Thirty-five percent of Venezuela's oil reserves entered the Pentagon's column with the acquisition line blank, and the public's share of them comes to one barrel in 105,000.

…(cont) The table is Energy Secretary Chris Wright, on Fox News on Friday, September 11, putting Venezuela's reserves at 300 billion barrels and saying the administration is tapping them to grow supply and cut prices. The same story quotes a top Trump official on how a thirty-minute military operation unlocked the windfall for U.S. buyers. Thirty-five percent of 300 billion barrels is 105 billion barrels. Then, on Wednesday, October 28, the president said Venezuela had given him one million barrels, and that he is giving them to "you people."

Price the people's share, since it is the part of this with a number on it. A barrel is forty-two gallons, which is a definition and not a forecast, so the gift is 42 million gallons of crude. I have valued crude at the retail gasoline price, hon, which is generous to the arrangement, because crude is not gasoline and nobody pumps it.

The reason for the price moved around in the same stretch. CBS reported that Monday that Iran had threatened a "more painful" response, on Sunday, to U.S. strikes on three Iranian oil tankers. On Tuesday, September 8, Iran announced an "exclusion zone" outside the Strait of Hormuz and oil prices rose. That Friday the stated cure was more supply, from the reserves a thirty-minute operation had opened. By Sunday, September 13, the president was blaming high gas prices on Ukraine. Within six days the pump price was attributed to a chokehold on tanker traffic, to a supply shortfall already solved, and to a war in Europe. What I do not have is a pump price after that Tuesday; no receipt in front of me carries one. What I have from that Monday is the New York Times, on drivers using hypermiling techniques to stretch a tank.

A gift also needs a donor. The donor named on the page is Venezuela, whose president is held at a Brooklyn detention center awaiting trial, where protesters have rallied for nine months running, and whose former first lady is asking a New York judge for release, citing a heart ailment. On Tuesday, October 27, the president said of Venezuela: "Let's make it the 51st state." A gift from a party you are simultaneously offering to annex is, in bookkeeping, a transfer inside one entity. Those do not create income. They relabel.

So: 35 percent of a country's reserves into the Pentagon's column, acquisition line blank. $4.15 a gallon out of the other column, a gallon at a time. Gaps that size keep turning up in the column with the nozzle on the end of it.