Trump’s First Call to the Oil Barons on Venezuela Invasion, Not Congress

By: Donovan Martin Sr, Editor in Chief

The first briefing did not go to Congress.
It did not go to allies.
It did not go to the American public.

It went to oil executives.

That single fact reframes everything that followed.

Before any legal justification was offered, before any constitutional process was triggered, before international norms were even pretended to be respected, the people brought into the room were the heads of energy corporations. The message, as alleged and widely circulated, was not cautious or ambiguous. It was blunt, transactional, and revealing: this is yours—extract it, profit from it, move fast. Venezuela was not discussed as a sovereign country, nor as a humanitarian crisis, nor even as a geopolitical dilemma. It was framed as inventory.

That is not how democracies are supposed to operate.

In any system that still takes the rule of law seriously, Congress is briefed first. Oversight exists precisely to slow power down, to interrogate motives, to prevent personal or corporate interests from hijacking state authority. When that order is reversed—when private capital is informed before public institutions—it signals that the outcome is already decided and the law is merely an obstacle to be managed.

This is why the oil briefing matters more than any speech, tweet, or justification that followed. It exposes intent.

Donald Trump has been consistent on one thing: he views nations the way he views assets. During his first term, he openly spoke about “taking” Venezuela, reducing a complex country of millions of people into a commodity defined by crude reserves. That language never disappeared. It matured. By the time of his second term, the rhetoric no longer sounded like provocation—it sounded like planning.

Reports and allegations that oil executives were told before Congress—and even before the public—that Venezuela’s resources would be opened up to them collapse the last illusion that this was about democracy, human rights, or regional stability. It becomes what it always looked like from the outside: regime change as a business strategy.

What makes this moment so destabilizing is not just the act itself, but the structure surrounding it. Trump does not operate within a vacuum. He operates within an ecosystem that rewards loyalty over legality. Courts are reshaped. Norms are discarded. Congress is sidelined. Advisors defend the indefensible by reframing power as strength and restraint as weakness. When checks and balances are treated as optional, the presidency stops being an office and starts becoming a lever.

That is where the dictatorship question enters—not as rhetoric, but as analysis.

A leader who can bypass Congress, ignore international law, brief corporations first, and face no meaningful resistance is not constrained by democracy. Elections may still occur, but democracy is more than ballots. It is limitation. It is accountability. It is the idea that no one, regardless of office, is above the system.

And that system is cracking.

The United States has long positioned itself as the global enforcer of international law while selectively exempting itself from its consequences. That contradiction is now fully exposed. You cannot claim a rules-based order while treating rules as disposable. You cannot lecture the world on sovereignty while kidnapping leaders and reallocating their national resources behind closed doors.

The damage is not confined to Venezuela. It reverberates outward. Allies begin to hedge. Adversaries recalibrate. Smaller nations watch carefully and learn a dangerous lesson: power does not come from law—it comes from leverage. When America models that behavior, it legitimizes it everywhere.

Perhaps the most disturbing element is how unsurprising this all feels. The outrage is there, but so is exhaustion. The abnormal has become routine. Each escalation is absorbed, debated for a news cycle, then normalized. That is how democracies don’t collapse dramatically—they erode quietly, while everyone argues about tone instead of substance.

So where does America go from here?

That depends on whether people are willing to confront the core issue instead of the symptoms. This is not about one foreign policy decision or one country. It is about whether the United States is still governed by law, or whether it is now governed by access—access to power, access to capital, access to the ear of one man.

If oil executives are briefed before Congress, then the republic is already upside down.

And if that does not provoke a reckoning—legal, political, and moral—then the question is no longer whether American democracy is in trouble. The question is whether it still exists at all.