Trump bankruptcy is on the horizon again, this time on the ocean. Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump University, Trump Airline and now… Trump Oil.

Court filings tell the story. Trump applying the American military, like the mob flexes protection racket muscle, to monopolize a market isn’t what he thought it would be. Trump is spending tens of millions of taxpayer money grabbing and maintaining aging ocean tanker rust buckets that he can’t sell, holding oil he can’t offload, and continuing the program anyway into an expanding disaster.

Here’s a table for every tanker seized so far under his ill-considered “Operation Southern Spear”.

The Trump Junk Fleet

Tanker	Seized	Cargo (barrels)	Est. Cargo Value	Vessel Value	Known Cost to U.S.	Status
Skipper	Dec 10, 2025	1.8M	$120–$135M	~$10M	$47M + $450K/mo + $5M pending	Held; DOJ asking court to sell
Centuries	Dec 20, 2025	~2M	~$130M	Unknown	Unknown (moored at Galveston)	Held
Bella 1 / Marinera	Jan 7, 2026	Empty	$0	Unknown	Atlantic chase + ongoing	Held; pure cost center
Sophia	Jan 7, 2026	~2M	~$130M	Unknown	Seizure costs; cargo returned	Returned to Venezuela
Olina	Jan 9, 2026	Loaded	Unknown	Unknown	Seizure costs; cargo returned	Returned to Venezuela
Veronica	Jan 15, 2026	Empty	$0	Unknown	Unknown (moored off Puerto Rico)	Held; pure cost center
Sagitta	Jan 21, 2026	Unknown	Unknown	Unknown	Unknown	Held
Aquila II	Feb 9, 2026	~700K	~$45M	Unknown	15,000 km pursuit + ongoing	Held; not formally seized
2 additional (unidentified)	Unknown	Unknown	Unknown	Unknown	Unknown	Held per NYT

That’s just eight confirmed seizures already painting the obvious picture.

The NYT reports ten total with Venezuelan ties. Two (Bella 1 and Veronica) were empty when seized. Two more (Sophia and Olina) were returned to Venezuela. The U.S. absorbed the full operational cost of every seizure and got nothing back on four of them.

The Asset Trap

A tanker is not a seized bank account. It’s not a pile of gold. It is like a slumlord grabbing a condemned property, a decaying organism that consumes capital every second it sits unrepaired. Taking the decrepit hulls means the U.S. government has made itself into the world’s most expensive and insolvent shipping company.

For what?

The Skipper’s court filings are Trump Steaks all over again.

The U.S. government was forced to spend $47 million in three months on repairing and maintaining a vessel worth $10 million. Instead of all the things $47 million could have done domestically, it’s tangled up in acquired foreign debt.

Read that Trump businessman genius move again.

He’s blowing 4.7x a ship’s value just to keep it afloat in Texas. Oil storage runs $15,000 a day. Another $5 million is pending for insurance and crew. The DOJ’s own asset manager wrote that these costs “far outstrip standard assets.”

Grade school children understand the math showing this is bad, but not Trump. Previous American procedure was to seize the assets (oil) at sea with a siphon and let the liability (ships) sail on. Makes sense, right? The Trump model has been to take all the liability, immediately undermining the assets.

The Storage Bottleneck

Trump’s army of sycophants can’t simply sell the oil, deteriorating on old ships. These are civil forfeiture cases tied up in U.S. District Court in Washington. The Skipper’s cargo — worth $120 to $135 million — has been sitting unsold since December. At $450,000 a month in storage alone, a 12-month legal process would burn up $5.4 million before a buyer is found. Add the $47 million in catch-up maintenance and $5 million in pending costs, and nearly half the cargo value evaporates before a single barrel is sold.

The DOJ is now asking the court to allow an emergency sale of the Skipper’s oil before the massive losses become obvious to the public. That’s the Trump circus creating emergencies by admitting their strategy is hemorrhaging money faster than they can bully people into covering it up.

Net Recovery Projection

Only the Skipper has detailed cost data. But the Skipper is the template. These are all aging, end-of-life shadow fleet tankers that were past commercial retirement when they were seized. If the Skipper’s costs are even roughly representative, here’s what the full fleet of eight held tankers looks like over time.

Assumptions: maximum recoverable cargo across the fleet estimated at $500 million. Initial repair costs averaged at $20M per tanker (conservative — the Skipper hit $47M). Ongoing monthly costs per tanker estimated at $2–3.5M (maintenance, crew, insurance, storage). Neither scenario includes military operational costs, legal fees, or cargo depreciation.

