Ariana Aspuru | Vox

Did Trump actually help Venezuela?

2026-05-07T16:14:43-04:00

Demonstrators in Caracas, Venezuela, on January 29, 2026. | Javier Campos/Picture Alliance via Getty Images

It’s been four months since the US captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and brought him to the US to stand trial. His vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, is now in charge, but the Trump administration has been largely silent on what comes next for the country.

In the meantime, Missy Ryan, a staff writer at the Atlantic, tells Vox that some polling suggests that a significant number of Venezuelans now feel that their country is better off — or at least no worse — than it was pre-US intervention.

It’s a somewhat surprising finding, given the many less optimistic predictions in the aftermath of Maduro’s removal. To explain what’s going on, Ryan spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about the surprising status of the US operation and what some positive outlook from inside the country tells us about what comes next.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

You published a piece in the Atlantic titled “Venezuela Seems to Be Going … Well?” Why did you call the piece that?

The headline of the piece really captured the surprise that many of my colleagues and many of the Latin America experts that I spoke with for the piece felt three months on from the ouster of Maduro, which was that, contrary to a lot of expectations about the potential destabilization of Venezuela, the potential for an Iraq-style armed insurgency or fracturing of the state, things were pretty quiet in Venezuela.

And in fact, there had been a relatively positive response from the Venezuelan public. In the limited polling that’s been done since January 3, they have expressed cautious optimism or at least a willingness to let some time pass before making a judgment about the overall net analysis of ‘are things better or worse for us in Venezuela?’

And you referenced polling, so this isn’t just people in the media saying things got better in Venezuela. Venezuelans broadly feel that way.

Correct. And I think that that should be the ultimate arbiter. It doesn’t matter as much what analysts in Washington or Miami think. It’s about the Venezuelans in Venezuela and then obviously the exile community throughout the world who are deeply invested in what happens there [and] can potentially return and help grow the economy, rebuild Venezuelan society after a very traumatic period of repression and economic deterioration.

The sense was people were willing to give Delcy Rodríguez, the interim president, some time and the interim authority some time to show if they could deliver on the kind of bread and butter issues that Venezuelans seem most focused on. There are starting to be some improvements there in terms of the economy. It hasn’t really affected prices yet, but certainly investment is starting to slowly materialize, [though] definitely far short of what President Trump had envisioned and promised when we heard from him in early January.

But with oil prices, where they are and the lifting of sanctions, the resource-dependent Venezuelan economy stands to grow if only from a statistical rebound perspective. And hopefully that’ll really begin to trickle down into Venezuelans’ pockets. The question of political freedoms is going to be very important, but it didn’t seem like it was the primary concern of Venezuelans in the polling that has been done so far.

One of the biggest differences is obviously just that there’s someone different in charge. Is Delcy Rodríguez making Venezuela a freer country than Maduro did?

That is a complicated question. There have been a number of metrics that you can talk about.

When the ouster happened in January, the Trump administration talked about it as a simple law enforcement operation that was executed by the military, which is incredibly unorthodox. They were talking about three phases, and this is what Rubio and the people at the State Department were describing as three phases that they saw for Venezuela: stabilization, recovery, and then transition.

As part of that recovery stage, they have leaned on the Rodríguez interim authorities to take certain steps. They focused on the release of political prisoners [and] they backed away from the same level of arbitrary arrests that had occurred under Maduro. There have been some limited, mostly economically focused protests or demonstrations that have happened without the same kind of crackdown that you would’ve expected under Maduro.

These have only been limited steps; there’s so much more that hasn’t actually occurred yet, and that includes the full release of political prisoners.

Remember that although Venezuelan oil exports are really starting to increase and the revenues are really starting to increase, that money goes into a US Treasury-controlled account in the United States, and Delcy Rodríguez has to submit a spending plan to the US government and in order to get that money back to Venezuela to pay salaries, to provide public services. So it is not an autonomous sovereign situation — far from it.

One of the biggest criticisms of this intervention in Venezuela, against President Trump, has been, “You didn’t even change the regime. You just put Maduro’s number two in power.” There’s no commitment to elections, at least in a concrete form. Do we have any idea now that it’s been four months, when we might see elections?

There has been no official statement either from the interim authorities in Venezuela or the US government, but what I’m told privately is that they are planning for elections to occur by the second half of 2027.

However, there is a lot that needs to happen before then, and we haven’t seen any public steps to advance those steps, which would include reform of the National Electoral Commission, an update to the registry of Venezuelans who have all been displaced all throughout Venezuela, and then of course, the question of millions of Venezuelans who are now outside the country who would need to [take] part in any sort of credible election.

The lack of a plan that has been made public raises questions about the level of commitment that the US administration has to the democracy piece of this. Their argument has been, ‘Look, if we jumped right into elections that really would have intensified the potential for civil conflict.’ And so their bet is on slow incremental change.

The fact that elections might be one, two years away only lends more credibility to this argument that this wasn’t about freedom for the Venezuelan people, this was about oil. Now that we’re months out, does it feel like this was just about oil? Is that a fair criticism to lob at the Trump administration?

It definitely was about oil, primarily for President Trump. He mentioned oil 19 times in the press conference that he gave the morning after the Maduro raid. There have been some more modest deals that have occurred, but the kind of big production deals in the oil sector have not yet materialized. And there’s a lot of structural obstacles that need to be overcome.

Primary among them is the overall trajectory of Venezuela and skepticism among oil investors to jump back in when they don’t know who’s going to be ruling the country in a year. Is it going to go back to a socialist model where they’re going to appropriate things?

Again, as Exxon famously said, they had their assets taken not once, but twice, and [Venezuela] was uninvestible. But also, what is this country going to look like in two years, five years, 10 years?

Can Mayor Mamdani get Democrats back on track?

2026-04-24T14:25:03-04:00

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani interacts with children during a visit to Learning Through Play Pre-K on April 18, 2026, in the Bronx. | Angelina Katsanis/Pool/Getty Images

After a historic victory last fall, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani marked 100 days in office earlier this month.

So far, it’s going pretty well: His approval numbers are broadly positive, he’s begun to deliver on some of his key campaign promises, and he weathered his first major challenge as mayor after NYC endured two serious winter storms earlier in the year. (He’s also successfully charmed President Donald Trump not once but twice.)

Mamdani’s track record also suggests some questions for the Democratic Party as it heads into the midterms. Among them: Is Mamdani’s success a glimpse into the party’s future? How much of it can be replicated outside of New York or on a national stage? And how much is the party willing to listen?

Ben Rhodes was a deputy national security adviser and close aide to Barack Obama. He’s now an author and co-host of Pod Save the World, a podcast about world news and foreign policy. Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram, asked Rhodes what lessons the party can draw from Mamdani and which candidates are sticking out as possible Mamdani-esque successes.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

You’re here to help us understand how [Mamdani]’s being perceived within the party. How’s he being spoken about inside that Democratic tent?

It’s interesting because there are two cleavages in the Democratic Party. One is between left and center. But the other is more about body language. Do you understand what is happening? Do you understand the scale of the danger that Trump poses? Do you understand the scale of the disgust that people feel for the Democratic Party and politics in general? Do you understand the need for generational change?

