'This is extortion': Social media erupts after Trump admits US may go to war for 'oil'

Social media piled on President Donald Trump’s admission that his mounting aggressive action against the nation of Venezuela is about mineral resources.

"Getting land, oil rights, whatever we had -- they took it away because we had a president that maybe wasn't watching,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday. “But they're not gonna do that. We want it back. They took our oil rights. We had a lot of oil there. They threw our companies out. And we want it back."

“This is extortion,” said actor Jon Cryer on Bluesky. “This is the president of the United States admitting he is extorting another country.”

Critics at the conservative National Review called Trump’s reasoning a “sprinkle [of] lots of crazy on top of legitimate allegations.”

“Presumably … the president is talking about the American oil companies that developed Venezuela’s rich oil resources until a series of Venezuelan regimes first nationalized the oil industry and eventually expropriated the property of American and other corporations,” wrote National Review Institute senior fellow Andrew McCarthy, who added that “U.S. oil companies were compensated” during the nationalization process.

Zak Taylor, a professor of public policy at Georgia Tech echoed Cryer’s sentiment, posting: “So this is just conquest? Nothing to do with gangs or drugs after all?”

“What corrupted version of the history of US-Latin American relations did Stephen Miller slip in front of Donald Trump?” demanded American University Assistant Professor David Ryan Miller.

National Security Reporter Zach Dorfman posted, however, that “This kind of statement would once be made inside the most rarified councils of state, some ultra-limited Special Group, wherein POTUS and his most trusted advisors would commit to never putting anything in writing yet some handwritten archival scrap excavated 50 years later would reveal the truth.”

Iraq veteran Alex Wright posted on Bluesky that “I thought we didn’t go to war over oil?”

MS NOW anchor Chris Hayes, like Wright, also noted Trump’s drastic turn from Republican policy, posting: “I guess I'll say, for someone of my age, it's wild to see a Republican president just come out and say we're going to wage war for oil.”