At the Port of Corpus Christi, Trump Points to a Tanker and Calls It Victory

On Tuesday, October 27, one week before Americans vote, President Donald Trump stood at the Port of Corpus Christi on the Texas Gulf coast and pointed past the crowd toward the water. A tanker was docked there, the Angerona, and the president had brought his audience to look at it. “It’s got 1 million barrels of oil on it from Venezuela,” he said, as Al Jazeera reported. He called the scene “the greatest oil victory in history.”

This was his fourth trip to Texas this campaign season, and the first of two rallies that day; the second was in Lubbock. According to local reporting, the Corpus Christi event had first been planned for Waco and was moved to the port only the week before. A rally can be moved. A tanker, apparently, could not, so the rally went to the ship.

The gift

The president gave the cargo a history. It came, he said, “thanks to our big victory in our recent war with Venezuela.” Earlier that day he had told reporters: “We took Venezuela with great success, and they have sent me a shipment of one million barrels of oil as a gift.”

Note the pronoun. Not sent to the country, not sent to the refineries: sent to me. Venezuela’s interim leader, Delcy Rodríguez, has said nothing about the shipment. Al Jazeera noted that it was unclear why the oil had been shipped at all, or whether the president’s figures were accurate.

A reflection, and only that: there is an old custom by which the defeated send tribute to the victor, and the victor shows it to his people so they can see what the war has bought. The custom has outlived many empires. It needs one thing, a ship that can be seen from shore.

The paperwork behind the tribute is less dramatic. Venezuela was already sending crude to the United States before January 3, when US forces seized Nicolás Maduro; the shipments have grown since then. In August the administration announced a deal giving the Pentagon a 35 percent stake in North America Blue Energy Partners, an entity overseeing 65 billion barrels of proven reserves. The White House has said the first shipment under that deal would probably arrive in November. Experts doubt it will do much in the short term. At the port, Trump went further still: Venezuela, he said, “will become a prosperous country, and who knows may someday soon it will become a prosperous 51st state.”

The pump

The real reason for the tanker lies far to the east. The US-Israeli war with Iran is now in its eighth month and has no clear way out, and fuel prices have followed it upward. Democrats have been pricing the war at the petrol pump, and those prices have already dragged the president’s approval toward historic lows. Tehran, for its part, has threatened to fire on American warships.

So the ship was a reply. The oil, Trump promised, “will be refined right here in Texas, including right here in Corpus Christi. Gasoline and diesel prices will soon come down.” He defended the attack on Iran and said prices would fall once the war was over, describing the present moment, as Bloomberg reported, as “Short-term pain, right, for long-term gain.”

A million barrels, if that is what the Angerona holds, arrives once. The war goes on every day. Voters will judge for themselves which of the two they see at the pump.

The seat

The president was not in Texas for the oil alone. He had come for a Senate seat. In the Republican primary he backed Attorney General Ken Paxton against the incumbent, Senator John Cornyn, and Paxton won. Paxton, dogged by scandal, now faces the Democrat James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian. Talarico has led most polls, mostly within the margin of error; the RealClearPolitics average puts him 1.7 points ahead.

No Democrat has won statewide office in Texas since 1994. A Talarico victory would be a heavy rebuke to the president at the moment Republicans are trying to keep a narrow Senate majority, with Democrats widely expected to take the House on November 3. Trump called Paxton up onto the stage and put the race in personal terms: “The only man standing between Texas and this raging lunatic is a man named President Donald J. Trump. And I need the help of Ken Paxton in the US Senate.”

Talarico has campaigned on the corruption allegations against his opponent and on the cost of living, saying Paxton “represents everything that’s wrong with this broken, corrupt system.” Paxton says Talarico is too “radical” for business-friendly Texas. Trump and Vice President JD Vance have distorted Talarico’s past remarks on transgender rights and border security, and in Corpus Christi the president repeated those attacks. “Talarico stated that he wants to dismantle Texas oil and gas and capitalism itself,” he told the crowd, according to KRIS 6 News, and he warned that the Democrat would try to take the Venezuelan oil away.

Then he asked the crowd to vote as if his own name were on the ballot. “If you go out, and if you all vote, we win in a landslide.” Behind him the Angerona stayed tied up at the dock, waiting for the refineries, and there were seven days left before the vote.