I think that Mamdani has excited just about everybody that is either on the progressive end of the spectrum in the party or who’s just eager for newer, younger faces who understand what’s going on, who do politics in a different way, who don’t feel like repurposing of the old talking points for the umpteenth time. And so there’s a bunch of people that see him as an opportunity, someone to follow, someone to emulate.

Then I think there’s Democrats that are terrified of Zohran Mamdani because of all those things. Let’s just take Chuck Schumer, who’s the stand-in for a lot of the Democratic establishment that people are frustrated with — who didn’t even endorse Mamdani, even though he is from New York. Obviously he’s ambivalent about Mamdani’s politics on Israel and Palestine. He’s reluctant to let go of the reins to a new generation in the same way that we saw Joe Biden be reluctant in his time in office. He’s internalized these fights between the left wing of the party and the center and is worried about the ascendancy of a democratic socialist and losing control of an agenda that is usually dictated from Washington, not the other way around.

I think Mamdani has been — I don’t want to say polarizing, because the Schumers of the world can’t really speak out against Mamdani anymore because he’s so popular at this point. But I do think that there are people that are ambivalent and then there are people that are excited and the number of excited people is the growing quotient.

Looking at him next to a figure like Schumer, the contrast is so apparent in two buckets: One, he’s a much better communicator. And then two, he seems to be way better at dealing with the president.

Are these the two buckets that Democrats who are in office or maybe even aspiring to national office are most focused on?

Those are two of the primary buckets. There’s obviously questions about what does the Democratic Party stand for on certain issues.

But the standing up to the president, let’s just start there. Mamdani has proven what a lot of Democrats suspect, which is that our leadership has completely failed to figure out a way to deal with Trump. They’re either railing against him in public and not able to do anything in private, or they’re trying to cut a deal in the old-fashioned way.

“He’s singularly talented and he has that kind of uniqueness that Obama had.”

That has not worked, and so I think Mamdani shows, “Hey, you can be smart about this and be completely uncompromising and Trump will actually respect you more.”

On the communication side, it helps that Mamdani is a charismatic politician. It helps that he’s a very likable politician. He speaks like a normal human being. And the Chuck Schumers of the world do not. It’s always some kind of seemingly poll-tested phrase about the middle class that is designed to offend the least people and therefore says absolutely nothing, whereas Mamdani just sounds like a normal guy, like an authentic person who’s just telling you what he believes, and I think people trust that he’s telling you what he believes.

People have heard him take stances that were controversial. I actually think in this case, his positions on Gaza helped validate his positions on affordability because people are like, “Well, this guy’s willing to go out and pick some really big fights and he’s not going to budge. I’m more likely to believe that he’s going to fight to lower my rent because he has principles that he’ll stand on.” And people don’t trust a lot of the mainstream Democratic politicians that they will actually be there when the fight comes.

You worked for a guy who was singular. Is Mamdani sort of singular? I mean, he’s 34 years old. He’s a former rapper. He loves sports, he loves culture. He understands social media. You can’t implant that into a Schumer or even Schumer’s team, necessarily.

He’s singularly talented and he has that kind of uniqueness that Obama had. His background is different. He presents differently. Now, I actually think that where it can be replicated, even if you don’t have Mamdani’s singular talents or background, is the authenticity and generational point: Younger people that just sound normal and look normal.

If you look in the Democratic Senate primaries, some people have overperformed often against the party establishment’s choices: Graham Platner in Maine. Graham Platner sounds like a normal guy and he’s 30 years younger than Janet Mills, the governor of Maine, who’s the preferred candidate of Chuck Schumer and the Democratic campaign committee. If you look at Michigan: Haley Stevens, a very conventional politician, is the preferred candidate of the DSCC. There are two candidates, Mallory McMorrow and Abdul El-Sayed, who present as more normal.

And this isn’t a left-center thing. This is just a younger and more authentic kind of politician.

As someone who worked for the previous generational politician in the Democratic Party, does it bum you out that [Mamdani] being born in another country might limit how much of a generational politician he gets to become?

It crossed my mind. I will say, it does make him an interesting figure. We’ve never had a figure, at least in my recent memory, who could end up being such a prominent politician at such a young age with a ceiling that is lower than the presidency. And what he chooses to do with that is quite interesting.

Is it just, “I’m a New York City guy and that’s what I’m doing. I’m running through the tape as mayor, and then I want to work in the city?” Is it “I become a New York state politician?” Is it “I become some kind of national figure separate from being president?”

It does in some ways free him of a burden in some respect. Because you’ve seen this with AOC, with any young politician. I mean, they’re already talking about [Sen. Jon] Ossoff in Georgia or if [state Rep. James] Talarico wins [in Texas], they’ll start talking about the presidency the next day.

It frees him up where every move that he makes isn’t like, “Is he positioning himself to one day run for president?” And so in that way, something is lost, but something is potentially gained too.

Pete Hegseth preaches “maximum lethality.” What has that meant in Iran?

2026-04-09T15:53:56-04:00

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks about the conflict in Iran from the White House briefing room on April 6, 2026. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Even before the Trump administration went to war with Iran, it was talking differently about its approach to combat.

President Donald Trump relabeled the Department of Defense to something more in line with his values: the Department of War. His Defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, promised to deliver on a philosophy of “maximum lethality.” For many years, Hegseth has wanted to unleash an American warrior and fight the enemy, no holds barred. (In 2024, Hegseth authored a book titled The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free.)

After notching successes in Venezuela and in last year’s limited strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, Hegseth and Trump began the Iran war confident and with a seemingly unbridled willingness to inflict damage. Trump’s post earlier this week threatening to wipe out a whole civilization may have resulted in a temporary ceasefire, but it seems like that strategy isn’t going anywhere.

Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with the New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells about how that philosophy has been realized in Hegseth and Trump’s first big war. Wallace-Wells explains Hegseth’s need to unleash that warrior ethos at every opportunity and how it might be driving the US’s next step with Iran.

How is [Hegseth] executing this concept of his?

I’d say a couple of things. The first is, it’s interesting to note, in all of the reporting that we’ve seen from many different outlets, that Hegseth is the only person who’s in the president’s circle who seems as optimistic as Trump does about the progress of the war and the possibilities of the war.

You see [Vice President] JD Vance distancing himself very actively from the war. You see [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio taking an ambivalent position. Gen. [Dan] Caine sees risks as well as possibilities. But Hegseth has been gung-ho the whole way.

His approach to the war, I think, has been that American lethality will deliver whatever the president wants. In the very first hours of the war, you have this massive bombing raid that kills [Iran’s Supreme Leader] Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and then President Trump comes out a few days later and says, in that raid, not only was Khamenei killed, but some of the other senior figures in the Iranian regime who we had hoped might succeed Khamenei [were killed]. Within a day of the war beginning we see 175 people killed in a school in southern Iran, presumably through a targeting error, though we’re still not totally sure exactly what happened there.

In both of these cases, you see a program of unleashed lethality. And I think you can see in both those cases that it undermines the aims of the United States and the stated war aims of the president, both in eliminating some of the potential replacements in the case of the initial bombing, and then also in making it just a little harder to imagine the Iranian public getting behind the kind of uprising that President Trump has said he wants to trigger.

How much of his approach do we think is coming from his own belief in this concept of maximum lethality, and how much of it is so many in his Cabinet just wanting to please the president?

