On January 5, 2026, during The Rachel Maddow Show, Rachel Maddow presented a segment about Donald Trump that relied on selective framing, speculation, and omission.
She began by asserting that Trump had misrepresented his conversations with oil companies:
“Trump told everybody, told reporters, ‘Oh yes, I’ve been talking to the oil companies. I talked to them before. I’ve talked to them since.’ The oil companies are like, ‘No, dude, no, you didn’t.’”
She then added commentary about Trump’s motivations and tone:
“Donald Trump likes the sound of ‘let’s take the oil.’ He thinks that sounds cool and transgressive and tough. He thinks it makes him sound like a king, like a military conquest kind of guy.”
Only after that setup did Maddow move to her central historical claim:
“Contrary to our popular imagination about Donald Trump… he supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He said he was for it.”
She continued:
“He actually said the only thing that was wrong with what we did in starting that disastrous war in Iraq is that we should have taken the oil.”
But the 2013 tweet she displayed on screen reads:
“I still can’t believe we left Iraq without the oil.”
That tweet was displayed on screen as Maddow spoke, even though its wording does not match the claim she attributed to it.
Those are not the same statement. The tweet criticizes how the war ended, not the decision to start it, and it does not say oil was the only thing wrong with the war.
Maddow also emphasized that Trump repeated the phrase years later:
“Even in his first run for president in 2016, he would repeat that we should have taken the oil… loves the sound of that.”
She then posed a rhetorical question to the audience:
“Does he know what that means?”
From there, Maddow launched into a detailed explanation of oil extraction, framing Trump’s phrase as a literal misunderstanding:
“Because Venezuela’s oil is not like sitting in barrels on shelves in a store and we can just march in there with a gun and a ball of lava and demand that they hand it over. Venezuela’s oil isn’t sitting there for us to take in some convenient package. Venezuela’s oil is under the surface of the earth. It needs to be drilled out, drilled down to, and then pumped up.”
She then listed what she said would be required to produce oil:
“And for that, you need a working electrical grid that provides you tons of reliable electricity. You need many trained workers. You need political stability and working ports and roads and physical security for your operations. You need contract law to work. You need billions and billions and billions of dollars, including billions of dollars worth of expensive equipment and expert investment.”
Maddow followed that with a claim about timing and return on investment:
“You need investments that you will not recoup immediately. It will take years, if not decades.”
She concluded by characterizing Trump’s language as a criminal fantasy:
“When Donald Trump says we’re gonna take the oil, I think he’s thinking it’s like a stick up.”
She then added:
“And Reuters is reporting that he lied when he told reporters that he had talked to all the oil companies about this in advance, and they were all on board with what he was doing.”
The report referenced statements from a limited number of companies, not the entire oil industry, and did not establish that Trump spoke to no one in the energy sector.
What Maddow did not tell viewers is that her historical claim relies on a single pre-war exchange from 2002, when Trump appeared on The Howard Stern Show and was asked a vague, offhand question about Iraq.
When asked whether he generally supported going into Iraq, Trump gave a hesitant, non-committal response—closer to “yeah, I guess so” than an endorsement. He did not advocate for the war, argue for regime change, or outline any policy rationale. This exchange occurred before the invasion, before the intelligence failures, and before the consequences of the war were known.
What Maddow also did not tell viewers is what happened next.
Trump publicly criticized the Iraq War soon after it began, calling it a mistake. He said plainly in 2004 that the war should not have happened. For nearly two decades afterward—well before the 2016 campaign—he repeatedly described the Iraq War as a disaster. His opposition was consistent and long-standing.
Reducing his position to a single, pre-war radio comment while ignoring nearly two decades of public opposition is not context—it is omission.
Maddow’s closing lecture also left out a basic fact: Venezuela already drills for and produces oil. It is one of the world’s historic oil-producing countries, with active operations dating back many decades.
By presenting oil development as hypothetical, impractical, and decades away from returns, Maddow framed Trump’s shorthand political language as ignorance—while ignoring both Venezuela’s existing oil industry and the economic reality that oil projects generate returns early through jobs, leasing, royalties, and production, and that increased supply helps lower energy costs across the broader economy.
Trump did not champion the Iraq War.
He criticized it early.
He opposed it consistently.
Freezing the timeline, discarding contradictory facts, exaggerating limited reporting, and replacing context with opinion, mockery, and speculation about what Trump “thinks”—while revealing ignorance about the real, near-term economic impact of oil drilling—is not analysis.
It is propaganda. Fake news indeed.