Trump Starts Underwater In Initial Venezuela Poll, US Oil Industry Not Rushing To Return, Chaos Reigns This Morning

This week Democrats must remind the world that we are still fighting for freedom, democracy, and rule of law here and everywhere.....

Morning all. We got our first poll on Trump’s claim of seizing Venezuela and like almost every other major initiative of this first year he starts out underwater:

As you can see there are still many, 25% of adults, who, unsurprisingly, have not yet made up their minds as we are in the early days of whatever the f-ck is happening in Venezuela right now. I think it is unlikely that Trump gets a rally around the flag boost for his seizing of Maduro for 1) it didn’t happen with his invasion of cities or his attack on Iran 2) the country just isn’t on board some kind of extended military campaign in Venezuela 3) this morning it increasingly feels like Trump has no real plan for what comes next in Venezuela, and like Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, thought the government would just fall and he could waltz into the Capital.

We also must remember that with the flood of Epstein releases just before the holidays Trump’s job approval began falling again, and it was clear he needed to do something dramatic to change the national narrative. Here is what I wrote on December 23rd -

Over the past weeks here in the US Trump had seen a 2-5 point rise from his November lows in some reliable polls. But I am now wondering whether the Epstein scandal, his disturbing speech to the nation last week, and all this other recent ugliness has started to drag him back down again. We got these two polls yesterday each with interviews from last week (Trump job approval) that are among the worst he’s seen this year:

36%-59% (-23) Gallup

35%-62% (-27) ARG

The just released Economist/YouGov weekly track found Trump dropping 6 points from last week - a huge drop - from 42%-54% (-12) to 39%-57% (-18). This is one point from Trump’s lowest reading this year.

This morning’s Civiqs daily track, which does not often see sharp movements, found Trump dropping 2 points and also coming in at 39%-57% (-18). This is the lowest reading of the year for Trump in this poll.

Taken together the last few days of polling for Trump have been arguably his worst set of polls this year. Movement against him, new lows, closing 2025 ugly the orange guy is!

Despite a recent flurry of right-leaning polls Trump’s job approval today appears is at or near the lowest so far this term in FiftyPlusOne’s tracker:

G. Elliott Morris has a new comprehensive look this morning at recent polling of Venezuela, Americans do not want war with Venezuela: military intervention in the country is even more unpopular than Trump’s tariffs and health care cuts (link). It contains this helpful summary chart

It is hard to see this morning, and things may change of course, how this Venezuelan lunacy is going to help Trump improve his standing with the public. It is also clear that those opposing Trump’s illegal and dangerous actions are on very firm ground with the American people, and should be aggressive and loud in the coming days. I think this early line coming from Congressional Dems - that Trump can’t run this country why do we think he can run another - is a good, Day 1 starting place. Here is Rep. Swalwell yesterday on CNN:

Yesterday I offered some initial thoughts about Trump’s reckless, illegal adventurism and this desperate attempt to restore his STRENGTH, POWER, and MANHOOD; and followed it with a post exploring whether Trump had delusionally imagined himself in charge of Venezuela given that the current government there made it very clear yesterday they believe they are in charge.

This morning I want to focus on the oil, and whether American oil companies actually want in.

Here’s The Wall Street Journal this morning:

From the Journal article:

For months, the U.S. sold its pressure campaign against Venezuela as a way to curtail drug trafficking. Now, it’s about getting American energy companies access to one of the world’s largest oil bounties.

The Trump administration’s move to oust Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro in a surprise military operation early Saturday will pave the way for U.S. oil companies to regain a foothold in the South American nation, President Trump said at a Mar-a-Lago press conference.

“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” he said.

But getting foreign companies to flock back to Venezuela will be a massive challenge. Chevron is the only major U.S. oil company there and is the country’s largest foreign investor. Other oil executives will be forced to gauge the stability on the ground in a country where the industry has fallen into disarray after more than two decades of mismanagement and corruption.

The other obstacle facing Trump’s effort to put more of Venezuela’s viscous crude into the global market is that the world doesn’t have much of an appetite for more oil. U.S. oil prices are languishing below $60 a barrel, a level that discourages investment for most American producers. Global supplies are expected to continue rising this year.