It’s interesting to think of Vance, Rubio, and Hegseth as each representing one idea of the president. Vance represents the sort of nationalism of the president. Rubio represents maybe a more traditional Republican transactional approach. And Hegseth just represents the full military maximalism. And he has become more influential because he has been the one who has, I think, successfully seen what the president wants to do in Iran and made himself the spokesman and enabler of that.

I do think that there’s a pretty good chance that this doesn’t turn out so well in public opinion and the progress of the war. I’m not sure that it’s been a very savvy long-term play for Hegseth, but I think we should remember that Hegseth did not have a political base or role in the world before Trump tapped him. He had never been a senior military commander. He’d served in the military as a younger man. He was the weekend co-host of Fox and Friends.

He owes his position in the world to President Trump. He’s, according to public opinion, now deeply unpopular, as is the war. If we’re thinking just in pure personal terms, it’s not crazy for him to take a shot and try to position himself as the maximalist face of this war. But I do think that there may be real costs for the rest of us.

Another thing that feels significant to this conversation and feels like maybe a companion piece to this idea of maximum lethality is Pete Hegseth is really tying this war [together with] his approach to God.

I would say to a Christian God, even more specifically. He’s specifically asked during military press conferences for people to pray to Jesus Christ on the troops’ behalf.

Another element that matters here is, he’s referred to the Iranian regime as apocalyptic, and together with delivering prayers from the podium where he’s giving technical updates on the progress of the war, it does give an atmosphere of holy war to the whole operation.

Pete’s whole thing is maximum lethality. The president seemed to go even further with his post, the whole world was on edge, and then we got a ceasefire out of it, however tentative it may be. Does that prove something about this concept of maximum lethality as a viable foreign policy?

If you threaten nuclear war, you can spook some people. I think that that’s pretty intuitive, but I don’t know that that really proves anything in terms of foreign policy. We’re looking at a situation where Iran seems like they’re likely to have full control of the Strait of Hormuz, where the regime is still in control, where the United States has alienated a huge number of its own allies around the world with its willingness to play brinksmanship.

In the narrow sense of, Trump had managed to get himself into a real trap and then by threatening enormous lethality, to use Hegseth’s word, he was able to maneuver out — I guess it worked, but it’s really hard for me to say that in any bigger-picture sense this was effective. I have to look back at this whole month and just say, what was this all for? It feels to me like a whole lot of fury and bombs and death, and it’s really hard for me to see a lot that’s come from it.

These coders want AI to take their jobs

2026-03-20T13:42:41-04:00

Code generated by a prompt on Google AI Studio. | Sean Rameswaram/Vox

Just over a year ago, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy coined the term “vibe coding” and it’s exactly what it sounds like. In a post on X, he wrote that it’s where “you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.”

Since then, coders from all backgrounds — and folks with zero experience — have tapped into their vibes to make apps and websites. Vibe coding platforms, powered by AI models like Claude, Codex, and Gemini, have gained traction as a way to give normies a toolset to code whatever they want, without writing a single line of script.

Tech behemoths like Amazon and bustling Silicon Valley startups even have their coders using it. It’s doing the grunt work for now, but they say it’s opening up a whole new world of possibilities. One possibility: It takes their job. But it’s a trade-off that some of them are willing to make.

Clive Thompson wrote a book about this and spent time with over 70 vibe coders to understand how the technology is upending the industry and if this is the end of computer programming as we know it. On Today, Explained, co-host Sean Rameswaram dug into these questions and even vibe coded a simple website while doing it.

You spent a lot of time hanging out with coders who were vibe coding. And from what I could tell from reading your piece in the New York Times Magazine is that they’re not vibe coding the same way that I was vibe coding.

No, they’re doing something that’s a lot more aggressive and ambitious. What they’re doing is they are using multiple agents, kind of swarms of agents at the same time. If they’re using Claude Code or Codex or Gemini they will have it wired into their laptops. Those agents can create files, destroy files. They can take code that’s been written, they can push it live into production in the world.

And they will also work little teams. So when they want to create a piece of software, sometimes they’ll write, like, a spec, like a page saying, “Here’s what I want to do.” Or sometimes they’ll just talk to the agent. But they’ll be kind of talking to the lead agent that’s going to be the head of the team and they’ll talk to it and say, “Here’s what I want you to do. What do you think? Give me your ideas.” And they’ll sort of go back and forth generating a plan. And when they’re confident that this top agent understands what is to be done, they’ll say, “All right. Go do it.”

And that one will spawn off several subagents. It will have one agent that’s writing code, another one that is testing the code. It’s quite wild to watch them do this. And sometimes if it does something wrong, they’ll have to yell at it. They’ll be like, “This is unacceptable.” Or they’ll say things like, you know, “This is embarrassing. You’re humiliating me.”

And I said to him, “What’s up with that? Does that language improve the sort of output of these agents?” And he was like, “I couldn’t prove it. But generally we find that when we sort of reprimand them a little bit, they become a little more reliable.”

Can you help us understand just how much time, money, human labor is being saved by vibe coding at the level that you observed?

Yeah, it can be really significant. They’re most significant when someone is building something new from scratch. The startup founders, one- or two-person, three-person shops, they’re like, “I need to get to market fast. There might be 10 other people with this idea. I got to beat them.” It’s dizzying. Some of those people were telling me that they were working 20 times faster than they would on their own. Stuff that would normally have taken them a day now takes half an hour.

But at a very large and mature company like Amazon or Google, you’ve got billions of lines of existing code and if one little part of it stops working, that could cascade through everything. So those folks are definitely using the agents, but they are less likely to be pushing stuff rapidly out. They’re more likely to be looking carefully at it and putting it through what’s known as code review, where multiple humans look at it and go, “Oh, okay, does that work?” So for them, basically it’s like a 10 percent improvement in terms of the velocity of productivity of the engineers, how fast they go from having an idea to making it happen.

And what’s really interesting, and you may have discovered this too, in your vibe coding: a lot of engineers told me that it was even less about speed than about the ability to experiment with a bunch of ideas and see which one might really work.

In the before times, you’d have an idea for a feature. Are you really going to spend six weeks developing it just to discover that it’s not really what you thought it was going to be?

Now, well, let’s just do 10 different versions of that over the next week and let’s look at all of them and then we can pick the one we want. You might not necessarily have gone faster, but the feature that you’ve got is exactly the one you wanted and you know because you held it in your hands.

A lot of tech layoffs in the past few years, and now we’re talking about how vibe coding has dramatically overturned the norms in engineering. How are developers feeling about that?

Well, here’s the thing. So there is definitely a civil war insofar as there is the majority of people that I spoke to, and I reached out to a very wide array — I talked to 75 developers.

And I actively wanted to talk to ones that didn’t like AI because I wanted to know their feelings. It’s a minority of people that are really hotly opposed, but they’re very, very strongly opposed. They don’t like the fact that these are trained on stolen materials. They don’t like the fact that it uses tons of energy. They don’t like the fact that they think it’s going to de-skill [people].

Why do you think they’re not the majority, when this is so clearly going to replace so many of them and bypass all of their ethical, moral concerns and objections?

I think it’s because for a lot of developers it’s just such a delightful experience in the short term of going from everything being a slow slog to it being like, “Oh my God, all these ideas and things I wanted to do, I can now try them and do them.”

Because it’s fun, basically.

