I’m still trying to digest what’s up with Trump and Venezuela. Here’s the latest from the New York Times:

Hours after a U.S. military operation that captured Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, President Trump said the United States would “run the country until such time that we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.” Mr. Maduro and his wife are being taken to New York to stand trial on drug and weapons charges, he said.

Mr. Trump offered few details about how the United States would oversee Venezuela, saying only that “a group” would do so. He added that he was not afraid of “boots on the ground.”

Mr. Trump said Venezuela’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, had spoken to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and told him she was “essentially willing to do what we think is necessary.” But hours earlier, Ms. Rodríguez denounced the U.S. operation on state television.

Trump can’t run this country properly, much less another one. I take it Marco Rubio and Pentagon Pete will be in charge of Venezuela. Maybe Pete will line up all the men and order them to shave.

Putting Maduro on trial in New York is an interesting move. Can the DoJ even prove it has jurisdiction? Trump would probably have to prove that Maduro is directly in charge of gangs operating within the U.S., and he may not be able to do that.

In his press conference today, Trump tried to make Maduro sound like a threat to the United States:

Trump addressed reporters shortly after returning to Florida, framing the developments in Venezuela as an urgent national security matter and casting the Maduro government as a direct threat to the United States. The president said the now-deposed Venezuelan leader had deepened ties with foreign adversaries while pursuing advanced weaponry capable of harming Americans.

“Furthermore, under the now deposed dictator Maduro, Venezuela was increasingly hosting foreign adversaries in our region and acquiring menacing, offensive weapons that could threaten U.S. interests and lives,” Trump said. “And they use those weapons. Last night. They used those weapons last night, potentially in league with the cartels operating along our border.”

Bring on the aluminum tubes and the yellowcake. I don’t doubt Venezuelans used some weapons last night, as they were being attacked. Duh. Then Trump mentioned the Monroe Doctrine without giving a hint that he knows what that is. It’s being superseded by the “Donroe Doctrine.” I’m serious; he said that.

Congress wasn’t even notified of this move, of course. It was not only illegal under the Constitution it also violated the UN charter (see Just Security). 

Needless to say, this will not turn out well. And maybe it was about the oil after all. CNBC:

President Donald Trump on Saturday said U.S. oil companies will invest billions of dollars in Venezuela’s energy sector after the overthrow of President Nicolas Maduro. 

“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies — the biggest anywhere in the world — go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure,” Trump said in a press conference from his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida.

“Let’s start making money for the country,” Trump said.

Trump can’t order our very large oil companies to do squat in Venezuela. I’m sure they’d do it if there’s a guaranteed profit for them, but that’s not making money “for the country.” That’s making money “for the oil companies.”

I’m sure there will be more details over the next few hours. I just want to note this one reaction from Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz

the ultimate democratic party response: i LOVE the crazy illegal thing you just did, but could you perhaps come to my office to sign form 317b for it?

[image or embed]

— Jack Mirkinson (@jackmirkinson.bsky.social) January 3, 2026 at 9:38 AM

Yeah, Dems need to work on the resistance thing. Some of them aren’t very good at it.

The Mamdani era of New York City politics begins. Over the past couple of days social media have been jammed by “New York City RIP” messages from righties. They can’t wait for Mamdani to fail.

Of course, there was general hysteria when it was learned he took the New York mayoral oath of office on a Quran. Two Qurans, actually. The oath must be invalid! I spent part of yesterday writing a backgrounder on why the Constitution does not require swearing on the Bible to take oaths of office. There were also rumors that Mamdani had refused to take any oath to uphold the Constitution. This was all nonsense, of course. Much suspicion was cast on the midnight ceremony in which he first took the oath. It was a “private” ceremony in that attendance was by invitation only. Obviously, he was trying to hide something. But it was televised. There are videos all over the web.