“One thing that works against it is the price of oil,” said Ali Moshiri, the former head of Chevron’s operations in Latin America and Africa. “In the environment we’re in, if you’re going to invest, do you put it in the Permian [Basin in the U.S.] or do you put it in Venezuela? That’s going to be a tough choice.”

And this, I am sure the Trump team has thought of all this…..

Orlando Ochoa, a Caracas-based economist and a visiting fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, described the Herculean task of jump-starting the moribund energy industry, which has seen tens of thousands of trained professionals flee the country under Maduro’s authoritarian rule.

He said that includes drafting a broad economic stabilization plan to attract the financing Venezuela badly needs from multilateral lenders to rebuild infrastructure and rusted oil-field installations. Local laws need to be modified to allow private energy firms to operate without state overreach, he added. And the government has to restructure some $160 billion in debt and settle pending arbitration cases with foreign companies to convince them to come back.

“What the U.S. needs to do is to implement a form of a Marshall Plan,” said Ochoa, referring to the economic program that helped rebuild Europe after World War II. “This is about much more than coming into the oil and gas sector just to extract crude from the ground.”

Imagine Trump announcing a multi-year hundreds of billions investment plan for Venezuela as he makes draconian cuts here at home.

We cannot forget for a moment that the idiocy is very strong with MAGA, and that is possible that no one really thought any of this through and there isn’t really a plan…..

Here’s more from Politico:

American oil companies have long hoped to recover the assets that Venezuela’s authoritarian regime ripped from them decades ago.

Now the Trump administration is offering to help them achieve that aim — with one major condition.

Administration officials have told oil executives in recent weeks that if they want compensation for their rigs, pipelines and other seized property, then they must be prepared to go back into Venezuela now and invest heavily in reviving its shattered petroleum industry, two people familiar with the administration’s outreach told POLITICO on Saturday. The outlook for Venezuela’s shattered oil infrastructure is one of the major questions following the U.S. military action that captured leader Nicolás Maduro.

But people in the industry said the administration’s message has left them still leery about the difficulty of rebuilding decayed oil fields in a country where it’s not even clear who will lead the country for the foreseeable future.

“They’re saying, ‘you gotta go in if you want to play and get reimbursed,’” said one industry official familiar with the conversations.

The offer has been on the table for the last 10 days, the person said. “But the infrastructure currently there is so dilapidated that no one at these companies can adequately assess what is needed to make it operable.”

And…..

Initial thoughts among U.S. oil industry officials and market analysts who spoke to POLITICO regarding a post-Maduro Venezuela focused more on questions than answers.

The administration has so far not laid out what its long-term plan looks like, or even if it has one, said Bob McNally, a former national security and energy adviser to President George W. Bush who now leads the energy and geopolitics consulting firm Rapidan Energy Group.

“It’s not clear there’s been a specific plan beyond the principal decision that in a post-Maduro, Trump-compliant regime that the U.S. companies — energy and others — will be at the top of the list” to reenter the country, McNally said. He added: “What the regime looks like, what the plans are for getting there, that has not been fully fleshed out yet.”

A central concern for U.S. industry executives is whether the administration can guarantee the safety of the employees and equipment that companies would need to send to Venezuela, how the companies would be paid, whether oil prices will rise enough to make Venezuelan crude profitable and the status of Venezuela’s membership in the OPEC oil exporters cartel. U.S. benchmark oil prices were at $57 a barrel, the lowest since the end of the pandemic, as of the market’s close on Friday.

Finally, as I’ve written, I think we should concerned that there was a furious set of talks between the Trump regime and Russia at the same time they were preparing their assault on Venezuela, as if they were somehow linked. Analyst Dave Troy found this nugget from career Russian expert Fiona Hill’s 2019 Congressional testimony:

Congress returns tomorrow my friends, and we need to be very, very loud. Plan on calling you Rep and 2 Senators and let them know you expect them to both fight Trump’s insane attempt to take possession of Venezuela, and to work to pass the Russian sanctions bill that has been introduced in both the House and Senate.

We are Democrats and this week we need to let the world know that we still stand for freedom, democracy, rule of law here and everywhere.

More, soon - Simon

FDR Memorial, Washington, DC (SR Photo)