Scenario	Initial Repair (fleet)	Monthly Burn (fleet)	Total Cost at 6 Mo.	Total Cost at 12 Mo.	Max Recoverable Cargo	Net at 12 Mo.
Conservative ($20M avg repair, $2M/mo per tanker)	$160M	$16M/mo	$256M	$352M	~$500M	+$148M
Skipper Rate ($40M avg repair, $3.5M/mo per tanker)	$320M	$28M/mo	$488M	$656M	~$500M	–$156M

Under the conservative scenario — which assumes each tanker costs less than half what the Skipper actually cost — the operation barely breaks even at 12 months. Under the Skipper rate, the operation goes underwater at roughly month 6 and never recovers. By month 12, the U.S. has spent $156 million more than the oil is worth.

Month six!

The Risk Nobody’s Pricing: Environmental Liability

Everything above is the optimistic scenario. It assumes nothing goes wrong with the ships themselves. That assumption deserves scrutiny.

These are single-hull, end-of-life “ghost fleet” tankers. They were built over two decades ago. They have been running intentionally dark, spoofing locations, skipping important inspections, and operating without valid safety certifications for years. So Trump has targeted absolute worst junk assets, with the least chance of positive return, for seizure.

Several were already rusting through, for obvious reasons. The Skipper’s $47 million in immediate repairs were totally avoidable by not seizing it.

I suspect the people who never maintain anything and have no concept of safety are the ones assuming all ships are equally valued.

Seizing unfit vessels on the verge of disaster actually makes the U.S. government the “responsible party” under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. OPA 90 imposes strict liability on the owner or operator of any vessel from which oil is discharged into U.S. waters.

Bush signed OPA 90 in response to the Exxon Valdez disaster. But as the Netflix documentary The White House Effect now documents using his own presidential library memos, his chief of staff John Sununu was simultaneously running a back channel with Exxon to neutralize every environmental commitment the administration made.

Perhaps that’s the Trump plan too.

The filmmakers found never-before-seen correspondence between oil executives and the White House chief of staff — memos in which, according to director Jon Shenk, Sununu openly bullied the President. EPA chief Bill Reilly told the filmmakers that even he was shocked by the tone.

The oil industry’s reaction to the Valdez spill was not remorse. It was to circle the wagons — applying the tobacco industry playbook of deny, counter, and split the electorate. Exxon wrote directly to Sununu as their line into the government. He convened a confidential “Global Warming Scientific ‘Skeptics’ Meeting” stacked with climate contrarians funded by coal companies. And the Bush White House forced NASA scientist James Hansen to alter his own congressional testimony to downplay climate risks.

The law survived the Bush corruption that is responsible for growing climate change disasters we experience today. The intentions behind it didn’t, perhaps by design. And now that same OPA 90 framework — strict liability, uncapped when safety regulations are violated — is the one that’s governing Trump’s seized tanker fleet. What are the chances it holds?

“Strict” means no-fault, so if the oil spills, the responsible party pays. And the current OPA liability cap for a single-hull tank vessel over 3,000 gross tons is the greater of $4,000 per gross ton or $29.6 million. But the cap vanishes entirely if the spill resulted from “violation of an applicable Federal safety, construction, or operating regulation.” These ships have no valid classification, no current safety certificates, and no double hulls. The cap would not survive a normal courtroom.

Here is what the uncapped liability looks like.

Spill Scenario	Volume	Historical Comparable	Cleanup Cost Range	Total Liability (incl. damages)
Minor hull breach (1 tanker, partial cargo)	~500K barrels	Larger than Exxon Valdez (262K bbl)	$2–4 billion	$3–7 billion
Major structural failure (1 full tanker)	~1.8M barrels	Approaching Deepwater Horizon scale	$5–15 billion	$10–25 billion
Cascading failure (2+ tankers at anchorage)	3–4M barrels	No historical precedent	$15–40 billion	$25–65 billion

The numbers have precedent. Exxon spent roughly $2.5 billion on cleanup alone for 262,000 barrels — about $9,500 per barrel spilled. BP’s total Deepwater Horizon liability exceeded $20.8 billion in settlements, with total costs above $65 billion. The Skipper is sitting in the Galveston Offshore Lightering Area with 1.8 million barrels of heavy Venezuelan crude — nearly seven times the volume of the Exxon Valdez spill — in a hull that required extensive repairs so it wouldn’t wreck Texas.

