DOONBEG, Ireland — President Donald Trump suggested Sunday, Sept. 13, 2026, that the United States could stay in Iran and “keep the oil,” drawing an explicit parallel to a U.S. push to take control of a fifth of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, Reuters reported from the Amgen Irish Open at Trump International Golf Links.

Speaking to reporters on a trip to Ireland for meetings and golf, Trump framed an exit as the default — with a wartime resource carve-out as the alternative. “We’ll ultimately get out (of Iran), unless we decide to stay and keep the oil like Venezuela,” he said, according to Reuters. He added that U.S. revenue from Venezuela has “paid for the war many times.”

That framing treats oil extraction as a fiscal payoff for military engagement — a claim worth reading as presidential salesmanship, not a settled ledger. Wartime control of another country’s energy resources is the kind of executive war-economy assertion that tends to outrun congressional authorization, market reality, and the actual capacity to hold and ship barrels under fire. Reuters noted the Venezuela comparison tracks a U.S. deal announced in August; how much of that revenue has truly “paid for the war” remains a presidential claim, not an independently audited scoreboard in the Doonbeg gaggle.

Trump still said he expects the Iran war to end this year, possibly just after November midterm elections in the United States, and that gasoline prices would “drop like a rock” once the conflict ended. He said he would only make the “right deal” and would not do one that was “no good,” adding that Iran was “calling constantly” for peace talks — an assertion Tehran has dismissed in the past, Reuters reported.

Oil markets were already on edge. Traders expected prices to rise again Monday after an attack on a Saudi oil pipeline — a separate shock already moving crude, not a rehash of the Iran theater itself. Trump’s Doonbeg comments layered a longer-term occupation-and-oil option onto that short-term price anxiety.

Video of the exchange is also available via C-SPAN’s White House event coverage of the president speaking to reporters in Doonbeg.

Sources