Nicolas Maduro’s doing what cartoonish dictators do when the chips are down: Availing himself of staged propaganda exercises to project a sense of normalcy.

In a piece published late Monday evening, The Wall Street Journal documented his efforts which include attending Christmas festivities, dancing for supporters and singing (badly) Bobby McFerrin’s only hit while wearing a sombrero.

It’s true that this isn’t Maduro’s first rodeo when it comes to US pressure campaigns aimed at forcing him from power, but this is the most concerted such effort. Behind the goofball bravado and awkward karaoke he’s feeling the heat.

According to two sources who spoke to Bloomberg, shut-ins have begun in the Orinoco Belt. With storage facilities brimming, PDVSA started closing wells on Sunday, the people said. The regime’s targeting production cuts of up to 25% in the region, in what the linked article aptly described as a “reality check” for Maduro.

This was Donald Trump’s plan all along. It’s not exactly a novel idea, it was just a matter of whether any US president would be willing to enforce Treasury sanctions on the country’s crude by implementing a physical blockade on the shadow fleet vessels which serve as a financial lifeline for the regime. Trump is that president.

Not only is the US military seizing sanctioned vessels and chasing the ones it can’t catch out to sea, it’s boarding tankers that aren’t sanctioned if they’re known to assist Maduro in the transport of contraband crude.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon continues to target alleged cocaine boats and by his own account, Trump bombed a narcotics “loading dock” in Venezuela this month. “There was a major explosion where they load the boats up with drugs,” he told reporters on Monday, apparently referencing a CIA drone strike originally made public by CNN.

Needless to say, PDVSA would rather not shutter its wells. Bringing them back online isn’t like turning the faucet back on, and the longer the shut-ins last, the harder and more expensive restarts tend to be.

Still, ousting Maduro will prove far more difficult than Trump expects. One issue is that Venezuelans are desperately poor, and while desperate times call for desperate measures (like maybe a revolt), it’s hard to mobilize when you’re broke and hungry. (For context, annual inflation in Iran was around 45% this month. In Venezuela, it was as high as 500%.)

Further, Maduro retains something like unflinching loyalty among the top military brass and he’s paid off God only knows how many militia and armed outfits scattered across the country. There isn’t a coherent resistance movement, let alone one that’s well-armed, and the regime enjoys formidable intelligence support from Cuba.

As far as the oil goes, not all of the country’s black gold is locked up. As Bloomberg noted in a separate piece on Monday, Chevron discharged two tankers loaded with Venezuelan crude at US ports recently with “another three” on the way. Chevron’s ships, the linked article said, “have so far been able to sail by the region freely.”

[Insert smirking Dick Cheney meme.]