And the government plans to add even more debt from captured Iranian tankers to this fleet. Iranian shadow fleet vessels are notoriously among the worst-maintained ships afloat. By seizing them, the U.S. takes the environmental and safety liability another step deeper. One major hull breach in a U.S. port turns a hundred-million-dollar waste into a multi-billion-dollar ecological disaster. Talk about sunk cost.

The Ledger

Trump is pushing deranged reports of gross cargo value, to generate $130 million headline figures, as money he magically made. That’s clearly not how anything works. The actual balance sheet looks very different.

Line Item	Headline Number	Actual Number
Gross cargo value (all held tankers)	~$500M	~$500M (if every barrel is eventually sold)
Emergency repairs (fleet)	Not reported	$160–$320M (based on Skipper rate)
Ongoing maintenance, crew, insurance	Not reported	$16–$28M per month, compounding
Oil storage	Not reported	~$3.6M per month (est. across loaded tankers)
Military operations (carrier groups, SEALs, 160th SOAR, CG cutters)	Not reported	Classified / buried in defense budget
Legal fees and court costs	Not reported	Unknown; 10 separate forfeiture cases
Empty tankers (Bella 1, Veronica)	“Seized!”	Pure liability; $0 revenue
Returned tankers (Sophia, Olina)	“Seized!”	Sunk cost; $0 revenue
Environmental tail risk (OPA 90)	Not mentioned	$3–65 billion per incident, uncapped
Net position at 12 months	“Financial boon”	+$148M (best case) to –$156M (Skipper rate)
Net position if one hull fails		–$3 billion to –$65 billion

Every day Trump’s seized liabilities sit in U.S. waters, the gap between artificially gross headlines and the balanced reality ledger widens.

The one number that should keep the DOJ’s asset manager awake at night is the OPA 90 tail risk of a single-hull structural failure in a Texas anchorage, which doesn’t appear in any press conference. Bush signed that law. Sununu gutted the intent. And now Trump is parking the exact category of vessel it was designed to eliminate — single-hull, uncertified, end-of-life tankers loaded with heavy crude — in American waters, on the American taxpayer’s tab, with the American coastline as collateral.

This is what Trump Oil looks like, just like every other Trump bankruptcy, as court filings reveal the disinformation behind his toxic press releases.

Trump promised to end the Ukraine war on day one. He promised to stop America’s forever wars. He is now sixteen days into a war with Iran that has no exit strategy, no surrender, no deal, and no end in sight — while the Ukraine war grinds on with fresh Russian money from sanctions he just lifted.

The conventional explanation is incompetence. He didn’t understand what he was promising. He didn’t plan for Hormuz. He didn’t anticipate Iran’s drones. The problem with the incompetence theory is that it doesn’t explain why every failure produces new power.

There’s a simpler explanation. This is how a protection racket works. The economics are straightforward: the worse things are made by the protector, the more valuable their protection becomes. A mob boss doesn’t profit from peace on the block. He profits from being the threat, creating crisis that ideally he controls. If the threat goes away, so does the revenue. If the threat escalates, the price goes up.

Trump started a war with Iran on February 28. After two weeks of Trump saying he’s “ahead of schedule” Iran hasn’t surrendered, nearly 200 little girls died when their school was bombed, the Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed, a thousand oil tankers are stranded, Brent crude is past $105, and the president has shifted from begging to demanding that countries who had no role in starting the conflict send warships to clean it up, or lose their security guarantees from him. Every day the crisis deepens, he expects his leverage grows. Every failure he produces he expects new coercive power. The worse it gets, the more he believes everyone needs him, and the more he expects they’ll concede.

The Sequence

Drop NATO. Drop Ukraine. Drop Pacific defense. Drop intelligence and break-up five-eyes. Declare the end of diplomacy. Start a Middle-East war unilaterally. Iran closes Hormuz. Oil spikes past $100. Use the energy crisis to invoke the Defense Production Act — a Cold War national security law — to override California state environmental law and a federal consent decree, on behalf of Texas Oil (Sable Offshore Corp.), the Houston-based company that lobbied the White House to do exactly this. Sable spent $300,000 on federal lobbying in 2025, including paying Holland & Knight to lobby on “project authorizations for offshore oil and gas development.” Before 2025, the company reported no federal lobbying at all. It literally paid the government to force it to restart its pipeline.