It’s enormously fun. The pleasure of coding used to be that there were a lot of these little wins when you got something working. Those little wins have gone away because you’re not doing that bug fixing, you’re not doing that line writing.

So the big wins are just coming in avalanches and it’s very intoxicating. Also, there are ones who essentially don’t think that those bad labor things are going to obtain. They think there’s a potential that more [jobs] will get created in areas that they have previously been unable to be created.

Give it five years for us. Does this harken the end of computer programming as we know it?

No, I would not go so far as to say that it ends in five years. I do think it becomes something very different potentially. I still think — everyone told me, and I believe — that you still need some understanding of the way a code base works to do the complicated things.

Weirdly, what you might see is something a little different, which is the explosion of code in areas where there is currently none. There’s a bazillion people out there that are code-adjacent. You work in accounting, you are a wizard at Excel, and you can import data if you’re given the ability now to have an agent say, “Okay, could you bring more data in?”

There is going to be this really weird world where there’s a lot of customized software for an audience of two, three people. We have thought of software historically as something that only exists if 10,000 people or a million people want it because it costs a lot of money to make it.

But if you can now start making it for next to nothing, you can start using it the way that we use Post-it notes. Put it all over the place. I need to jot this idea down. I’m going to make this happen. And maybe this software solves one problem for this afternoon and we never use it again. Software starts becoming almost disposable.

What economists got wrong about Trump’s tariffs

2026-02-26T18:18:43-05:00

A press conference by President Donald Trump on tariffs is displayed on a television as traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. | Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs last year had been supposed to change everything — as companies retaliated against new tariffs, economists predicted, prices would soar and the US economy would plunge into recession.

The Supreme Court recently declared those tariffs unconstitutional. As Trump scrambles to reimpose them, though, the news raised a question: Did economists get it wrong the first time around?

Ben Harris, the vice president and director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution and a former assistant Treasury secretary for economic policy in the Biden administration, says economists underestimated our complicated economic system.

“My guess is that if you told a hundred economists that the average tariff rate was going to jump from 3 percent to well over 20 percent, many would’ve predicted a recession,” Harris said. “And that was in fact not what we saw.”

On Today, Explained, he and co-host Noel King dig into the surprises from Trump’s tariff policy, what it illuminated about our own economy, and what happens next.

When President Trump was elected and it became clear that he planned on implementing tariffs, what were you hearing from responsible economists about what was going to happen to the American economy?

Many economists were caught by surprise. The average tariff rate in the first Trump administration went from about 1.5 percent to about 3 percent, which was a big proportional increase. But I think there was a bit of a failure of imagination by economists when it came to the second Trump administration, where post-“Liberation Day,” we saw that average rate jump well over 20 percent.

The second thing that caught economists by surprise was that the really sharp increase didn’t have the type of impact that we thought it would have. My guess is that if you told a hundred economists that the average tariff rate was going to jump from 3 percent to well over 20 percent, many would’ve predicted a recession. And that was in fact not what we saw.

Yeah, and it wasn’t just your guess, because I remember covering Liberation Day last year and it was something close to hysteria. But broadly, the American economy did not tank. What did happen?

We learned three big lessons about why this increase in tariffs did not tank the US economy.

The first lesson was that when the tariffs passed through to US consumers really matters. In the first Trump administration, you might remember that the president put in place a tariff on washing machines, which meant that every American consumer paid about $90 more for every washing machine that they bought. And that pass-through happened really quickly. And so the expectation was that the same speed of transmission would happen in a second Trump administration, and that in fact didn’t happen. And that may be because companies weren’t sure if the tariffs would stick and were waiting to see what happened, or maybe they thought that US consumers didn’t have the wealth and income to handle these tariffs all at once.

The second lesson that we learned is that it also matters what’s happening in the rest of the economy. And as you know, the president and Republicans in Congress passed this massive One Big Beautiful Bill [Act]. That bill had a lot of stimulus in it and so for a middle-class family, the extra taxes you were paying in tariffs was roughly offset by the extra tax benefit you were getting from the One Big Beautiful Bill.

The third lesson I think we learned was that the expected response from our trading partners isn’t always what we think. If I had told a bunch of economists at the beginning of 2025 that the tariff rate was going to shoot up as much as it did, I think we would’ve expected that our trading partners in Europe and in Asia and elsewhere around the world would react by putting in place additional tariffs on US exports. That’s exactly the opposite of what we saw, outside of China. We saw a lot of our trading partners racing to put together these trade frameworks rather than putting in place punitive measures against us.

Why was there not the retaliation we expected?

We’ll learn more after a few years. I think that our trading partners, like domestic economists, were caught off guard by the size of the increases and they didn’t really have plans in place to go ahead and put in place punitive measures.

Also, the United States has a massive export market, and this is something that President Trump recognized from the outset. We do have a fair amount of leverage over our trading partners. And so it just takes time for them to put in place alternatives to trading with the United States. I think that when 2026 closes, and if we get into 2027, we’ll probably see more punitive measures and more shifts in trading patterns away from the United States, if these tariffs stay in place.

We can sit here and say all day long that the American economy did not do badly last year or over the last 12 months. But we do know that Americans feel differently about the tariffs. Do we trace that to something bigger going wrong?

I think there are two big takeaways that I have from surveys of American consumers. The first is that people really hate inflation. And I learned this lesson during the Biden administration when I was serving as chief economist of the Treasury Department, where we had the unemployment rate at 3.5 percent. It was a record low, but people were still really frustrated with the economy because prices were higher. And that’s, I think, true today, where President Trump ran on a platform of lowering prices and inflation has stayed around 3 percent or a little bit less.

But the second thing is if you look at surveys of both Democrats and Republicans where they’re asked, “Why do we have higher prices?” — really high percentages of Democrats and even high percentages of Republicans attribute the higher prices to those tariffs, which is economically correct. So I think that American consumers are fairly astute and they’re also really frustrated with this policy.

Did we learn any lessons about the American economy from the Liberation Day tariffs in the past 12 months?

The big lesson about the American economy that we learned was that we are the largest economy in the world. We’re a well-diversified economy. It takes more than a temporary change in our trading policy to throw us into recession.

What happens next now that the tariffs are lifted? Should people expect that prices go down?

We’ll probably see prices stabilize, particularly if the president starts to remove some of the tariffs that have proven to be unpopular. It’s a real question as far as what the White House and the Republicans in Congress are going to do in advance of the midterms. Republicans in the House are obviously concerned about losing to Democrats and potentially even the Senate. Some people are speculating that you’ll see a bill coming out of Congress that will rebate some of the costs of tariffs directly to American households.

And we’re going to see a bunch of legal challenges to the tariffs that will determine exactly what happens moving forward. So you’ve heard of these Section 122 tariffs that the president announced after the Supreme Court decision. Those are universal tariffs of 15 percent. There will be a court ruling on whether or not he can use those. And there’s also a question as far as the rebates. And so, roughly $160 billion in tariffs have been illegally collected. Will those get rebated back to the multitude of companies that have gone ahead and filed for rebates?

The Supreme Court did the president a favor and limited his authority on tariffs. Tariffs outside of a few select circumstances are unequivocally bad for American consumers and they’re unequivocally bad for US businesses. But in general, I think that we should not expect a recession in the near term, and we should rest assured that we have a great number of resources and we’ll continue to grow at a moderate rate.

