News Vérité

President Trump’s takeover of Venezuela was more than just an effort to bring a “bad man” to justice; it also contained huge economic stakes — in the name of oil. Under a plan announced Friday by Trump, the Pentagon would become the investor and controller of 17 Venezuelan oil fields containing 65 billion barrels of crude oil. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth negotiated the deal with interim Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez by creating a private business partnership at no cost to U.S. taxpayers, the president announced. Venezuela is granting the U.S. a 100-year concession to the oil fields. Rodríguez’s government said the agreement could draw about $100 billion in private investment while generating more than $209 billion in tax revenue for Venezuela. The private company envisioned in the deal will be led by controversial Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt, according to The Wall Street Journal. Trump no doubt had his eyes on Iranian oil when he joined Israel in a war on the Islamic Republic, initially announced as a battle for regime change, but which now has come down to reopening the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait was open before the war but has become Iran’s

Donald Trump has never sounded like a professor, and that, according to the linguists and political scientists who have spent years dissecting his speech, is precisely the point. When he takes questions from reporters or dictates a post to his social media accounts, his language rarely resembles the polished, subordinate-clause-heavy rhetoric of a typical American politician. Instead, researchers who study his speech patterns describe something closer to the sentence structure of a fourth-to-sixth-grade reader: short, blunt, and repetitive. And yet this same style has proven remarkably durable, carrying his message to rally crowds, cable news audiences, and tens of millions of social media followers alike. The paradox is worth taking seriously. Simplicity of syntax is not the same thing as simplicity of thought, and readability scores are a measure of sentence construction, not intelligence — a distinction linguists are careful to draw. Grade-level estimates for Trump’s speech also vary depending on the sample analyzed and the method used, and no single number should be treated as a settled fact. What is less disputed is that his communication follows recognizable, repeatable patterns — patterns that reward closer analysis precisely because they work.

News has surfaced that CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s recent secretive journey to Moscow was to warn Russia about a possible “test” assault on a NATO country. The U.S. had uncovered evidence that Putin was considering such a move to test NATO resolve in light of Trump’s intransigence toward the continent’s possible defense. Ratcliffe did not meet Putin, according to The Wall Street Journal, but his message was conveyed to the dictator. Problem is, how much teeth could a U.S. warning contain? We’re already strategically short of Interceptor missiles. China, too, is on the move in our unlocked-and-unloaded phase of military preparedness after expending almost all of our costliest defense weapons in Iran. The Chinese are now step by step taking over the Taiwan Strait, just as Iran took over the Strait of Hormuz. This is an update to my previous reporting: CIA Director John Ratcliffe is reported to have spent a few hours in Moscow, without any details being released. According to The New York Times: Mr. Ratcliffe was on the ground for about eight hours. It was not immediately clear why he was in Moscow or whom he met with in the Russian capital. There was no clarification or