US Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Sunday denied that the Trump administration was stealing Venezuela’s oil just one hour after boasting that the country is being “forced to work” with the United States.

During a Sunday morning interview on ABC News, Wright was asked why he trusted interim Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez, given that she was previously the vice president of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who was abducted by the American military earlier this year and brought to the US to face narco-terrorism, drug trafficking, and weapons charges.

“We have a lot of leverage over Venezuela,” Wright explained. “We control the sale of oil outside of their country. So right now, they are forced to work in partnership with us, and they are working in partnership with us.”

Shortly after, during an interview on Fox News, Wright grew indignant at the suggestion that the US was forcing Venezuela to give up its oil through threats of military force and other coercive measures.

“This is a home run!” Wright said of the Trump administration’s arrangements with the Venezuelan government. “These senators saying we’re stealing their oil at gunpoint, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the more oil that’s produced in Venezuela, including with the deal with the US government, the more royalties and tax revenues go to the Venezuelan government and the Venezuelan people.”

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who was supportive of the US abducting Maduro, last week criticized the Trump administration for cutting a deal with what she said was still a corrupt and oppressive government in Caracas.

“The wealth of our land does not belong to an illegitimate regime,” Machado said in a video posted on social media, “it belongs to the Venezuelan people.”

In an analysis published last week, economist Paul Krugman accused the Trump administration of concocting a “plot to steal Venezuela’s oil,” which he described as equal parts “vile and deeply stupid.”

The deal is vile, Krugman said, because it validates "everything the Latin American left has ever said about US imperialism” in the region.

And it is simultaneously stupid, he argued, because the investments required to improve Venezuela’s oil infrastructure will be so great that its benefits are unlikely to materialize in the near future, if at all.

“Venezuelan oil currently sells for around $70 a barrel on world markets,” Krugman wrote. “But as I said, getting that oil out will require huge investments in infrastructure. Nor does Venezuela oil come gushing out when you drill a well: As one expert put it, ‘it comes out of the ground with the consistency of cold peanut butter.’”

It’s one thing for Trump to usurp powers that belong to Congress — quite another for him to usurp places that belong to all of us.

I’m talking about his renaming and demolishing what we share in common.

Trump said he “decided” to change the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America because he was pissed off at Canada.

How can one man decide to change the name of one of the Great Lakes — a name that we all learned when we were in elementary school? Not only is it part of our shared heritage; it’s part of our common reality.

Well-known place names anchor us. They provide a shared set of markers by which we navigate ourselves and situate others. By what right can he arbitrarily rob us of them?

He’s also changed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. He’s even considering renaming the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

A U.S. president has legal authority to instruct the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to update official maps and domestic databases. But that’s to maintain uniformity — quite the opposite of what Trump is doing.

And why the hell are Google Maps and Apple Maps following Trump’s arbitrary “decision” to change these place names? Good for MapQuest for refusing.

It’s not just place names that concern me. It’s also revered places we hold in common.

The building in Washington, D.C., called the White House is as much a part of our shared reality and common heritage as is Lake Ontario or the Gulf of Mexico.

How many of you have visited it? Taken photos of it? Seen pictures of it in books and on souvenirs?

Its “stately simplicity is … in accord with the purposes it was designed to serve,” President Theodore Roosevelt once said of the White House. Safeguarding it, he said, gives us continuity with our past. (Chief Justice John Roberts used this quote in his dissent from the Supreme Court majority’s recent opinion allowing Trump to continue to build his ballroom.)

After Trump has erected a giant ballroom in place of the East Wing, the White House will lose its continuity with our past. He’s robbing us of the White House we knew.

Same with the long pool extending eastward from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument, called the Reflecting Pool. He had its bottom painted dark blue (and is now claiming that vandals caused the paint to peel).

To the west of the Lincoln Memorial lies Arlington National Cemetery and the stately Lee-Custis Mansion. These are also part of our shared reality and common heritage. He wants to erect a giant arch that would block this view.

I’m not saying that our shared reality has to remain exactly the same through time. Place names we’ve relied on for our entire lives can be changed. Iconic buildings and monuments can be altered.

But one man should not be able to summarily and heedlessly change these places — Lake Ontario, the Gulf of Mexico, the White House, the Reflecting Pool, the view from the Lincoln Memorial.

No single person should be able to arbitrarily alter the place names and physical places that anchor us, orient us, provide us with a shared meaning — at least not in a democracy.

Trump’s place robbery is another way he is asserting his dominance. He wants us to know he has the power to alter our world at will — force us to call places whatever he decides they should be called, to accept whatever physical alterations he makes, and to abide one of the most intimate kinds of subservience: making us literally lose our place.

When sane people are once again in charge, I hope that among the first things they do is restore the names, demolish the impositions, and reclaim our common understandings of where and who we are.

• Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org

President Donald Trump left countless onlookers aghast Sunday after publishing three dozen bizarre online posts in the span of two hours, one of which suggested the United States owned the moon.

“Something is very wrong with the president,” wrote Tom Nichols, staff writer for The Atlantic, in a social media post on X Sunday. “And yet, still has the codes to our nuclear arsenal and is the single person who can order their use.”

Among Trump’s bizarre online posts were images that appeared to be generated with artificial intelligence (AI) depicting him in hellish landscapes with threatening messages. One depicts Trump walking in Washington, D.C. alongside an army of robots and soldiers with red glowing eyes, and the message, “THEY WILL NEVER SLEEP AGAIN.” Another depicts Trump sitting atop a black throne amid a hellish and war-torn landscape in front of giant humanoid robots.

In another post, Trump suggested renaming the state of New Mexico to “New America,” and in another, redrawing Iran’s borders to mirror the silhouette of Trump’s profile. One post, also likely generated with AI, depicts the destruction of Iran’s Kharg Island with the message, “Bye bye, Kharg.”

Trump also shared an image of the moon that included the text, “THE MOON IS OURS,” alongside an American flag.

“This is not normal,” wrote John Jackson, a political commentator and self-proclaimed U.S. veteran of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and former trial lawyer. “It’s like watching a slow-motion train crash. Historians will be aghast.”

Independent journalist Aaron Rupar called Trump’s string of online posts “absolutely bonkers” in a social media post on X to his more than 1.1 million followers.

Trump also shared an AI-generated image depicting himself blowing up the earth, as well as an AI-generated image depicting himself buying stocks in the Oval Office, alongside the admission that he had “made Hundreds of Billions of Dollars on Stocks, and Many other type Holdings.”