The term of the previous mayor ends at midnight, so new mayors are sworn in immediately after midnight. Then at the public inauguration yesterday afternoon, I understand he took the oath again. This is normal. But everything he says or does or didn’t say or didn’t do is being picked apart and held up as an example of the danger he poses to America.

Mayor Mamdani’s inaugural speech is quite good, IMO, and worth reading. Much of what he wants to do is going to be a heavy lift, but I think he is capable of success. Let’s hope.

Here’s another video for you — Jack Smith’s testimony to the House Judiciary Committee. I have only seen bits of it, but this is supposed to be the whole thing. It may take a while to watch.

The Trump Administration continues to shoot itself in the foot. As I understand it, some rightie influencer made a video accusing daycare centers run by Somalis in Minnesota of fraud. We’ve been having dump on Somalis in Minnesota month, I take it. Whether this guy found actual fraud, or whether his claims are the fraud, is still up in the air. But HHS has frozen all federal subsidies to day care in all 50 states. It will be up to day care centers to prove to HHS that they are legitimate, or something. This will take a while.

So along with losing their health insurance a lot of people are going to start the new year by losing their day care. Yeah, that’s a great way to endear oneself to the voters.

Happy new year.

I’m not in the mood to celebrate, but if you are, enjoy and stay safe.

The coming year is likely to be an epic mess. But let’s hope that by this time next year we’ll be in a better place. In the meantime, I hope you all keep commenting here. It helps me and I hope it helps you.

Update:

A wave of business bankruptcies is slamming the U.S. economy, Business Insider reports.  “From billion-dollar giants to mom-and-pop shops to everyday individuals, bankruptcies are piling up  across the US this year, with large corporate bankruptcies already hitting their highest level in 15 years.” Do tell.

Paul Krugman writes that small businesses are getting the worst of it. Although the tariffs are hurting everybody, big companies are better able to absorb sudden extra cost. Big companies can also game the system to their advantage; small businesses cannot. Finally, the end of the Obamacare tax credits means small business employees, and many employers, are losing their health insurance.

Meanwhile, manufacturing jobs are evaporating. Trump really didn’t do much for manufacturing jobs in his first term. For a couple of years he coasted on the momentum of President Obama’s economy, but by 2019 the U.S. was in a manufacturing recession. (See U.S. manufacturing dives to 10-year low as trade tensions weigh by Reuters, October 2019.) And then came Covid.

But that was then. A month ago Fortune reported that Despite Trump’s best efforts to reshore manufacturing, blue-collar employment is plunging for the first time since the pandemic with 59,000 lost jobs. Sorry I can’t report past the headline; there’s a paywall. For how many manufacturing jobs Trump has actually lost, see the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The numbers are preliminary, but could be as many as 208,000. And that’s just manufacturing. See also ‘An Abject Failure’: Economists Trash Trump’s Disastrous Job Creation Record in Year-End Reviews at Common Dreams.

Whether the U.S. economy is in danger or is showing resilience and should do fine depends on whom you ask. But from what I’m reading all the juice is going into tech, especially AI and related industries, while everything else is struggling. And of course Trump and the clowns he’s chosen for his cabinet are not capable of making any of this any better.

But I’m not sure the state of the economy is getting as much attention as it normally would. There’s so much drama going on, all the time, to focus on any one thing. Today Trump is busy making a mess of the Ukraine-Russia crisis and engaging in an undeclared and unauthorized war in Venezuela. Plus he’s bombing more boats in the Pacific now. Trump appears to be in denial that there’s anything fundamentally wrong with the economy, and his flickering attention span is elsewhere. Except that he’s still talking about giving Americans a “tariff dividend” of $2000, which would really be a payoff to dispose taxpayers toward voting Republican in the midterms. We’ll see.

Gallup says the public is in a gloomy mood. Gloomy enough to punish Republicans in 2026?  I guess we’ll find out.

I hope everyone had a lovely holiday. And now, back to work.

