Maduro In Custody. His Blue Hoodie In Your Cart?

Donald Trump loves to get some stink on a new year early, as we all learned five years ago today. In 2026 he didn’t even wait six days, kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on January 3rd. I say “kidnapping,” here. Venezuelan officials say “kidnapping.” Maduro says “I was kidnapped.” Donald Trump says kidnapping is “not a bad term” for what he did. The BBC says please don’t call it a kidnapping, chaps. Five years ago I confidently asserted that “the clearest and least self-deluded coverage tends to be British,” so I guess some things do change.

But not Donald Trump’s ideas. He chose a couple of beliefs in the early 1980s, seemingly at random, and hasn’t updated a thing since. One of those beliefs is that people are born with a finite amount of energy, like a battery, and when we use it all up we die. Another is that getting more oil is always good, so it wasn’t a big surprise when Trump explained that in Venezuela “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.” That doesn’t make sense, wrote Responsible Statecraft’s Karthik Sankaran, when America is already the world’s largest oil exporter and oil supply growth exceeds demand growth by millions of barrels a day. American oil companies also don’t appear to have much appetite for a huge capital expenditure in a country that is already a security nightmare, and which doesn’t seem likely to get safer after a gringo-facilitated coup. No worries if not though! American taxpayers will fund it.

Meanwhile Stephen Miller is visibly erect at the idea that this could be a stepping stone to a U.S. invasion of Greenland, and Li’l Marco appears to be interested in securing the supply of a different kind of snow. Jamelle Bouie says “they're doing it for gender,” which is a classic joke-shaped truth. But so far the best explanation I’ve seen for what is happening comes from a TikTok post by Venezuelan-American filmmaker Giorgio Angelini, who says this is “basically… a mafia turf war” between the gang who runs Venezuela, the gang who runs Cuba, and the gang who runs the United States.

The biggest winners of the U.S. backed Venezuelan coup are Nike, whose “‘Maduro Fit’ went viral… [and] sold out across multiple sizes on Nike's U.S. webstore,” and athleisure brand ORIGIN, who immediately blasted out a marketing email with the subject “Maduro In Custody. His Blue Hoodie In Your Cart?" I can’t wait for the Maduro Fit Deep Dive from Feed Me.

Yesterday In The Year That Was And Wasn’t: The Morning News, “The Year That Was and Wasn’t.” Category-matching web game 2025 will ruin your life for an indeterminate number of hours. Sarah Jeong closed out the year explaining that propaganda of the deed is so back. Only “media leaders” could take Semafor’s question “what did you get wrong in 2025?” as an opportunity to brag. The mayor of Shirley Jackson’s Buell, Maine got a fan-Chotining in “Why one small American town won’t stop stoning its residents to death.” And Erin Kissane wrote about the collapse of collective sense-making as “what happens when you hit a saturated jumble of communal sense with something big and fast and heavy.”

Tomorrow in The Year That Will or Won’t Be: “A List of Predictions Made in 1926 About 2026.” All of them are somehow smarter than the New York Times’ “10 Predictions for Life in 2026” made just one day before 2026 started. Anil Dash: “How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026?”

Today in Taint:¹ The taint zapper is finally real, and a report from the Glasgow ball-kicking (“Flute Accompaniment!”).

A fun game that I am extremely mediocre at: enclose.horse

And Finally: 404 Media now owns 404media.com, where it plans to establish a lively presence on the World Wide Web that it hopes will complement and update the 100-year-old print magazine for the Internet age.

Today’s Song: A Tribe Called Quest, “We The People”

Welcome to 2026, suckers! If you thought 2016 through 2025 inclusive was bad, b-b-b-baby you just ain’t seen nothing yet. Next Time: let’s talk about Gas Town.

Also: “And because they shall not bee altogether mocked…”: Here’s how “to make Pies that the Birds may be aliue in them, and flie out when it is cut vp.”

1  ALT: “Taint That A Shame,“ or “Two If By Taint.” That one doesn’t even make sense, honestly, but it makes me laugh.