When President Trump answered the press plainly about the seizure of a Venezuelan oil tanker — saying, without hedging, “I assume we’re going to keep the oil” — the media lost its collective mind. Reporters who spend their days lecturing Americans on propriety were suddenly shocked by a leader willing to call enforcement what it is: enforcement.
The operation itself was no stunt. U.S. forces boarded a very large tanker off Venezuela’s coast — identified by officials as the Skipper, previously sailing under the name Adisa — which was carrying roughly two million barrels and had ties to shadow networks moving sanctioned crude for Iran. This was not accidental; it was a targeted strike against a vessel repeatedly used to flout sanctions and undercut lawful pressure on rogue regimes.
Attorney General Pam Bondi released footage showing Coast Guard teams and other federal agents fast-roping onto the deck, executing a warrant tied to long-standing sanctions violations. The visuals were textbook law-enforcement action, not theater, and they show what happens when an administration is serious about following the law and defending national security.
Of course Caracas howled about “piracy” and the usual international chorus rushed to moralize while ignoring the years of illicit shipping, deceptive tracking, and Iran-linked transfers that made this seizure necessary. Predictably, the Democratic establishment and parts of the legacy press rushed to conflate borderless enforcement with warmongering, even as they offered no coherent plan for stopping the narco- and terror-linked oil trade.
Conservatives and common-sense Americans should welcome this kind of clarity and action. Enforcing sanctions against Maduro’s kleptocrats and Iran’s proxies protects American workers, cuts off terrorist funding, and sends a message that the United States will not tolerate lawlessness on the high seas. The press can be stunned all it wants; leadership sometimes looks blunt because it has to be effective.
Now Congress and the American people need to demand transparency and results: ensure proceeds from seized assets are used to hold bad actors accountable and to help American families and veterans, not to feed swampy bureaucracies. If Washington is finally going to defend our interests and our hemisphere, conservatives should push for decisive follow-through rather than bowing to performative outrage from the left.