The Trump Administration certainly had a busy holiday. First we had a big Christmas Eve Epstein files document announcement. More than one million files they previously didn’t know about have somehow turned up! Somebody must have stacked them in a back hall under the old pizza boxes. My goodness, what a surprise. And after Trump’s girl Pam kept saying the DoJ had done an “exhaustive review” of everything Epstein and there was nothing in the files worth releasing. It’s going to take them a while to review all that, of course.

And then on Christmas Day Trump bombed Nigeria. Why did Trump bomb Nigeria? To please his White evangelical supporters, basically. White evangelicals in the U.S. have been yammering that Nigerian Christians were being “targeted” for death. There was talk of a Nigerian Christian genocide. So Trump dropped a bunch of bombs on Nigeria, I take it. And the evangelicals were pleased.

I’ve been watching this for a while. There has been a lot of terrorist violence in Nigeria. Some of the people killed by terrorists are Christians. Some of them are not. According to Pew, Nigeria is 56 percent Muslim and 43 percent Christian. Maybe. I’ve seen different figures elsewhere. Terrorist groups in Nigeria include West African ISIS, Boko Haram, and Ansaru, These are all Muslim organizations. But there are also a whole lot of criminal gangs in operation, and I take it the authorities aren’t always sure if particular incidents of violence are terrorist-related or gang-related. Nigeria is the world’s sixth-most populous country.  It has more than 250 ethnic groups, with varying languages and customs. Who knows who is targeting whom?

Juan Cole:

Ironically, the strike was fully supported by the Muslim president of Nigeria, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and coordinated with the federal military. Nigeria’s Daily Post is more positive about the operation than most US newspapers. It says that US naval vessels in the Gulf of Guinea launched 16 guided MQ-9 Reaper missiles at “two major Islamic State ISIS terrorist enclaves located within the Bauni Forest axis of Tangaza Local Government Area, Sokoto State.”

So Trump’s attempt to configure the action as a Christian strike in defense of Christians (for his Evangelical base) is a stretch. He seems actually to have worked hand in glove with Tinibu and the Nigerian Muslim elite to hit a mutual problem. Although parts of Nigeria, especially the northeast, are poor and conflict-ridden, there is no evidence that Christians suffer worse from this violence than Muslims — people from both communities have been kidnapped, brutalized, and killed by forces such as Boko Haram.

That’s what I’m seeing from other sources. Whatever is going on in Nigeria is not a simple Muslims-versus-Christians dichotomy. It’s more complicated. Never mind that Trump had no authorization whatsoever to bomb Nigeria. Nothing happening there threatens the United States. He just did this to score points with the White evangelicals. Who are less than 15 percent of the U.S. population, btw.  See also Breaking down U.S. strikes on ISIS in Nigeria and the complicated conflict there at PBS.

Also, Trump has decided that since “affordability” is a fake word, or something, the midterms will be about “pricing.” I don’t think that’s going to help him much.

You’ve probably also heard that the MAGA movement is fracturing. There was a particularly good analysis of the current state of MAGA at the New York Times — The Strange Death of Make America Great Again by Matthew Walther. It’s good enough that I’m burning my last gift link for the month. Walther proposes that “Coalitions organized around symbolic enmities and ideological absolutes rather than shared material interests are prone to sudden collapse.”

… MAGA’s internal contradictions can no longer be ignored. The movement that had promised an end to foreign adventurism has found itself torn between an alliance of ideological noninterventionists and realists and a hawkish national security establishment. Trumpism promised a revival of domestic manufacturing, yet neither the president nor his advisers have decided whether this means tariffs, industrial policy, reviving organized labor, environmental deregulation or mere nostalgia. MAGA also promised immigration reform but has oscillated between showboating deportations and a deference to pro-visa allies in Big Tech and corporate agriculture. At the same time,  American support for Israel has become a contested issue on the right for the first time in decades. Some opponents have been accused of antisemitism; others simply announce it. …

… This problem extends to Mr. Trump himself. No postwar political movement has been more closely bound up in the fortunes of its founder than MAGA is. Yet during the recent controversies, Mr. Trump’s own views have been neither heeded nor even earnestly solicited. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he has begun to recede from the movement he created.

