More Trump theft.

Click here for Paul Krugman's January 8 Substack post, entitled "The Looting of US Foreign Policy," subtitled "Goodbye, national interest. Hello, ego gratification and profits for the ruling clique" -- which he defines later in the article as "the Trump family and its hangers-on."

 He begins with:

While I was working on this, ICE murdered a woman in Minneapolis. I’m still going to put up the originally planned post, but like every decent American I’m having a hard time thinking about anything else right now. 

Exactly, Paul.

He's referring to a Truth Social post by Trump saying that he will take 30-50 million barrels of oil  from Venezuela. He says "This Oil will be sold at its market Price, and that money will be controlled by me" -- he adds "to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States!" Yeah, fat chance.

This will be in the range of $2 billion; less than .01 percent of the U.S. GDP; "in terms of U.S. oil consumption, that's about 2 days' worth of oil. " Krugman says this is trivial from the perspective of national interest, but it's a fairly big number to "the clique that is currently running the U.S. government" -- the Trump family and its hangers-on:

Trumpist foreign policy has nothing to do with, well, making America great again, and everything to do with raising the wealth and status of the Trump family and its hangers-on — what they call our ruling clique.

When it comes to Trump's threats against Canada and Greenland/Denmark, Krugman says "the Trump clique doesn’t care whether nations have been staunch allies of the United States. They want subservient clients paying tribute, not to America, but to them personally. And that’s something democracies like Canada and Denmark won’t do."

He then says:

Trump has been remarkably transparent about his goals in Venezuela: It’s all about looting. That is, he wants to seize the country’s oil wealth on behalf of himself and his clique. [The hyperlink connects with an article in Popular Information about, among other things, Trump-supporting billionaire, investor Paul Singer, who in November bought Citgo, the U.S.-based subsidiary of Venezuela's state-run oil company.] Some people, notably María Corina Machado, leader of Venezuela’s opposition, have been surprised that Trump shows no interest in restoring democracy. But why would he? He’s unable to enrich himself personally in democracies like Canada and Denmark. But a repressive regime like Venezuela is willing to pay him protection money.

He finishes:

The bottom line is that to understand what Trump is doing around the world you must disabuse yourself of the notion that any of it is about serving America. It’s all about glorifying himself and enriching his clique.