How exorbitant concert ticket prices became so normal

2026-02-23T18:59:53-05:00

Harry Styles performs on stage during The BRIT Awards 2023 in London, England. Styles’ concert tickets have been going for over $1,000. | Dave J. Hogan/Getty Images

The fans are fighting again. Followers of artists like Harry Styles and BTS reported seeing ticket prices well over $1,000 for seats — and that’s when buying tickets directly, not only resale sites.

The cost of attending a concert has skyrocketed in recent years, making it closer to a luxury purchase than a hobby. We can partially blame the pandemic for jacking up the cost of running a big production. And, as always, we can blame resellers for buying up cheap tickets and selling them back to us for exponentially more.

But the base price of a ticket now looks oddly similar to that inflated resale price. Why? And is there any amount we won’t pay to see our favorite artist perform live?

On Today, Explained, co-host and avid concertgoer Astead Herndon dug into these questions with Taylor Mims, a Billboard editor who covers the live entertainment industry. They discuss the behind-the-scenes costs of touring, why prices won’t come down, and whether a breaking point is on the horizon.

I recently read that Harry Styles was charging $1,000 for a concert ticket. No beef with Harry Styles, but that seems like a shocking price. Can you tell me what’s going on here?

$1,000 is a lot of money for a ticket. But if we’re being completely honest, it’s fairly typical for these big tours at this point to find tickets in the $1,000s, $2,000, etc., especially for those really valuable seats. It’s been slowly going up over the years, but it really became normal following the Covid-19 pandemic. Concerts were so in demand, still are in demand, and people really want to be there. They will pay good money to have a good seat at a good concert.

I hear what you’re saying, but supply and demand was true before the pandemic too. What exactly has changed to make this process so much more sticky?

People have figured out that there’s a way to get in that queue and make a bunch of money off of these tickets. It’s become its own marketplace. Ticket resellers get in there, buy those tickets at a low price, and then mark it up as much as they possibly can for the secondary market. Resell that ticket, and that’s their whole profit right there. It’s not that difficult to make a bunch of money off of these concerts.

But now we’re seeing huge ticket prices from the original sellers like Ticketmaster. Who sets that initial price for a ticket, and who should I be blaming here?

That’s going to be between the artist and the agent or the promoter. One of the big things that happened over the course of the pandemic is that we lost a lot of good staff, a lot of good crew, because they couldn’t make money when concerts were shut down and the price of everything has gone up. So the price of touring — that could be a crew, supplies, travel — has gone up, and so that makes the price of the ticket go up as well. These artists have to recoup costs at some point.

“It’s not slowing down — it’s only getting worse.”

And when you’re telling a fan it’s going to cost you this much to get into the door, they expect a show. So on top of that, that means more rehearsal time. It costs a lot of money for these giant productions. Loading in and out of a stadium show is incredibly expensive, and so is hauling all that stuff across the country, across oceans. So there’s a lot of costs that have made it more expensive just to be a touring artist.

Is it also that artists are seeing these high resale prices and think, Hey, if people are going to pay it, might as well. I mean, could this just be a case of artists prioritizing bottom line over fan accessibility?

Yes, but also it’s not necessarily that they’re prioritizing the bottom line over the fan. It’s that they know the fan’s going to pay that price either way, so that money might as well go to them. If you’re selling a ticket for $200, but it’s going to go for $1,000 on a secondary market, if you raise that ticket price to $500, it’s a lot less profitable for the ticket reseller, and that fan was going to pay that price anyway, if not more.

What is the recourse for fans who feel like $1,000 for a live concert might be too much?

One of the things that’s happening across the country right now is that a bunch of different states are trying to implement regulations on this because it has gotten really out of hand. And so you’ll see recently in California, in New York, what they’ve introduced are resale caps. When somebody buys a face-value ticket, if, for whatever reason, they can’t go, they can resell that ticket for no more than 10 percent above face value.

And what that does is take the wind completely out of the resale market, because that makes it so much less lucrative to be in this job, to be doing this for a career. It’s very possible. But only one state so far has passed the ticket resale cap, which is Maine.

Do you think there will be a tipping point where fans may say, “Hey, we’ve had enough,” and this road we’re on reverses course or at least slows down?

I definitely think if we’re not there yet, we’re getting very close. It’s not slowing down — it’s only getting worse. And I do think that this legislation is really going to tell us where we’re at because we’ve had almost 10 states introduce these resale caps. Even just a couple of years ago, you couldn’t even get those bills discussed because there’s so much lobbying money against it. So if we see more states able to pass this, that should tell you right there that the tide is turning.

China is wielding a new kind of power in the world now

2026-01-19T09:39:07-05:00

An inflatable Labubu in Victoria Harbour on October 25, 2025, in Hong Kong. | Hou Yu/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images

To say that China had a successful 2025 would be an understatement.

According to President Donald Trump’s campaign agenda and early months of his second administration, the United States was going to be tough on China. Trump went heavy on tariffs, limited chip exports, and tried to assert dominance over the country.

A year later, you’d have trouble finding evidence of it.

Instead, China has prospered by exercising hard economic power over the US — by wielding its newfound soft power. If you didn’t catch the blockbuster Chinese movie Nhe Zha 2 or play Black Myth: Wukong, you likely caught wind of a Labubu.

But why did these cultural exports finally leave China now? And how might it impact China’s growing hard power over the US?

To find out, Today, Explained senior producer and reporter Miles Bryan spoke with Don Weinland, a China business and finance editor for The Economist based in Shanghai.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

How would you define [China’s] soft power?

The first thing to say is that China massively underpunches on its cultural exports. This is the world’s second biggest economy, an incredible manufacturing power unparalleled elsewhere. And yet on cultural exports, it is really not doing very well on that front.

This is something that’s actually changing. For many years, I don’t think you would’ve known most of the movies or video games or toys that are being made in China, especially not by name. But China did much better on cultural exports in 2025 than it has in previous years.

I feel like we should start with Labubu. I don’t have any Labubus, to be honest, but I do see them everywhere, and I was surprised to learn in researching for this story that they originated in China. Are you a Labubu guy?

I’m not really a Labubu guy per se, but I am very interested in Pop Mart, the company that makes Labubus. It really started getting a lot of attention in 2024, and then in ’25, it just blew up. If you haven’t seen one, they’re often described as being “ugly cute.” And they come in these things called blind boxes. You don’t know what Labubu you’re going to get. They’re collectors’ items. It’s kind of like baseball cards in a way. You don’t know what baseball cards you’re getting, and you might get a rare card.

So what else? You mentioned movies.

Nhe Zha 2 really blew up at the beginning of 2025. It’s an animated film. It tells a traditional Chinese myth story. It’s the highest grossing animated film ever. That’s quite amazing in itself. And most of that happened domestically, but I know people in the US that have seen it as well.

Chinese films don’t get a lot of screen time in the US traditionally, but this one seems like it did break through in some places. You would hear senior leaders citing Nhe Zha 2, which is very odd to hear them referencing this animated film. And really, they were pointing to what they see as a cultural success. So that tells you something about how important this movie was.

You also mentioned video games. I was looking into one game that looks like it broke through: Black Myth: Wukong. Can you tell me a bit about that?

