America in 2025: Why drill for oil when you can just take it?

On this day in America, December 10th, 2025, we learned that the Trump administration seized an oil tanker early this morning off the coast of Venezuela. As reported by CBC, Trump made the following comments from the White House during a roundtable with businessmen: “We’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela. Large tanker. Very large. Largest one ever, actually. And other things are happening.”

Shortly after, Attorney General Pam Bondi posted a video on X showing armed personnel rappelling onto the ship from a helicopter, then sweeping the deck with guns drawn. She said the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, and the U.S. Coast Guard, “with support from the Department of War”, executed a seizure warrant for a crude oil tanker allegedly transporting sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran.

According to CNN, Trump offered no detailed explanation for the operation, saying only that it was seized “for very good reason.” When asked what would happen to the oil, he shrugged and said, “We keep it, I guess.”

Venezuela, for its part, is calling it piracy. A statement from the Venezuelan government denounced it as “an act of international piracy,” adding: “It is not migration. It is not drug trafficking. It is not democracy. It is not human rights. It has always been about our natural wealth, our oil, our energy, the resources that belong exclusively to the Venezuelan people.”

This was a unilateral flex of military power, a message, loud and clear. The Trump regime is willing to act alone, escalate beyond our borders, and take what it wants. This wasn’t about national security. It was about regime change. About installing someone loyal to Trump in Venezuela, not for democracy, but for oil. That’s what makes it authoritarian, not just the act itself, but the intent behind it. A government using force to serve the personal interests of one man is not defending the country. It’s reshaping it. This wasn’t just a seizure; it was the start of a new level of authoritarian rule. A moment where Trump made it clear he’s shifting into overdrive as the midterms get closer. And from here, it only gets worse.

Later in the day, Reuters reported that the United States government formally threatened the International Criminal Court with sanctions unless it pledged not to prosecute Trump and his top officials. The statement came from a White House official, who said: “There is growing concern … that in 2029 the ICC will turn its attention to the president, to the vice president, to the secretary of war and others, and pursue prosecutions against them…That is unacceptable, and we will not allow it to happen.” The Trump administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, noted the administration was pressuring other nations to help rewrite the Rome Statute, the treaty that empowers the ICC to prosecute the world’s most serious crimes: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes of aggression.

Trump knows he is breaking laws. And he knows the world is watching, so he is threatening the court the only way he can, financially. The irony is, the U.S. isn’t even a signatory, so charges are highly unlikely. Prosecution and conviction of a sitting or former U.S. president would be a global legal anomaly. But in the unlikely event there was a conviction, Trump could face consequences: travel restrictions and reputational fallout that could impact his global business operations. He may never go to The Hague. But he could lose the ability to move freely across borders. But maybe what he’s most afraid of is the humiliation.

The Department of Homeland Security announced that they have finalized a multi-year contract to build their own fleet of Boeing 737 aircraft for deportations. According to the Associated Press, the deal includes retrofitting planes for mass removals and establishing dedicated DHS-operated flight routes.

In a statement to The Washington Post, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said the planes would save money “by allowing ICE to operate more effectively, including by using more efficient flight patterns.” McLaughlin added that Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem “are committed to quickly and efficiently getting criminal illegal aliens OUT of our country.”

This is the normalization of state-run mass expulsion. This is what authoritarian governments do when they expect displacement to become permanent. They are building a system at scale to remove people from the country quickly, without limits, and to move them around within our borders to detention centers, holding facilities, and undisclosed locations far from the public eye.

When the Nazis decided that certain people no longer belonged in society, they built a rail network to remove them, not just from homes, but from view. People were loaded onto trains, sent across borders, and disappeared into prisons and camps, many never to return. Those trains were described as efficient, too. But what they really created was infrastructure for erasure. DHS already has prisons and camps they are sending people to, both inside and outside our country, and this is just another piece of a system that mirrors what Hitler built: one that makes it easier to take people away, faster, in larger numbers, and with less oversight. And once that kind of system exists, history tells us what happens next.

Also today, NBC News reported that President Trump publicly called for CNN to be sold. “I think CNN should be sold, because I think the people that are running CNN right now are either corrupt or incompetent,” he said from the White House. CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, is reportedly planning to sell off other divisions, but not CNN. Now, with this comment, Trump is putting direct political pressure on a private media company to sell one of the nation’s largest news networks, simply because he doesn’t like how it covers him.

This wasn’t a critique of bias. It was a declaration of control. Authoritarian leaders don’t just attack the press; they seek to own the message. This is the same tactic used in China, where state-run media is the only media. It’s what happens in North Korea, where every broadcast is curated by the regime. It’s how Putin built power in Russia, not by banning independent news outright at first, but by slowly starving it, replacing it, and then criminalizing anything that strayed from the official line. Trump isn’t hiding the goal. He’s saying it out loud: journalism that doesn’t praise him doesn’t deserve to exist.

A free press is not just a feature of democracy; it is one of its final lines of defense. And today, the President of the United States openly demanded that a major news outlet be taken over by someone loyal to him. That’s not rhetoric. That’s not noise. That is a direct threat to the idea that truth should exist without permission. And it’s not just aimed at CNN. It’s aimed at all of us.

There’s always more to say. Every single night, I sit with more stories than I can fit into one post, and tonight was one of the hardest. That’s part of the tactic of authoritarians. The noise, the chaos, the constant flood meant to wear us down. Like today’s directive from U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, ordering American diplomats to abandon Calibri font and return to Times New Roman, claiming it “restores decorum and professionalism.” According to the BBC, the switch reverses accessibility measures and policies aimed at making documents easier to read for those with visual impairments, and is now being framed as part of the President’s “One Voice for America” directive. On the surface, it’s just a font. But underneath, it’s about taking away a very simple way to make everyone have the same fair playing field. This regime feeds on cruelty. We can’t expect it to change. But we can refuse to comply. We can stay informed. We can resist the urge to tune out. And we can remind ourselves that every single day we make it through without giving in is one day closer to the end of this manufactured madness.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

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