The DOJ opinion enabling the DPA preemption was dated March 3 — three days into the war. The correspondence between Sable and the administration started before the first strike on Iran. The crisis didn’t create the opportunity. The opportunity was waiting for its crisis.

The Hormuz disruption: 20,000,000 barrels per day.

Sable’s output capacity: 50,000 barrels per day.

That’s 0.25% of the problem, a complete waste of energy with horrible downsides, being driven hard to spin up a domestic crisis on top of foreign ones. Solving the energy crisis was never the point. Overriding California was. Overriding the environment was.

The Protection Racket

Simultaneously, the administration issued a 30-day waiver lifting sanctions on Russian oil stranded at sea. Zelenskyy warned that this single easing could give Russia $10 billion for its war against Ukraine. German Chancellor Merz called it wrong. The European Council president called it “very concerning, as it impacts European security.” The Kremlin welcomed the move and pressed Washington to go further.

Then came the begging, followed by a demand. Trump called on China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and “others” to send warships to reopen Hormuz for him because he can’t figure it out. He told the Financial Times that if allies don’t help, it will be “very bad for the future of NATO”, as though he hadn’t just told NATO it had no value to him. A week earlier, he had told Britain not to bother sending ships because he’d already won.

The response has been uniformly noncommittal. South Korea “takes note.” Japan’s ruling party policy chief told NHK the legal threshold for military deployment is “very high” — the pacifist constitution essentially prohibits it without invoking a 2015 security law that has never been used. Australia flatly refused. France said it would consider escort missions only when “circumstances permit.” No country has committed a single vessel.

But the demand itself is the instrument.

A month ago, the question of whether Japan should send warships into the Persian Gulf was unthinkable. America had its own minesweepers in Bahrain. Now all those minesweepers are decommissioned by America, so pleading for help from Japan is on the table. Now PM Takaichi walks into the White House on Thursday with 70% of Japan’s oil imports held hostage by a crisis she didn’t create, facing a direct ask she can’t easily refuse. South Korea’s careful diplomatic non-answer is already a concession — the frame has shifted from “of course not you bumbling idiot” to “under review.”

The Ledger

The pattern is consistent across every theater. Remove the protections, create the predictable crisis, then demand the vulnerable do the actual work themselves and reward Trump.

What Trump removed	Who it hurt	What he then demanded
Lifted Russian oil sanctions ($10B windfall for Moscow’s war chest)	Ukraine, EU	Asked Ukraine for drone defense tech after dismissing their offer in August 2025. Asked EU allies for Hormuz warships while enriching the country invading their neighbor.
Redeployed THAAD and Patriot missile systems from South Korea to Middle East	South Korea, Japan	Asked both to send warships to the Strait of Hormuz — the same theater draining their own defense coverage. North Korea immediately launched 10+ ballistic missiles to test the gap.
Moved carriers and air defense from the Pacific (Abraham Lincoln from Indo-Pacific; one-third of naval surface fleet to Middle East)	Taiwan, Philippines, Japan	Told Asia to help secure Hormuz. Elbridge Colby claims the US is “laser-focused on the First Island Chain” while stripping it of assets. China detected 26 aircraft near Taiwan in a single day.
Moved air defense systems from Europe to the Middle East	NATO, Eastern Europe	Threatened “very bad future” for NATO if allies don’t help with Hormuz. Germany already out of its own air defense missiles. Can no longer transfer any to Ukraine.
Burned through 25%+ of THAAD stockpile, years of Tomahawk supply, 1,000+ Patriot interceptors	Everyone — allies who depend on US deterrence globally	Told Lockheed to “quadruple production” with no funded timeline. Meanwhile, Patriot inventories were at 25% of required levels before the war started.
Dismissed Ukraine’s drone interception proposal at White House meeting, August 2025	Ukraine, US forces in Gulf	Reversed course in the first week of war. US officials now call it one of their “biggest tactical mistakes.” Seven American service members killed by the drones they were offered a defense against.

Zelenskyy’s position captures the dynamic precisely: after Trump lifted sanctions against Russia and repeatedly backed Russian aggression, the Ukraine is now providing experts to Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and a US military base in Jordan for defending the Americans who couldn’t help Ukraine. Perhaps it is in hopes of earning back what was taken. Zelenskyy told reporters he wanted to sign a $35-50 billion drone deal. Trump told Fox News the US doesn’t need Ukraine’s help, while everyone on the ground knew Ukraine’s help was essential to American defense. Zelenskyy responded:

All our institutions received these requests, and we responded to them.