Incredibly popular within China, but also overseas. I think it’s one of the most popular video games of this style ever. It’s also based on a traditional Chinese myth. It was so popular that the areas in China that it takes place in started getting a bunch of tourists visiting them. This type of cultural product can generate economic growth, not just in the selling of the product itself, but also in areas like tourism.

What do these products have in common that contributed to their breaking out of China as cultural exports in the past year? What do you think is happening here that’s different?

I’ve kind of narrowed it down to two really important things. One is that a lot of the creators behind these things are in their late 30s or early 40s, and they are people that went to university in China just as the education system was changing. A lot more students were going to school at the time. It’s a time when the internet was relatively free. It was quite easy to get online and look at foreign websites. I think they absorbed a lot of foreign culture.

Another thing is that these types of products are being funded quite a bit better than in the past. The Communist Party has its priorities. It wants to be strong in manufacturing; it wants to be strong in areas like electric vehicles and batteries, solar power. It hasn’t really focused that much on its cultural products and its soft power, and we can kind of see that changing in areas like animated film or video games. It’s a lot easier for these types of companies to get funding now, and that just means that it’s going to reach a lot more people in China, but also overseas.

There’s another factor that has really held back cultural exports in China, and that’s just rules and regulations here that make it very, very difficult to make raunchy, sexy entertainment, the type of stuff that we’re used to in the US. Sometimes even broaching the topic of divorce is difficult in sitcoms. You can’t even really have haunted houses in Chinese entertainment, because the Communist Party doesn’t like superstition.

What’s your bet on the next big Chinese cultural export? Think we’re getting a Labubu 2.0 in 2026?

I don’t think Labubu is going away anytime soon. Pop Mart is going to keep cranking out these strange, ugly, cute dolls. But I would say one area that American consumers might see in 2026 is they might see more Chinese products, well-made products, popping up in America. We’ve been talking about entertainment, but products have a big impact on soft power as well. If you start buying well-made Chinese products, it could change your mind about China.

It does seem like China’s making progress on entertainment and cultural products that are more geared towards children. I think that’s kind of a safe space for Chinese cultural exports. You don’t need things like violence and sex and the raunchier bits of entertainment in this space. That might make it easier for more of these types of youth-focused things to reach people outside of China.

Can the ICE shooter be prosecuted?

2026-01-15T14:09:45-05:00

Clergy, faith, and community leaders gather to call for ICE to leave the community following the fatal shooting of Renee Good during a law enforcement operation in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 8, 2026. | Octavio Jones/AFP via Getty Images

The Twin Cities, and much of the nation, are still reeling from ICE agent Jonathan Ross shooting and killing Renee Good last week. The local resistance to the federal immigration forces deployed in and around Minneapolis has grown, and the Trump administration’s rhetoric against Good and the protesters around Minneapolis has heated up. On Thursday, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act and send the US military to the cities to crush the activists.

Meanwhile, a question still hangs over the crisis: Will Ross face any legal accountability for killing Good? Vice President JD Vance insists that Ross has “absolute immunity” for his actions, and the Justice Department is declining to investigate him. But others wonder if the state of Minnesota can prosecute Ross for the killing. The short answer, at the moment, is maybe.

Today, Explained cohost Noel King spoke with Vox’s senior legal correspondent Ian Millhiser about the state of the competing federal and state investigations into Good’s death, what the Supreme Court has said about this issue, and whether the Trump administration’s immunity claims about ICE officers have any merit.

There’s much more in the full podcast. So listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

A woman in Minnesota is dead and there is video of her killing at the hands of an ICE agent. The first response from many thinking Americans was: There will be a legal way of dealing with what happened here. There will be accountability. Why is that our response?

The whole point of legal accountability is to deter people from doing bad things. This isn’t the only reason I don’t break into my neighbor’s home, but one reason I don’t break into my neighbor’s home is I know that if I do, I will be arrested.

Key takeaways

The federal government has shown little interest in prosecuting the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good, but Minnesota may try to prosecute him on state charges.
The Justice Department is not cooperating or sharing information with Minnesota state investigators, which will make a state prosecution more difficult.
The Supreme Court has a very old precedent stating that federal law enforcement officers are immune from prosecution for acts taken while carrying out their duties, but in June 2025, the Court issued another ruling saying that that immunity is not absolute if the actions in question were not “necessary and proper” for their responsibilities.

This is a question that the Supreme Court has been wrestling with for quite some time, is when do we want law enforcement officers to feel like if they behave badly, they will fear legal consequences?

All right, let’s talk about the investigation in Minneapolis at this point. What do we know?

We know it’s pretty splintered. Normally the way something like this would work is that federal law enforcement officers would work with the state police in order to determine what happened and if any criminal charges need to be brought. So there’s several reasons why the federal investigation [into the Good shooting] is looking like it’s not serious. One is that they appear to have kicked the state police out of the investigation. The state is no longer allowed to cooperate with the federal government. The federal government apparently is not sharing information with state police. And that’s a big red flag.

On top of that, the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, said that he doesn’t think a civil rights investigation into the shooting itself is warranted. And on top of that, six prosecutors in the US Attorney’s Office in Minnesota resigned in protest, because apparently the US attorney wanted the investigation to focus on Becca Good, the wife of the victim.

So, you know, it really looks like this federal investigation is not just a sham, but potentially something worse, because they may be looking to harass the widow here. And that leaves open the question of whether the state government is going to be able to conduct a thorough investigation without federal cooperation.

Minnesota itself seems to be indicating that it wants to conduct an investigation. They have requested that people “who have information or who have video or photos of the event to submit that information.”

But it’s unclear just how effective the state’s investigation is going to be if the feds will not cooperate.

Let’s talk about what we are hearing from the federal government. Vice President JD Vance, who has a law degree from Yale, said an astonishing amount before an investigation had even begun here:

“I can believe that her death is a tragedy while also recognizing that it’s a tragedy of her own making and a tragedy of the far left who has marshaled an entire movement, a lunatic fringe, against our law enforcement officers,” he said. And he has been very clear that he thinks the ICE agent involved, Jonathan Ross, has “absolute immunity.”

What does the vice president mean?

I mean, he needs to go back to law school if he thinks that that’s the appropriate term. “Absolute immunity” is a term that is used in civil lawsuits, not in criminal investigation — like when you have a private party suing another person, typically for money. The Supreme Court has said that three classes of individuals have absolute immunity from those suits. None of them are law enforcement. Those three classes of individuals are the sitting president, judges, and prosecutors. Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who shot Renee Good, is neither the president of the United States, a judge, nor a prosecutor. So absolute immunity does not apply to him.

There are some doctrines that apply to criminal investigations. Probably the most important one is a doctrine that emerges from a case called In re Neagle. It was an 1890 case, so this is really old, and it involves a federal law enforcement officer who shot a man in the course of duty. The state of California wanted to prosecute him. And Neagle set the rule that in most but not all cases, when a federal law enforcement officer is acting within the scope of their duties, the state cannot prosecute them.

Okay, so even though the vice president was not using the right words, he may have been saying the right thing, because this guy is a federal officer. This precedent that’s been around since 1890 probably protects him, right? Unless somebody on the federal end decides to bring criminal charges?

Well, it’s unclear, because about six months ago, last June, the Supreme Court handed down another case called Martin v. United States. They weakened Neagle somewhat in that decision.