Is MAGA sustainable without Trump? MAGA was never a serious political movement. It is more of social/cultural phenomenon, a movement of people estranged from multiculturalism, liberal values, and the 21st century in general. .

MAGA’s internal culture has always rewarded theatrical confrontation over achievement. Boorishness commands attention, and boors mistake attention for leverage. Pseudo-martyrdom becomes an end in itself. Loyalty tests proliferate. Those who counsel de-escalation find themselves subject to denunciation; prudential disagreement is allowed to provide cover for rank bigotry. Partisans celebrate one another for exacerbating tensions even when exacerbation forecloses coalition building.

There is also a related problem: The Trumpist movement has generated a lunatic array of semiautonomous online subcultures that are largely indifferent to strategic considerations and immune from political consequences while still exercising influence over actors whose decisions are not so immune.

Without a strong personality to rally around, to tell them who to hate this week, they have no direction. And Trump is fading. Had he lived, maybe Charlie Kirk could have been the new MAGA Daddy for at least part of the movement. But I don’t see J.D. Vance or Tucker Carlson or Ben Shapiro or Nick Fuentes or any other semi-leaders of MAGA turning into The One. More likely MAGA, whatever it is, will just fracture. Even Jim Geraghty, a long-time Trump apologist who writes for the Washington Post, called the recent Turning Point conference A conference of clowns; “Wrestlemania with podcasters.”

See also Cracks have emerged in the Maga coalition by Moira Donegan at The Guardian.

This is one of those “where do we start?” days. So let’s start with Trump unveils a new class of Navy battleship named after himself at WaPo.

Trump, speaking alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Navy Secretary John Phelan at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, said the new warships will have “guns and missiles at the highest level,” along with hypersonic weapons, electric rail guns and lasers. The first battleship, to be called the USS Defiant, will be part of a broader effort to build a modern “Golden Fleet” of warships, Trump said, indicating that he will play a leading role in the program.

“The U.S. Navy will lead the design of these ships along with me, because I’m a really aesthetic person,” Trump said.

The Navy said in a news release after Trump’s announcement that the vessel “will be the most lethal surface combatant ever constructed” and triple the size of a current Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, which is about 505 feet long and weighs about 9,000 tons. That would be smaller than existing aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships, vessels that commonly carry Marines at sea.

At the last minute 60 Minutes pulled a segment covering the experiences of detainees at CECOT in El Salvador. This was done by Bari Weiss, the CBS News editor in chief. She wanted to avoid controversy, she said. It blew up in her face.

Weiss said the segment was flawed because it didn’t present the administration’s point of view. That’s largely because the administration failed to respond to 60 Minutes’ requests for comments. Sometimes silence is a response. “A free press isn’t free if stories get shelved just because the powerful won’t talk,” Congressman Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said. I rarely watch CBS News, but it’s sad that the network of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite has come to this.

There was commentary when Weiss was named to the position that she lacked experience in the news side of the business. She’s always been on the opinion/editorial side. I hope she gets canned soon. But the larger issue has to do with what political pressure is doing to the news business. And what’s behind that is mergers and media monopolies.

For years the FCC enacted regulations to make sure news consumers had access to sources from a variety of companies. But Trump’s FCC chair has thrown that out the window. Now there is a raging battle going on over which right-wing interest is going to end up with a digital media monopoly. And right now CBS and CNN are being sacrificed to Trump, says Franklin Foer at The Atlantic.

The fate of Warner Bros. Discovery is no longer a regulatory matter. It is a medieval tournament, in which the king invites rival bidders to compete for his approval. To acquire the media company, the aspirants—Paramount and Netflix—will have to offer a sacrifice: Whoever can damage CNN the most stands to walk away with the prize.

