Franco Ordoñez

And this is a big part of his focus on tackling affordability.

And, you know, we can talk later about geopolitics.

There's so many different layers here.

I mean, it's the most glaring example, I would say, of Trump's desire to dominate the Western Hemisphere.

You know, it's part of his larger goals for pushing out Russia and China out of the region.

You know, the administration has even told Delcy Rodriguez, the acting president –

Venezuela that she needs to kick out China and Russia, as well as Iran and Cuba and sever economic ties.

I mean, this is a matter of, you know, influence.

Even this weekend after the capture of Maduro, President Trump said that American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.

If that is true, by the way, that President Trump spoke, as he said, before and after to the oil companies, he will have actually spoken with oil companies before speaking with lawmakers, which is an incredible thought.

Yeah, I mean, there's definitely growing concern from Congress.

Yeah.

I mean, the president says like I mean, he says he says a lot of things like many things.

President gives a lot of mixed signals.

Now he I will give him some credit for being practical and saying that they are in this for the long haul, that they're going to be there for years, that they are not going to cut and run.

At the same time, there are a lot of concerns about the costs and how much it will take, what kind of U.S.

resources will be involved.

The president seems to say that it's not going to cost Americans anything because they're going to be getting so much oil out of the ground and they're going to be able to pay for it all and get a lot of profits.

In fact, he said in a recent interview with NBC that it was going to take 18 months to get the Venezuelan oil infrastructure going again.

Now, Camila can talk a lot more about this than I can, but that just seems tremendously hard to imagine.