President Trump is downplaying concerns about a new oil reserve agreement with Venezuela that experts say could take years to get up and running. CBS News' Lilia Luciano has more.
Page A8From§Eachthe midnight edition — 1 September 2026
US signs oil deal with Venezuela's dictator, whose jail photo swaps his $40K watch for a $40 Casio.
As it ran on the front
Watch the sequence, because the sequence is the whole story. Washington spends years calling Nicolas Maduro a dictator — sanctions, the works — and then, this stretch, two things land on the wire within days of each other: a new U.S. oil deal with Venezuela, and a jail photo of the man himself trading his $40,000 Swiss watch for a $40 Casio. One of those is a policy story. The other is a costume change. Together they tell you which one was ever the point.
You don't sign an oil deal with a country. You sign it with whoever controls the wells, the export terminals, the guys with the guns at the port. So when the story is 'new U.S. oil deal with Venezuela,' what that sentence actually contains is: new U.S. oil deal with the dictator's government, negotiated at the exact moment his own PR operation is busy downgrading his wristwatch for the cameras. That's not a coincidence, that's stagecraft on both ends — his people trying to look austere for his own audience, ours trying to look tough for ours, and somewhere in the middle a deal gets papered over by both performances.…
…(cont) This is the same trick with a different flag every few years. The label — dictator, strongman, adversary, whatever the desk decides that week — turns out to be fully compatible with a signed contract, as long as the commodity underneath it is the right one. Nobody sanctions a barrel of oil out of the ground. They sanction the man's watch, his travel, his bank accounts, and leave the wellhead alone, because the wellhead is the actual client.
So next time the word 'dictator' shows up in a headline next to the word 'deal,' read it as one sentence, not two. The moral framing is the packaging. The oil is the shipment. And the price of that shipment doesn't show up on a sanctions list — it shows up at the pump, in a country whose leadership can call itself anything it wants as long as the barrels keep moving on schedule.
“They call him a dictator with one hand and sign an oil contract with the other — that's not diplomacy, that's a business relationship with better lighting. The watch downgrade is the tell: optics change, the barrel still pumps. Watch your receipt at the pump, because that crude doesn't come free just because Washington calls the seller names first.”
“This is pragmatic energy policy, full stop — global supply, national interest, nothing more. Are we doing business with a strongman? I wouldn't call him that. I mean, we call him that, but the deal isn't about him, it's about barrels. Did I just defend dealing with a dictator? That's not what I— it's an oil deal. That's all this is.”
The receipts
Watch this transformation. Ousted Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro posed for a jailhouse picture sporting a peace sign and a $40 Casio watch — after he sported $40,000 luxury Swiss timepieces while in power. The slimmed-down socialist…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.