Here we go again. The new oil deal
with Venezuela, Donald Trump bragged
over the weekend, will “substantially lower” gas prices and won’t cost the
America taxpayer a dime. It’s historic. It’s yuge. It’s miraculous. So much
winning. Hard to argue with in this case, right?
Actually, Ricardo Hausmann found these
claims pretty easy to argue with after all. Hausmann is a professor of
political economy at Harvard’s Kennedy School and a former planning
minister and Central Bank board member of Venezuela. I’d call that pretty
credentialed. Responding to a Marco Rubio tweet boasting about the deal,
Hausmann wrote,
in part:
Secretary Marco Rubio:
You have just lost any trust Venezuelans ever had on [sic] you, and it will
come to haunt you. You opted to use U.S. power not to free Venezuelans, but to
go to bed with our oppressors.… Venezuelans will not respect this illegitimate
deal and no major U.S. oil company will take it seriously because they know it
will not last.
Hausmann is not alone. Skeptics
included, at least initially, Florida GOP Representative María Elvira Salazar, who
tweeted:
“Any oil ‘deal’ with Venezuela’s interim regime has an expiration date: the day
President Trump leaves the White House.” She also called Venezuelan interim
President Delcy Rodríguez an “acting dictator” and concluded: “No democracy. No
lasting deal. Period.”
Ah, but we know how things work in
today’s GOP. She quickly deleted that post, in both English and Spanish, and returned
to X an hour later to write: “The U.S.-Venezuela oil deal is a great deal
for the United States and the Venezuelan people.” Guess she’ll avoid a primary
next election.
The Venezuela announcement tracks
with a very well-worn pattern. Trump raves that the deal in question is the
greatest in the annals of history. It will deliver scarcely imaginable
benefits. It will cost nothing. And it all happened because of Trump’s genius.
It’s been a lie every time. The
tariffs were going to help farmers. Nope: Farmers are furious at Trump, giving
Democrats their first potential political opening in rural America in ages. The
tariffs were going to allow for elimination of the income tax. Remember
that one? The war in Iran was going to take a month. The Reflecting Pool,
ruined by Trump’s predecessors, was going to be thing of unparalleled beauty.
It’s tempting to call these lies,
and they surely were in the sense that Trump just says everything he does is
the greatest without the slightest bit of analysis or conscience entering into the
equation. But they’re not just lies. They’re delusions. And delusions, in a
way, are even worse than lies.
Why? Because while a liar can
change course, a delusional person cannot. Trump is sitting in the mid-to-low
30s in approval. If he were merely a liar, he could try to correct course and
do some things differently. He could realize, for example, that the war he
started has been a disaster and is massively unpopular and, without exactly
admitting it directly, sue for peace and cut his losses. A liar can
acknowledge, eventually, that maybe he screwed up a little on the Reflecting
Pool.
But a delusionist can do none of
those things because the delusionist can’t accept that he’s done anything
wrong. And he surrounds himself with people who understand that their only real
job, whatever their actual specific responsibilities may be, is to keep the
delusions alive and the Emperor happy.
So: A normal president two months
out from what’s shaping up as a devastating midterm election would try to do
things a little differently. I’m not sure in this case what exactly that would
be; releasing some of the petroleum reserve, bringing beef producers to the
White House and pressing them to lower prices for a period. Anyway that’s
Trump’s problem, not mine. The point is that he won’t do these things because
he doesn’t think anything is wrong. In fact, his plan right now is to make
himself the centerpiece of the GOP’s midterm message, and to that end he will
reportedly redirect
part of a $400 million kitty to “television advertisements about his own
record.”
That record is delulu. He
mocks affordability. He says the bad polls are fake. He blames everything on
Joe Biden. He tells people the economy is roaring, everybody says so (yes,
everybody at Mar-a-Lago probably does say so). He boasts, as he did at
that rally 10 or so days ago, that the last 19 months have been the greatest
first 19 months of any administration in history.
His aides must echo every word of
this palaver or risk censure or termination. Ditto Republican elected
officials, as Salazar no doubt learned swiftly and loudly after her first
tweet. And ditto Republican office seekers, like the Senate candidate in
Minnesota (net worth: between
$17 and $33 million) who says people concerned about gas prices should
“take one less trip to Starbucks.”
The GOP lives in a cocoon, woven by
the gossamer threads of Trump’s fantasia. Reality does not penetrate it. It’s
funny to watch. But it’s tragic because it’s affecting people’s lives. People
are struggling and suffering. But to say that in the Emperor’s presence is to
prove only that you’re a deep-stater or a stooge or a RINO.
So, no—none of this is fixable. The
economy will get worse. More and more innocent people, very much including
children, will be rounded up and held in detention centers in the
kind of hideous conditions we associate with a right- (or hard-left-) wing
dictatorship, not the United States of America. The jaw-dropping corruption
will continue and will get worse and more desperate, as indeed it has nearly
every month of this administration so far. The attempts to rig and steal the
midterms will only get more blatant. And next year, the hideous aspects of the
Big Ugly Bill, the ones they intentionally delayed until after the midterms,
will kick in, like the massive Medicaid cuts, and poor people and those in
nursing homes, among many others, will suffer even more.
Oh—and to return to Venezuela. The
Associated Press reported
over the weekend that there are many aspects of this deal we don’t know about. First
of all, the U.S. government and “an unnamed private operator” formed a new
company that was given the rights to 17 oil fields for 100 years. Gee, ya think
maybe that operator is some kind of friend of Trump? Or maybe that Trump
himself has a piece of the company?
Second, as was well known at the
time of the U.S. coup, Venezuela’s oil infrastructure is in horrible shape and
will take years to repair. So when will consumers start seeing this oil? As the
AP put it, in its dry, neutral way: “A substantial boost in production is not
expected to happen quickly.”
Third, it isn’t clear yet who will
pay for these infrastructure improvements. Remember: Trump said this wouldn’t
cost taxpayers any money. He said the same thing about the ballroom (current
cost to taxpayers: around $300
million).
And fourth, it also isn’t clear how
the U.S. oil industry will react. Oil companies will surely fret, and properly
so, that the next president, if a Democrat, will cancel this. And there’s also
the unstable situation in Venezuela itself. Salazar, before she censored
herself, was correct—Delcy Rodríguez is an “acting dictator.” The actual
winner of the last election, recognized by the Biden administration, was
Edmundo Gonzales. But Nicolás Maduro stole it (Rodríguez was his vice president).
And the current opposition leader, María Corina Machado, is in
exile, having won the Nobel Peace Prize, and says she hopes to return to
the country this year. Not exactly a stable investment climate.
I’m going to go out on a limb here
and guess that a year or so from now, we’ll learn that the operating
partnership is corrupt, that infrastructure investments aren’t happening as
promised, that the venture has cost taxpayers money, and that U.S.
oil firms don’t want any part of it. I hope I’m wrong about all those things.
But history suggests otherwise.
And in that case, whoever the next Karoline Leavitt is will be standing
up at that podium saying everything’s going beautifully, and Stephen Cheung will
be “truthing” that the naysayers are a bunch of Marxist haters. Actually, the
only person in this story who’s vaguely Marxist is Trump’s
friend Delcy Rodríguez, whose Marxist
guerilla father orchestrated the kidnapping of an American businessman in
1974. But never mind that. The Emperor is never wrong.
