Trump’s Folly

A war for oil, an ocean up for renaming, and what Dolly Parton knew about refusing the frame

Good morning! Friday night, Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that the United States had secured “majority U.S. control” of more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s proven oil reserves what he called, in characteristic capitals, “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY!” The agreement, negotiated by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth with Venezuela’s interim president Delcy Rodríguez, grants a U.S.-backed joint venture a 100-year lease and a 55% government stake in oilfields holding more than a fifth of Venezuela’s total reserves, more than triple ExxonMobil’s entire global reserve base.

Venezuela’s constitution states that the country’s oil deposits belong to the Venezuelan state and cannot be transferred to another owner. Ricardo Hausmann, a Harvard economist and former Venezuelan government official, called the agreement unconstitutional on its face, writing that “an illegitimate interim government with an illegitimate hydrocarbons law has no legitimacy to strike this unconstitutional deal.” Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist based in the U.S., was blunter still: handing over the country’s oil wealth to the U.S., he wrote, “is not in the interest of the Venezuelan people, much more when it is done at gunpoint.”

The timing is hard to ignore. Six months into a war that was supposed to break Iranian leverage, Washington has not reopened the Strait of Hormuz on its own terms. Instead, it is trying to make Venezuela more important, rebuilding its oil sector, securing century-long production rights and creating a Western Hemisphere source of supply that can help offset the vulnerability Iran has exposed.

American foreign policy, stretching back decades, has insisted that its wars were never about oil. Simon Marks put this one more bluntly: “This, they admit, was a war for oil.” Whether or not you accept that formulation, the broader point is difficult to miss. Washington isn’t reopening the artery. It is building a bypass.

While the oil deal dominated the wires, Trump’s Truth Social feed offered its own unfiltered supplement to the week’s news. He has renamed Lake Ontario “Lake America” by decree, and this week used Governor Kathy Hochul’s refusal to adopt the name as a campaign attack, accusing her of being “on the side of Canada” and endorsing her opponent, Bruce Blakeman, in the same post. He has also floated renaming the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to claim American ownership of them. It reads like satire. It isn’t.

A reader suggested that, in the spirit of the moment, we rename the Reflecting Pool after him. I submit Trump’s Folly. It would look lovely in bronze.

The late Dolly Parton represented something almost opposite. She never let every question be sorted into a tribe. Asked about Black lives mattering, she answered simply: of course they do, we’re all God’s children. No hedge, no rally, no loyalty test.

In a country increasingly trained to divide over everything, Parton was a reminder that people can still be united by principle without being united by party. Trump’s talent is creating a line and forcing everyone to choose a side of it. Even righteous opposition can become part of the machinery if we spend all our energy defending one side of a division he invented. The harder discipline is to refuse the frame altogether, to stand on the common principle underneath it and invite people to stand there with us.

The car is packed, Marz is moderately excited, and by the time many of you read this we’ll be on the road. My sons are honoring their father’s wish to have his ashes scattered near his sister and his mother, in a place that mattered deeply to his family. We may carry a small handful of my father with us too, which feels somehow right, one more generation returned to the same ground.

I’m going to leave the noise behind for a couple of days. There will still be news when I get back; there always is. For now, there are people to love, memories to carry, and a goodbye that deserves our full attention. Be kind to one another.