This is one of those moments in Donald Trump’s presidency when an event that would otherwise be recognized as a death knell for democracy somehow fails to elicit the outrage it deserves. Warner Bros. Discovery owns CNN, whose coverage Trump views as hostile to his administration. So he is abusing the government’s merger-approval power in order to insist that the next owner of the venerable outlet mold its journalism to his liking.

He does a good job of explaining why changing technologies have made the news business far more fragile and more susceptible to authoritarian manipulation than they were back when Katharine Graham decided to publish the Pentagon Papers. That kind of expose may not happen again in the U.S. The press won’t be free to do it.

You’ve probably heard that GOP congresswoman Elise Stefanik has announced she is not running for re-election. As far as I’ve heard, she does plan to serve out her term. But even more surprising, she’s dropped her plans to run for New York governor next year. I understand she was polling way ahead of the only other Republican in the race. Although I think her chances for getting elected were remote. Gov. Hochul is not wildly popular, but I don’t think any Republican has a prayer in a statewide race in New York right now.

What’s more interesting to me is what happened just before this decision. It has to do with the recent shooting at Brown University. The Usual Bleepheads on the Right (led by Laura Loomer and Jack Posobiec) had made up their minds that the shooter was a particular Brown U. Palestinian undergrad whose name I will not repeat because it’s been spread around the Web enough already. According to rightie rumors, the perp had stormed into the classroom screaming  “Allahu Akbar” before shooting. Variations of this rumor insisted that the primary target was not the physics professor who was slain but Ella Cook, a sophomore from Alabama, who was vice president of the campus Republican Club. WaPo:

“She was a Republican leader in the Republican Party at Brown University,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) said Tuesday during an appearance on conservative influencer Benny Johnson’s podcast. “You can’t tell me she wasn’t targeted. I would hate to miss that opportunity to say that because the consequences here are very, very fishy. But at the end of the day … nobody really pays a price for this.”

Cook was one of the two students who died. The other student who died was Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, a freshman who had hoped to become a brain surgeon. For some reason the Right didn’t generate any rumors about why he was targeted, too.

Now, what does this have to do with Stefanik? First off, her gubernatorial campaign manager, Alex de Grasse, was all over X attacking the innocent Palestinian student and repeating the rumors. He and others also accused the president of Brown U. of “protecting” the Palestinian student (that part is probably true). And then Stefanik herself got in on it. 

“It seems very clear to me that the president of @BrownUniversity will need to be hauled in front of Congress for a hearing under oath,” Stefanik posted on X on December 17. She got a book deal the last time she interrogated Ivy League presidents under oath.

And then law enforcement identified the alleged shooter as Claudio Neves Valente, originally of Portugal and a former Brown U. physics student. The motive for the shooting appears to have been an an entirely personal one to Valente, who was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Did Stefanik feel a twinge of remorse, or at least embarrassment? Maybe. It’s also the case that a poll came out recently showing Stefanik ten points behind Gov. Hochul. Stefanik’s district is way up north, bordering Canada, and is mostly rural. She’s been in the House since 2015 and has won all her re-election campaigns easily. In 2024 the district went for Trump by 60%. I’ve read that Stefanik, a Harvard grad, originally positioned herself as a moderate. And then she moved Right. Now she is the fourth-ranking Republican in the House and considered a loyal Trump minion, although people who know her personally say she’s not necessarily a MAGA True Believer.

You may remember that Trump had appointed her to be ambassador to the UN, and then after she’d said her goodbyes to the House he un-appointed her. She accepted this with good grace. She was promised something else big later on. But recently, the New York Times reports, Trump refused to endorse her for governor over her most likely primary opponent, who hadn’t even formally entered the race yet. That may have been the final straw, the Times said. And it illustrates once again that with Trump, loyalty goes only one way. Stefanik is planning to spend more time with her family now.

Update: Politico: “President Donald Trump endorsed Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman in the New York gubernatorial race, a day after Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) ended her bid.”

