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Guest Essay

By Christopher Caldwell

Mr. Caldwell is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.”

Ever since Donald Trump’s scatterbrained news conference on Saturday, at which he announced that the Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and his wife were being brought to justice after a U.S. commando assault on Caracas, many have naturally focused on the one thing the president said that was crystal-clear. “We’re going to have our very large U.S. oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” he vowed — and he repeated the promise again and again.

Mr. Trump is already paying a political price for his forthrightness. Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, spoke for many in his party when he called the raid “wildly........

© The New York Times