Conspiracy
Trump's Take-The-Oil Speech Predates the Internet, GPS, and His Third Wife
By Tah Foil, . BSN Network. Satire.
A videotape recorded in 1987 and recently authenticated by two archivists at a facility in New Jersey shows Donald Trump, then 41, explaining to an interviewer that the United States was making a strategic mistake by not simply taking the oil from countries it had conflicts with, and that any serious businessman could see this was the correct move.
The tape predates the commercial internet, the GPS navigation system, the fall of the Soviet Union, and Melania Trump by approximately thirteen years.
The recording surfaced last week and was verified against known footage from the period. In it, Trump outlines what he describes as a "very simple" solution to American energy dependence, one that involves going in, taking the oil, and leaving, in that order. He does not specify who would be left in charge of the country afterward, a detail he would continue not specifying for the next four decades.
Former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who served in the administration from 2018 to 2019 before departing under circumstances he has described in 500 pages, confirmed that the take-the-oil framework was a consistent feature of internal discussions. "It was always on the table," Bolton said. "Sometimes it was the table."
What makes the tape notable, according to people who study these things professionally, is not the content but the continuity. Most political figures revise their positions as circumstances change, as new information arrives, or as pollsters recommend it. Trump revised his position on the Iran nuclear deal, on NATO, on his personal lawyer, and on at least eleven people he once described as the best he had ever seen at their jobs. The oil position did not move.
Dr. Patricia Hollis, who teaches American foreign policy at a university in Ohio and who agreed to comment on the tape after watching twelve minutes of it, said she had seen ideological consistency before but that this particular case was unusual in its "almost architectural" quality. "It is not that he returned to the idea," she said. "It is that he appears never to have left it. It is the load-bearing wall."
She paused, then added that she was using the phrase metaphorically and that no actual walls were involved, a clarification she said she now includes whenever possible.
Trump made versions of the same argument publicly during the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, on the campaign trail in 2016, in a White House meeting in 2018 that three attendees later described in separate memoirs using the same adjective, and again in 2025 during a briefing on Iran that began as a discussion of sanctions and ended, sources say, as a discussion of oil.
In a statement released Monday, a spokesperson for the former and current president said that the tape demonstrated "extraordinary vision" and that most people would be fortunate to have one idea that good. The statement did not address whether any plan to execute the idea had been developed in the intervening 38 years.
The oil in question remains, as of press time, in Iran.
Records show Trump also gave a version of the same interview to Playboy in 1990, to Larry King in 1999, and to himself in a number of tweets between 2011 and 2021. Each version is substantially the same. In the 1987 tape he is wearing a different tie. That is the only variation researchers have been able to confirm.
The archivists who authenticated the tape noted that the magnetic oxide on the cassette was consistent with Maxell UD-XL stock from the mid-to-late 1980s, the same tape format used to record, among other things, the original broadcast of Miami Vice, a show Trump is known to have watched and to have found, by his own account, instructive.
No one involved in the authentication process was asked whether they found any of this concerning. They were asked only whether the tape was real.
It is.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-video-iran-oil/