Trump vs. The World

In the early morning of Saturday, January 3rd, 2026, the first sign that something unusual was going on in Washington DC came from a surprising source, pizzeras. Open- source intelligence trackers noted a sudden spike in late night pizza orders had occurred near the Pentagon, and this can be used as an informal indicator to predict major events, crises, or busy work days for defense personnel. Shortly before 11 p.m. the prior evening, President Donald Trump had issued the final command from his Mara Lago club.

Good luck and Godspeed. Within hours, the leader of Venezuela, Nicholas Maduro, was snatched from his compound in Caracus by a strike force of over 150 aircraft launched from 20 different locations. The assault, dubbed Operation Absolute Resolve, was a textbook display of modern military prowess. While US Space Force and Cyber Command effectively turned off the lights of Caracus and disabled the nation's air defenses, Delta Force operators were deployed via low-flying nightstalker helicopters.

Maduro, reportedly caught as he tried to reach a steel safe room, was soon photographed blindfolded and bound aboard the USS Eoima. By late Saturday, he had been delivered to a New York jail to face federal charges of naroterrorism. There is a certain irony in the administration sudden enthusiasm for importing Venezuelans, especially ones that it claims were involved in drug gangs. Maduro may be the only Venezuelan in New York hoping that ICE follows through on its promise of immediate removal back to his home country.

Maduro is being detained at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, joining a legendary roster of high-profile residents, including the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein and the rapper Shaun Diddy Combmes. I imagine Maduro and Diddy are comparing notes in the exercise yard over how much oil the US government took from them. The military managed to hit all their targets, but unfortunately the politicians couldn't even manage to hit the same talking points. Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially tried to frame the raid as primarily a law enforcement operation, but the scale of the deployment, which included an aircraft carrier and 14,000 troops, wasn't exactly a traffic stop.

From Mara Lago, the president was far more blunt about what had just happened, announcing that the United States would now run and be in charge of Venezuela. This declaration left allies and observers surprised. Critics argued that while the raid effectively ...