“Bruce is MAGA all the way, and has been with me from the very beginning,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social Saturday. “Bruce Blakeman is a FANTASTIC guy, will win the big November Election and, without hesitation, has my Complete and Total Endorsement for Governor of the ONCE GREAT STATE OF NEW YORK (IT CAN BE GREAT AGAIN!). BRUCE BLAKEMAN WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!”

Nassau County is western Long Island. All I know about Blakeman is that he wants to ban trans women from sports and fought mask and vaccine mandates during the Covid pandemic. A wackadoo, in other words.

I’ve not been to Stefanik’s district and can’t say how politics works there. Whether any Democrat has a chance of taking her seat next year I do not know.

There’s one other factor that might have discouraged Stefanik. The few Republican women in Congress seem to be bailing at a faster rate than men. Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) has just announced she is retiring after a single term. Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa is retiring. Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee is running for governor. Rep Nancy Mace of South Carolina is running for governor. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia isn’t even staying for her full term. There are a few others.  I’ve heard that part of the problem is that these women are tired of being treated as second-class legislators by Republican men, who are not exactly woke.

Update: Paul Kane reports in WaPo Republican women shrinking their ranks in Congress.

“There’s a lot of weak Republican men, and they’re more afraid of strong Republican women. So they always try to marginalize the strong Republican women,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) told The Washington Post’s Kadia Goba in an October interview.

In other news: Trump plans to meet with health insurance executives soon, and he will tell them they have to lower their premium prices.

“I’m going to call in the insurance companies that are making so much money, and they have to make less, a lot less,” Trump said during an Oval Office announcement on drug pricing. “I’m going to see if they get their price down, to put it very bluntly. And I think that is a very big statement.” 

Trump said the meeting could take place in Florida, where he will spend the next two weeks, or at the White House the first week of 2026. He said he came up with the idea on the spot. 

Shares of major health insurers like UnitedHealth Group Inc., Cigna Group and Humana Inc. plummeted after Trump’s remarks.  

At the same event, Trump heaped praise on the drug company CEOs who have made deals with the administration to lower costs for Medicare recipients.  

In the face of tariff threats from the White House, 14 drug companies have publicly reached agreements with the White House in exchange for tariff reprieve. 

The tariff threat won’t work on the insurance guys, of course,  And who else remembers that Medicare drug price negotiation was made possible by Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act? Thanks, Joe Biden!

I didn’t expect the DoJ to fully comply with the deadline set by Congress to release all the Epstein files. I did expect them to have a better excuse than “we aren’t ready.” Trump’s girl Pam seems to have interpreted the deadline as a suggestion to maybe begin releasing a few things, and the rest will follow whenever. She even admitted in her press release that what was released today was mostly stuff that had already been leaked.

Pam says it’s Kash Patel’s fault she isn’t releasing more stuff.

Attorney General Bondi requested the full and complete files related to Jeffrey Epstein. In response, the Department received approximately 200 pages of documents, however, the Attorney General was later informed of thousands of pages of documents related to the investigation and indictment of Epstein that were not previously disclosed. The Attorney General has requested the FBI deliver the remaining documents to the Department by 8:00 AM on February 28 and has tasked FBI Director Kash Patel with investigating why the request for all documents was not followed.

Sure, Pam, whatever. This FBI page — the link came up in a news feed — contains links to what seem to be random Epstein-related records and documents, but the few I glanced at were redacted up the wazoo. Here’s a random sample:

This appears to be about somebody making a chart. it’s hard to tell.

Dems in Congress have vowed to pursue all legal options to force the DoJ to comply with the law, but there may not be any legal options. They can file a lawsuit, and a court may order the DoJ to comply, and then what?

You’ve probably heard that Trump has arranged to have the Kennedy Center renamed the Trump Kennedy Center, and that name has already been added to the center facade. The Kennedy family minus RFK the Lesser is not happy. See also Bill Kristol, who compares Trump to Caligula.