Sunday, January 04, 2026

Trump Is An Unreliable Narrator

Delcy Rodríguez and the core of the regime’s leadership are negotiating with the United States as we speak. This is not a sudden pivot. It is the result of a conclusion reached in Washington over months: the U.S. does not believe that María Corina Machado and the opposition have the operational capacity to seize power in Venezuela because they do not control, or meaningfully fracture, the military. If they did, power would have shifted immediately after the 2024 presidential election. It did not.

For a long period, U.S. officials, including Marco Rubio, were in constant communication with Machado and her team. They were asked repeatedly for proof of a concrete plan, not just to win power symbolically, but to retain it in practice: chain of command, military alignment, institutional control, day-after governance. The answers were consistently evasive, justified by security concerns, but never substantiated. At that point, from the U.S. government’s perspective, the opposition ceased to look like a viable transition mechanism and began to look like a political wager with no enforcement arm.

The plan now on the table is for Delcy Rodríguez to stabilize the country with U.S. backing and then call for general elections. This is not framed as an endorsement of the regime, but as a containment and transition strategy. Washington is explicit about one thing: this is not a partnership of equals. The United States is running the process, the lines are being managed through Rubio, and the leverage is entirely asymmetric. Delcy is the instrument, not the center of gravity.

U.S. officials also assess that Delcy’s harsh public rhetoric today was aimed inward, at the chavista base, not outward. That messaging is understood as domestic signaling. Nevertheless, as of now, negotiations with the United States are ongoing as we speak.
Somebody needs to tell Trump…
In a telephone interview this morning with The Atlantic, President Donald J. Trump issued a threat against Venezuela’s Interim President Delcy Rodríguez, saying that, “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro,” adding that he would not stand for Rodríguez’s “defiant rejection” of military intervention by the United States.

Additionally, during the interview, President Trump reaffirmed that Venezuela may not be the last country subject to American intervention, or even that it would remain isolated to Latin America, clearly stating, “We do need Greenland, absolutely,” while describing the island which is a part of Denmark, a close-ally and member of NATO, as “surrounded by Russian and Chinese ships.”
And how it's going:
Himes: "I was delighted to hear that Tom Cotton, chairmen of the Senate Intel Committee, has been in regular contact with the administration. I've had zero outreach and no Democrat that I'm aware of has had any outreach whatsoever. So apparently we're now in a world where the legal obligation to keep Congress informed only applies to your party."
Clearly a wild exaggeration: Meanwhile, this is all perfectly legal: I don’t think this is Trump playing three-dimensional electoral chess.
This is Trump playing Little Dictator. He thinks he’s finally equal to Putin, now.

But let’s not fixate on that….
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