What I get out of Martin is that protections for federal law enforcement officers against state prosecutions are not absolute. So they are not what JD Vance said they are, even though there is still some protection there.

Is there a chance in your mind that this case ends up in some fashion before the Supreme Court?

I think that if the state of Minnesota prosecutes — and that’s a big if here, because first of all, we don’t know if they’re going to be able to conduct a thorough investigation given the federal sabotage. And second of all, we don’t know what the results of that investigation would be. Maybe they determine that they can’t bring a successful prosecution here. Even if Jonathan Ross is guilty, the prosecutors still have to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. And so they may determine that they just don’t have enough evidence that it’s worth going to a jury.

But if they bring a prosecution, I think that the state of the law governing when a state can bring a prosecution against a federal officer is very unclear right now. And especially given how high-profile this case is, this is the sort of case that I could easily see winding up in front of the Supreme Court.

If Minnesota state prosecutors are able to bring charges against this man, what does that mean for the way that ICE behaves in the streets next month, six months from now, a year from now?

I think it depends a lot on what the courts say. What the Supreme Court said recently in Martin, though, is that, well, we only want Neagle to apply when we know that this officer is actually carrying out federal duties. [The opinion says that] “federal officers may sometimes defeat state prosecutions against them by demonstrating that their actions, though criminal under state law, were ‘necessary and proper’ in the discharge of their federal responsibilities.”

If I was a Minnesota state prosecutor, I could argue that shooting someone when they had their wheels turned against you and they weren’t a threat to you is not “necessary and proper” to the discharge of federal law enforcement, and therefore prosecution should be allowed. And if I were Jonathan Ross’s attorney, I could argue the opposite.

That’s really vague language that the Supreme Court handed down in Martin. So I don’t know what the correct answer is to the question of whether or not Ross can be prosecuted at state court, because the only thing I’ve got to work with is this extraordinarily vague line from the Supreme Court about things that are “necessary and proper” to federal responsibilities.

As somebody who is a lawyer and who has covered the law for a long time, what do you make of the fact that a lot of Americans are feeling right now that the law does not work, that a woman is dead, that ICE is dragging people off the streets, in some cases violently, and the law does not seem to apply to those people?

They are correct that there is in fact selective law enforcement in the Trump administration. Trump had a very different reaction to the January 6 offenders, some of which endangered federal law enforcement officers a whole lot more than Renee Good did.

There’s no question here that the Justice Department is behaving in a political manner, and it’s a serious problem. For many, many years, there were very strong norms saying that even though the Justice Department is part of a presidential administration, prosecutorial decisions should be made by civil servants for neutral legal reasons and not for political reasons. And that norm has just completely broken down under this president.

What do Venezuelans want for their country?

2026-01-05T18:20:13-05:00

A march in support of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, both detained in the United States, takes place in Caracas, Venezuela, on January 4, 2025. | Javier Campos/NurPhoto via Getty Images

In the wake of a US military operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro over the weekend, an atmosphere of uncertainty has settled on the South American country.

Maduro, who appeared in a US federal courtroom in New York today, is in US custody. Meanwhile, Vice President Delcy Rodríguez has stepped up to be Venezuela’s interim leader — and has already received fresh threats from President Donald Trump if she refuses to comply with US guidance.

Amid the tumult, how are people in Venezuela feeling? Ana Vanessa Herrero, a reporter based in Caracas, says that the mood among Venezuelans has been something of a mixed bag. Some are celebrating; some are losing sleep over the conflict; others are gathering supplies in case the US launches more attacks — which Trump said the US is prepared to do.

Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Herrero about what she’s seeing and hearing in Venezuela, and what the sentiment in Venezuela tells us about what might happen next.

It’s great to be able to talk to you, especially since you filled us in on what was going on a few weeks ago. What’s going on now?

Everything’s going on. Since Saturday, people have been wondering what is going to happen next. In just 48 hours, Venezuelans experienced not only the first bombing and the first glimpse of war that they have experienced for hundreds of years now, but also they had to face the fact that Nicolas Maduro is no longer here. And that happened just in a couple of hours. That is an historic moment for Venezuelans who oppose Maduro, but also for those who follow him.

What are people in the streets saying? And is it safe to be out on the street today?

I tried to wait as long as I could to see what was going on [Saturday], and then to my surprise, no military on the streets, no cops on the streets, no danger whatsoever. People were just wandering and trying to line up in front of supermarkets and pharmacies to get water, food, supplies, whatever they could just to avoid being off guard in case something else happened.

The same image was repeated on Sunday. And now, people are just trying to get back to normal. We see malls opening [for] a shorter period of time, maybe for a few hours.

Such calm after such a storm is not something that you would expect. And some people tell me that it’s not normal. I spoke to someone, an elderly woman, and she said that in all of her years living in Venezuela and being born here, she felt so stressed that she just wanted to go to sleep and figure it out later. And I hear a lot of people are having trouble sleeping. They’re not feeling safe going to bed because they’re scared that the bombings could resume.

Even when I hear a sound that sounds like a plane, I immediately start looking around, getting nervous, trying to figure out what’s going on.

Let’s talk about Delcy Rodriguez. Who is she and who is she aligned with?

Delcy Rodriguez has been a long-time critic of not only the US policies against Venezuela, but against South America. And she has been a fierce critic of Trump and Trump’s approach against Nicolas Maduro. She has a very, very strong leftist background. She is the daughter of a leftist leader, and she was very close to [leftist dictator] Hugo Chavez, who gave her the first chance to be part of the government with him. And then she became a powerful name after Chavez died, working closely with Nicolas Maduro. So no wonder why her sudden change of tone is raising some eyebrows.

You say her tone is changing. What exactly has been happening with her?

Well, on Saturday she said that what happened to Maduro was a kidnapping and it was illegal, and she urged the US government and Trump to bring him back to Venezuela.

And then less than 24 hours later, or maybe a day later, she sat down with all the ministers of the former Maduro government and she invited the US to work together on a joint agenda. And she didn’t explain further, but I think there’s no need. That phrase alone was enough to raise some eyebrows.

What do you think happened exactly? Why’d she change her tune?

I’m not sure, but I can suspect that the threats that Donald Trump made against her if she didn’t comply [with US demands] had something to do with it. We don’t know. I mean, is she going to change laws to favor the US? Is she going to resume the diplomatic relations between the US and Venezuela? We have no idea what working together on a joint agenda means, but for sure it’s interesting to hear.

We do know what is motivating the United States here, in part because President Trump came right out on Saturday, gave a press conference and said, “We want Venezuela’s oil.” In Venezuela, how did people hear that remark? What was the response?

Well, people are so focused on how to survive the next few hours and days. That wasn’t part of the conversation up until very recently.

I have been talking to a lot of people on the ground and some of them are addressing that issue, but not all of them. So the ones who tell me that, some of them say they don’t want anyone running the country — Venezuela for Venezuelans.

On the other hand, you have the other extreme, and it’s people saying, “You know what? If the US wants to run the country, then great, as long as they didn’t do it with Nicolas Maduro.” What they all agree on is that they really don’t know what that means, “running the country.” And I think no one knows.

Ana, what are people hoping for next? When you ask people what they would like to see happen, what do you hear?

