President Trump said Sunday the U.S. will “fill up” the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) as a result of the oil deal his administration reached with the Venezuelan government. “One of the things I am going to do with the Venezuelan Oil is…
Page F3From§Eachthe supper edition — 30 August 2026
Trump strikes oil deal with Venezuela; its president is reachable only from a New York prison.
Let's just run the numbers as filed. The administration announced an oil deal with Venezuela, and the stated plan, in the President's own words, is to 'fill up' the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is the country's rainy-day tank, the one we draw down when prices spike and refill when we don't, in theory, on a schedule, at a price somebody's supposed to be able to explain later to a subcommittee. So: barrels in, from Venezuela, under a new deal, headed for the Reserve. That's the supply side of the ledger. Now the counterparty. The president of the country supplying those barrels is, per his own posted photographs, currently housed in a federal prison in New York, where he says the government is 'standing firm.' Standing firm, for the record, is not a shipping term, and a New York federal prison is not a customary venue for executing a national oil agreement, but here we are, filed as one transaction: deal signed, reserve to be filled, counterparty in custody. I don't have a line item that reconciles 'sovereign oil partner' with 'inmate,' hon, so I'm just going to note the gap and move on, the way you'd note it on any file where the vendor listed and the vendor available don't match. Somebody, somewhere, is the actual signatory making these barrels move, and it is worth asking, plainly, without accusation, whether that party is a government, a caretaker administration, or simply whoever currently holds the pumps, because the public pays the difference between the posted price and the delivered price no matter whose name sits on the contract. The Reserve gets filled either way, the number on the gauge goes up, the receipts get filed, and the press release reads clean. It's the paperwork behind the press release that doesn't reconcile — a sovereign deal with a head of state who is, this week, reachable only through visitation hours. File it under: pending clarification.
“They cut an oil deal with Venezuela and the guy who ran the country is sitting in a federal prison in New York, posting photos like it's a hostage tape — that's not diplomacy, that's a stickup with a press release.”
“The deal secures American energy supply, full stop, and where exactly the seller is currently residing is really a matter for a separate agency, it's not really my — actually, is it my lane? I don't think it's my lane.”
The receipts
In the two photographs, Venezuela's deposed leader Nicolás Maduro is wearing a gray tracksuit and making peace signs with his hands.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.