Analysis of Venezuela Oil Deal Impact

The second thing I want to talk about a little bit is the Venezuela oil deal,

which

I know some of you will have questions on, but I think it's just an amazing

testament to what a smart foreign policy could look like and how

it feeds back in to good outcomes for the American people.

So as a lot of you know, and I think even some of the, uh,

the more liberal outlets

in here had talked about, we had for a very long time the Biden

administration draining the strategic petroleum reserve purely for

the purpose of lowering gas and oil costs. There wasn't an international crisis.

There wasn't, you know, a foreign nation that

was trying to disrupt world energy

markets. There was just an administration that

was trying to juice gas

prices for the midterms. And what that meant is for Americans, our

strategic petroleum reserve under the administration got extraordinarily

low. Well, now we're using, of course, the successful Venezuela

operation and some of the, the friendships and some of the

relationships that have

developed in the wake of that operation to create what

is effectively a

new sixty-five billion barrel of oil

reserve for the United States of America.

And the way that that's gonna work is that private companies,

American companies,

can go in there, generate a lot of oil revenue.

Obviously, that's gonna mean world oil markets get

only more supply.

That will lower costs for Americans.

That means a lot of revenue is gonna go to the people of Venezuela,

but also thanks

to the deal struck by Marco and Pete Hegseth and others in the

administration, it

actually sets us up to where the American people will directly receive some of

the royalties as well. So it's good for Venezuelans,

it's good for anybody who's

buying gas, and it's good for the American taxpayer as

well.

So it's, uh, it's very much a win-win thing.

We're very proud of it.

And I also just think that it gives supply stability in the

energy

market. I think if we've learned anything over the

last six months, but

importantly, if we've learned anything over the last

forty years, it's that these

things, the supply of critical minerals

and resources really

matters. We had an administration for a very long

time that underinvested in this

stuff, and now we're trying to change that,

and we're doing so quite successfully.