South Korea’s president admitted publicly that while Seoul opposes the withdrawal of US air defense assets, “it is also a reality that we cannot fully enforce our position.” North Korea fired 10+ ballistic missiles within days of Trump’s mindless THAAD redeployment. The message received in Pyongyang was the same message received everywhere else: America is obsessed with an Israeli mission to destabilize the Middle East, unable to disentangle itself from expanding war crimes.

Escalation as Strategy

The conventional political analysis assumes unpopularity is a cost. A leader who starts a war that closes Hormuz, spikes gas past $3.70, and produces no Iranian surrender should be paying a political price. But that analysis depends on accountability mechanisms functioning — elections that respond to disapproval, institutions that check overreach, allies that withdraw cooperation.

What’s actually happening is the opposite, as I’ve explained on this blog before in terms of Hitler rising to power as a function of his rapid decline in popularity.

Hitler was very, very unpopular. It’s how he amassed power. Trump also is very, very unpopular. And it’s working for him too. Stop waiting for approval ratings to matter to people who want to be hated. They already don’t.

Every day Hormuz stays closed, oil goes higher, the leverage over Japan and South Korea deepens, the DPA pretext for overriding state law gets stronger, and the argument for lifting Russian sanctions becomes more “reasonable.” The worse the crisis, the more everyone needs him to fix it, which means the more they’ll concede to get the fix.

Iran’s IRGC navy commander captured the absurdity cleanly:

Americans falsely claimed the destruction of Iran’s navy. Then they falsely claimed the escorting of oil tankers. Now they’re even asking others for backup forces.

Iran won’t unconditionally surrender. The Strait won’t magically open. Oil will keep climbing. And at every new price point, there’s a new demand waiting. A new state law to override. A new sanction to lift. A new ally to squeeze. The failure generates the power to extract the next concession.

The Sorting Function

Hatred doesn’t constrain this. It sorts.

People who object leave government, leave the military, leave proximity to power. What remains is the apparatus of the people who will execute. Hegseth didn’t get the Defense Secretary job despite being unqualified, despite advocating for war crimes and denouncing laws. He got it because being unqualified means he has no independent institutional base, no professional reputation to protect, no reason to exist outside the principal’s patronage. The competent people who would have objected to bombing Iran without a Hormuz contingency aren’t in the room. That’s a design specification for becoming as hated as possible, just like in the Vietnam War.

…the Peers Commission was involved in an even bigger cover-up: It exonerated the commander of US forces in Vietnam, Gen. William Westmoreland, from any responsibility for My Lai, despite the fact that the policy Westmoreland conveyed to his subordinates was to treat civilians who remained in long-term Vietnamese Communist, or Viet Cong (VC), base areas like My Lai as enemy combatants. […] The directive actually allowed the creation of free-fire zones in hamlets and villages under long-term Viet Cong control such as My Lai, in which the civilian population would have no protection whatsoever.

Externally it works the same way. Every ally that refuses to send warships clarifies the relationship. You’re either inside the protection racket or outside it. There’s no neutral position. Germany’s foreign minister was asked about Trump’s call for warships:

Will we soon be an active part of this conflict? No.

That clarity is itself a data point the administration will use. The next time Berlin needs something, the answer to the Hormuz question will be on the ledger.

Debt-Trap Security

The structural parallel is debt-trap diplomacy, except the currency is security dependence rather than infrastructure loans. Create the deficit, then collect.

India negotiated directly with Tehran and got two tankers through the Strait. China’s oil is flowing from Iran without interruption — Tehran is only blocking shipments from countries affiliated with the United States and its allies. The countries most dependent on American security guarantees are the ones most trapped by the crisis America created. The countries with independent diplomatic relationships are finding their own way through.

The flywheel only breaks when someone converts hatred into organized material resistance. Polling numbers, editorial condemnation, allied dismay… all just noise. The Trump sycophantic administration is fine with horrible no good noise, it makes the protection racket insiders feel closer.

What it can’t absorb is the thing none of its targets have yet produced: a coordinated refusal to participate in a system where the arsonist exists for the thrill of seeing all the fire trucks respond and fail.

The racket doesn’t just extract concessions from allies. It burns through people.