Dear readers,
We hope you had a great holiday! Ben, Megan and I are back and there’s a lot of news for us to talk about.
We start with the arrest of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela and President Trump’s statement that we’ll be “running” the country now. That seems wrong — the Maduro regime is still in power, sans Maduro, and it’s unclear exactly what accommodation we can cajole them into without actually occupying the country. The president is fixated on getting American firms back in the business of extracting and refining Venezuelan oil and he might be satisfied with that even if the tyrants remain in power, but as Megan notes, this may be less of a prize than Trump thinks. Venezuela’s oil industry is badly decayed from decades under socialism, US firms will be reluctant to make capital investments when the US cannot really guarantee they won’t be expropriated later (since we don’t run Venezuela), and Venezuela’s dirty crude is hard to refine economically at a time of middling oil prices.
Next, we talk about the fraud scandal that brought down Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, how Democrats went a bit too far with the (correct) observation that too much “program integrity” isn’t always a good thing, and why exactly Walz became such a hate figure for Republicans — after having supposedly been the “code talker” who could win back rural voters who grew disaffected from the Democratic Party.
We discuss Megan’s case that arts professionals should be wary of boycotting the “Trump Kennedy Center” — while Ben and I argue that this is exactly the sort of low-stakes issue where symbolic anti-Trump politics are healthy and welcome — and I give an on-the-ground dispatch from communist-occupied New York, one week into Zohran Mamdani’s administration.
We hope you enjoy the episode,
Josh