They would like elections. The mood around people who are actually talking about the future, elections are a huge part of it. In 2024, as you can recall, Venezuela had presidential elections and those results were not recognized by Nicolas Maduro, who claimed himself as a victor without any proof. Now, I think people have that feeling of, “We now need our fair elections again.” I mean, we need to, and the Constitution says that in case of an absolute total void of power in the presidency, then the vice president should fill that void immediately and call for elections in the next 30 days. We don’t know if that is going to happen because the circumstances right now are unprecedented for Venezuelans.

Venezuelans right now are trying to get out of the state of shock and they’re trying to get as much food and water as they can, because they’re accustomed to problems, turmoil and tragedy, and they feel that something else might happen.

JD Vance and the future of MAGA

2025-12-23T15:38:58-05:00

Vice President JD Vance speaks during a press conference outside the West Wing of the White House on October 30, 2025, in Washington, DC. | Oliver Contreras/AFP via Getty Images

After a successful 2024 election, Vice President JD Vance came into the White House ready to shake things up, support President Donald Trump at all costs, and post whatever he wanted online.

But what does Vance — the former “never Trump” conservative who has maneuvered, at least for now, into the position of MAGA heir apparent — really want the country to look like? And with a potentially difficult midterm season approaching, will the vice president begin to distance himself from Trump?

Host Noel King spoke with Ian Ward, a reporter at Politico, who covers conservatives and the American right. They discussed the highs and lows of Vance’s first year and what it tells us about what the Republican party could look like after the Trump administration.

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From late 2024 onward, you see memes of Vance: huge head, dancing, little boy hat, lollipop. It starts as a way to mock the VP. But he doesn’t treat it like that. What does he do instead?

He’s embraced it. One notable example: there’s this famous meme of the vice president, overweight with long curly hair and big bulging eyes, that started circulating around the election. And for Halloween this year, Vance dressed up as that meme and took a picture with big bulgy eyes and posted it online.

He’s part of the millennial generation that grew up at the peak era of online blogging and sort of early social media. I think he understands really innately that conservative politics are flowing upwards from the internet at this point. So by engaging with some of those memes, he’s signaling that he’s in the engine room of the right and that he gets it in a way that an older generation of politicians didn’t.

He comes into office January 20. What do some of his early wins look like?

He was deputized very early on to shepherd some of Trump’s more controversial nominees through the Senate —people like Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., or Tulsi Gabbard. So that was a big win for him.

“I think everyone understands that he’s the heir apparent and that it’s his nomination to lose in 2028.”

A second one was his trip to Europe. He gave two very notable speeches there, one at the Munich Security Conference where he basically torpedoed 50 years of transatlantic collaboration, and one in Paris where he laid out the administration’s view on AI. And those both showed that he was willing to enter into these spaces and disrupt a status quo that in his mind wasn’t working.

In February, President Trump met Ukraine’s President Vladimir Zelenskyy in the Oval Office. Might have been not a big story, but it became a big story in part because of the role that JD Vance played. Remind us what happened.

Zelenskyy was in town to finalize a critical-mineral deal. The meeting in the Oval Office between Trump and Zelenskyy and Vance and a couple other Cabinet members very quickly devolved into Trump and Vance berating Zelenskyy. Vance has an idea that Europe has benefited tremendously from the international order governed by American military and economic hegemony.

At the same time, I think he thinks that that international order has harmed the type of working-class blue-collar American that he grew up with in Ohio. These are the people who actually fight the wars. They’re the people who’ve borne the brunt of the de-industrialization that’s accompanied economic globalization.

So I think, in his mind, Europe — and Ukraine by extension — are sort of freeloaders who are leeching off working-class Americans and not thanking them for it

And then in June, we have this “12-day war” between Israel and Iran, and JD Vance defends Trump when he drops the bunker buster bomb. How does Vance navigate his clear and obvious disdain for foreign wars with President Trump?

All signs indicate that behind the scenes he was advocating against direct US intervention in that conflict. But once it became apparent that Trump was going to intervene, Vance publicly fell in line. After the strikes in Iran, Vance articulated what he called the “Trump Doctrine” to justify these strikes.

It all goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning, about him as not just a defender but a kind of explainer and justifier. It’s not really sufficient in his mind to defend these things; he wants to offer a kind of intellectual rationalization or justification for them.

In September, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. What was Vance’s relationship with Charlie Kirk, and what did you see him doing in the aftermath of the killing?

Kirk and Vance were very close. Some reporting came out after Kirk’s death that Kirk was actually one of the first conservatives to identify Vance as a rising star, that he eventually introduced him to Donald Trump Jr.’s team and vouched for him as a legitimate convert to the MAGA movement.

He hosted Charlie Kirk’s show a couple days after his death, sitting behind his desk in the old Executive Office Building, delivering a straight-to-camera monologue with an American flag behind him. It looked extremely presidential. He sort of led the charge in positioning Kirk’s death as a consequence of rising political violence on the left, which he said is a much larger issue than right-wing political violence.

In October, some messages from a Young Republican group chat were leaked and there was lots of racism. There was open antisemitism. JD Vance involved himself in that story. How so?

He downplayed the nature of those statements. More broadly, there’s a sense on the right that, for the past five or 10 years, Republicans have sort of laid down and let what they call “cancel culture” take over. Vance and others are trying to effectuate a kind of broader cultural shift where they’re going to say, No matter how offensive a comment was, we’re not going to give up one of our own, and we fight back against our enemies and our perceived enemies in the media.

Does that extend to the next skirmish? Because a few weeks later, Tucker Carlson interviews Nazi-curious Nick Fuentes and doesn’t ask him any hard questions.

Yeah, he stayed sort of conspicuously quiet in that whole controversy.

At the same time, he is doing some coalitional management here. I think he rightly recognizes that Fuentes, despite his very odious views, has a very real and very mobilized following of young men that MAGA desperately needs to keep in its electoral coalition. He’s called Fuentes some names, but he’s made no real effort to actually banish him from the conservative coalition.

What role do you think the vice president is going to play in the midterms?

I think you’ll see him out on the trail selling some of these economic accomplishments. Definitely talking a lot about immigration. I think immigration is at this point really the issue that’s holding the otherwise somewhat fractious MAGA coalition together.

And I think they will run, very prominently, on the very precipitous drop in illegal border crossings. And also whatever progress they’ve made on the mass deportations, despite the controversy that’s kicked up.

What has JD Vance said about whether or not he plans to run for president in 2028?

The decorum, of course, is not to talk about your presidential ambitions until you’re actually a candidate for president. Vance clearly understands that and has said it’s not my focus right now and denied that he’s angling for it. But I think everyone understands that he’s the heir apparent and that it’s his nomination to lose in 2028.

Do people like JD Vance?

The polling is not very good on this, so it’s hard to peer into the electorate.

I think a lot these days about the sociologist Max Weber, actually, who wrote about the “structure of charismatic movements” and the way that charismatic leaders end up anointing successors. The process of anointment matters a lot for whether the charisma rubs off on a successor. I think a lot of that question hinges on how exactly Vance ends up securing the nomination.

Is it an endorsement from Trump? Does Trump throw it open to a factional fight in which someone like a Vance and someone like a Rubio and Ted Cruz have to duke it out, where some of the dirty laundry coalitionally is aired out? Then it’s a much harder task for Vance to consolidate the MAGA base behind him.