1. United States
2. Fla.
3. Letter

We know. Buck up Five hundred million dollars of Venezuelan oil money is now sitting in a Qatari bank account, controlled by a U.S. president who talks about other nations’ resources like they are his personal war trophies. The United States toppled a government, grabbed its most valuable asset, and routed the first huge payout into an offshore account in a friendly petro monarchy, with trump’s own team boasting that they, not Venezuelans, will decide if and when any of it comes back.​ This is not policy as usual; it is what happens when an elected strongman decides the law is something that happens to other people. trump has pushed through orders that wall this cash off from courts, creditors and even future governments, turning public oil revenue into a White House controlled pot that lives outside the reach of normal checks and balances. His aides frame it as a “historic energy deal,” while ideologues like Stephen Miller have spent months arguing that Venezuelan oil really belongs to the United States and calling past nationalization “the largest recorded theft of American wealth,” a ready made justification for looting dressed up as justice.​ From Caracas to Tehran, officials call it piracy and robbery and warn that this is how empires behave when they stop pretending to respect sovereignty. At home, a supposedly coequal Congress has managed a few angry letters while trump stacks a Qatar sky palace on one side and a Qatar oil account on the other, proving he can invade, seize another country’s oil, stash the money offshore and dare anyone to stop him, which is less a foreign policy doctrine than a confession that the world’s most powerful democracy is letting a lawless president operate like a dictator on the global stage.