The Itinerant Bandit

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, April 13, 2026

 

Donald Trump has said he means to run the country like a business, and he is.

 

Piracy is a business.

 

Negotiations led by J. D. Vance predictably failed to produce an agreement to open the Strait of Hormuz, and so now the Trump administration has announced that the United States will blockade the waterway. Given that this is the Trump administration we are talking about, that may or may not happen, but the psychology at play is transparent enough: Donald Trump is humiliated by his inability to force the Iranians to give him what he wants with threats of war crimes and genocide, and so now he will pretend that gutting worldwide energy markets and a great deal of non-energy trade to boot was his idea all along. With all due respect to my third-favorite cult (after Cthulhu worshipers and the Fair Tax guys) that is some sub-genius stuff right there.

 

“If it were up to me, I’d take the oil,” the president of these United States said about his illegal war on Iran. “I’d keep the oil. I would make plenty of money.” Really? “If I had my choice … yeah, because I’m a businessman first.” Seriously? “To the victor belong the spoils,” said the president of—let’s go ahead and emphasize that—the United States of America. The model—again—is Venezuela: “We’ve taken hundreds of millions of barrels [of oil] … over 100 million barrels already,” he said. “It paid for that war many, many times over.”

 

As with most of what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth, that is somewhere between a lie and ignorant bluster—and it is marginally worse than the actual truth of the situation, which is that U.S. buyers, such as Chevron’s refining operation, are importing Venezuelan oil, while other buyers, such as Chinese refiners, are no longer pretending that they are not buying Venezuelan oil, which had been under heavy sanctions. The U.S. Treasury is exercising financial oversight of the Venezuelan state-owned oil company, PDVSA. But consider that PDVSA’s joint operating partners include such U.S.-based energy behemoths as Chevron, and let me go ahead and assure you, in case you had any doubts, Chevron is going to get paid for its role in taking that oil out of the ground. Trump talks about the oil industry in Venezuela like he has just carjacked a Toyota Yaris on the mean streets of Caracas, and, no doubt, he is looking for a way to profit personally and politically from the U.S. intervention in the Venezuelan oil business, but it simply is not the case that the United States has just “taken hundreds of millions of barrels” of oil from Venezuela like Megan Fox at a Walmart cosmetics counter.

 

I suppose you can say that much about Donald Trump: Though he is a convicted felon nearly three dozen times over, in this case, he is not actually behaving like a criminal—he merely aspires to.

 

Iran is not Venezuela. I suspect that U.S. “oversight” of the Iranian petroleum industry will result in someone’s remembering P.J. O’Rourke’s line about the canard that the United States went into Iraq for self-interested financial reasons: “Damn, it’s expensive to steal oil.”

 

Maybe you think even Donald Trump couldn’t screw up a bunch of oil wells. But do remember that he lost his shirt in the Atlantic City casino business and bought a modeling agency and a beauty-pageant business because he doesn’t know how to talk to women.

 

The political scientist Mancur Olson famously described the state as a “stationary bandit.” With all due respect (and much is due) to John Rawls, the actual “original position” is Thomas Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes, a state of chaos in which the more intelligent men in the rapine-and-plunder game eventually figured out that if you left the poor hapless villagers you’re sacking a little bit of seed corn, some tools, and enough food to get through the winter, then there’d be more to pillage in the spring—whereas reducing them to utter starvation or simply massacring them all left you with nothing to steal when pillaging season comes around again. So you leave them a little something, and, eventually, you start protecting them from other less enlightened pillagers in the same way you’d protect a herd of livestock. Eventually, you stop roving and just consolidate your grip over the villages under your dominion. A generation or two go by, you skin a couple of weasels and get a pliant holy man to chant some mumbo-jumbo over your tyranny, and, presto-change-o, you’re King Henry II.

 

Consent and legitimacy and parliaments and all that stuff—the “social contract” business that Murray Rothbard described as “the immaculate conception of the state”—comes after the fact: The real foundation of the political order is the warlord and warlordism.

 

I don’t really believe in progress per se—not in permanent progress, anyway. In my estimate, we’re all still the same bone-through-the-nose savages barking at the moon that our ancestors were at the dawning of H. sap. 300,000 years ago or whatever it was. Deirdre McCloskey’s “great enrichment,” Jonah Goldberg’s “miracle,” whatever you want to call it—that stuff is recent. Civilization in any given place at any given time is like that shopping bag blowing around in American Beauty—it goes up, it goes down, and you might be surprised by how high it can go and how long it can stay up, but gravity never stops being gravity. We have been lucky over the course of the past few centuries because civilization has been effectively compartmentalized—Germany or China can go careering off into the outer dark without necessarily dragging the rest of the world along for the ride, so while we’ve got 1933 and 1776 effectively right next to each other when measured against the long span of human history, we have managed to maintain a fairly high average level of human civilization, and, unlike those isolated Pacific island cultures that invent and forget and reinvent the same fishing technique every few generations, we have had enough separation for security and enough connectedness to facilitate shared memory and, in our time, a truly global division of labor. (If you want to worry about AI, then worry about that balance—AI threatens both the benefits of connectivity and the benefits of separation via the same means, i.e., technologically enabled homogenization.) Take one frame of that dancing bag in American Beauty, and you might think it really does fly. It doesn’t.

 

The United States is, at present, on a course of regress, not only as regards the degenerate and buffoonish caudillo the American people have twice elected as president but also, more broadly, as regards the things he stands for: Joe Biden was anti-trade and anti-globalization, too, and it is likely that the next Democratic president will be at least as much of an economic nationalist and anti-capitalist as Trump is, though he probably will talk about it differently. The retreat from our constitutional order and from our institutions is not uniquely a phenomenon of the right-wing revolutionists currently in control of the Republican Party: Democrats have been ready to make war on the Supreme Court for years, not because it is failing to do its job but because it does, even when that means telling progressives that they have to go to the polls and the legislatures in order to secure the policy outcomes they demand rather than having them imposed by the judiciary acting as a superlegislature. You think the Trump administration was the first to try to use the levers of government to shut down unfriendly media? You think using private-sector employment as a means of enforcing political conformism was a big conservative idea?

 

Trump represents something atavistic in the American character—and in the human character. He is a would-be bandit, and not even a stationary one but the roving kind that goes abroad in search of victims to pillage and loot and murder. And, on that point, much of the world and at least some Americans agree:

 

Something is going to have to be done about this.

 

Economics for English Majors

 

Inflation for March ran at an annualized rate of 3.3 percent, well above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target. This is policy-driven inflation: incontinent spending, a destructive war introducing chaos into energy markets. For perspective: At 2 percent inflation, prices double every 36 years; at 3.3 percent, prices double—i.e., your money loses half its value—in just under 22 years. I suspect that Republicans are in their YOLO era—they assume, with good reason, that they are going to get the stuffing kicked out of them in the midterms, and, frankly, congressional Republicans may not want to be in power for the conclusion of Donald Trump’s time in office, which will involve ... God knows what.

 

The ship of state has too much canvas up, and the longer this keeps up, the worse the wreck is going to be. As consequences go, 3.3 percent inflation is pretty mild—things can get a lot worse than that, and probably will.