Source : BRICS NEWS
United States President Donald Trump has suggested that Venezuela could one day become America’s 51st state, BRICS News reported on October 28, 2026, as he hailed growing oil co-operation between Washington and Caracas at a campaign rally in Texas.
“President Trump says Venezuela could become the 51st US state,” BRICS News said in a post on X. The remarks were made on Tuesday, October 27, at a midterm election rally in Corpus Christi, Texas, according to Anadolu Agency and The Hill.
“It will become a prosperous country, and who knows? Maybe someday soon it will become a prosperous 51st state. That’s possible,” Mr Trump told supporters. He then repeated the idea: “Let’s make it the 51st state. And instead of a president, we’ll have an election for a governor. How about that? You know, they have a lot of oil.”
The president also singled out oil billionaire Harold Hamm in the crowd. “Now let’s make it, Harold, the 51st state. Do you like that? I do. I do,” he said, according to The Hill and Mediaite.
Mr Trump made the comments while celebrating the arrival of what he described as the first one million barrels of Venezuelan oil under an agreement between the two countries. Earlier on Tuesday he called the shipment a “gift”, and he told the rally that the crude would be refined in Texas, “including right here in Corpus Christi”. “This historic win gives us control over a massive part of the world’s oil supply,” he said, according to Anadolu Agency.
He thanked Venezuela for what he called a relationship that had become “very, very good”, and said billions of dollars were being invested in the country by major oil companies, creating jobs that “no one would have thought possible just one year ago”. He also promised that petrol and diesel prices in the United States would soon fall. CNN reported that the price of a gallon of unleaded petrol was about 40 per cent higher than a year earlier, and diesel about 75 per cent higher, as Republican candidates head into the midterm elections.
The remarks come months after the US military operation in January that ousted then-President Nicolás Maduro. Mr Trump used the rally to praise “the warriors of the United States military” for what he called a “great victory against Venezuela”. Delcy Rodríguez has served as Venezuela’s acting president since Mr Maduro’s removal.
It is not the first time Mr Trump has floated the idea. The Hill reported that he said earlier this year he was “seriously considering” making Venezuela a state, and he has made similar remarks about Canada. In May, Ms Rodríguez told journalists that Venezuela had no plans to become a US state. “We will continue to defend our integrity, our sovereignty, our independence, our history,” she said, according to The Associated Press.
No formal proposal accompanied Tuesday’s comments. Admitting a new state to the union would require an act of the US Congress, and market analysts at Newsquawk described the remark as rhetorical positioning rather than policy. The Hill reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio travelled with Mr Trump to Texas in his capacity as national security adviser.
There was no immediate response from the Venezuelan government to the latest remarks.
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