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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.

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.

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.

What Venezuelans really want

2025-12-09T15:17:22-05:00

People walks to cross the Internation Simon Bolivar border bridge between Colombia and Venezuela, while relatives of Colombian nationals detained in Venezuela block it in demand of their release, in Villa del Rosario, Colombia, on December 5, 2025. | Schneyder Mendoza/AFP via Getty Images

Across Venezuela, residents wonder how long they’ll be waiting.

Venezuela has experienced a severe decade of economic and political crisis, led by Nicolás Maduro. Now, as the threat of US intervention looms, Venezuelans are going through a cycle of anxiety and uncertainty. How long will this standoff last? Who would replace Maduro?

In the meantime, they still need to afford groceries, go to work and try to keep their lives moving.

Ana Vanessa Herrero is an investigative reporter with the Washington Post and based in Caracas. She’s a native Venezuelan and has been speaking with her community throughout her time reporting there. She tells host Noel King about daily life in Venezuela, what residents are thinking, and how they’re preparing for a possible war.

The US has been attacking boats, alleging that these are drug traffickers bringing drugs from Venezuela. How are people in Venezuela responding to these attacks at sea by the US?

The reaction is not a unified reaction. The situation, for example, in Sucre, the coast region where all the boats are allegedly coming from, they’re scared. They don’t feel safe that they’re not going to be attacked somehow. But outside of Sucre, the situation is absolutely different. So Venezuelans are really not focusing on the attacks, on the vessels, but focusing on the economy.

Everyone has PTSD right now. Everyone is getting ready just in case we’re going to have to suffer like in 2016, 2017, or 2018 again. In those years Venezuela experienced hyperinflation of over a million percent. And that is well deep inside our memory.

Now the diplomatic tension is not as important, it’s a little part of the conversation. Most of the conversation revolves around if I’m going to have enough money to buy food. And every threat affects the markets and affects all investments.

But remember the economy was collapsing and last year it started seeing some small changes for the better. Those were because of the cash flow on the streets and because of small investments. It doesn’t mean that the economy was thriving, but we did see some changes. But now every person who has some money to invest is really insecure of doing so because you don’t know if tomorrow the US attacks Venezuela. How can you survive without that money? People are trying to save the money that they have just in case something happens and that is affecting the day-to-day economy.

I can understand how the story of the men in boats becomes small given a broader economic crisis. I wonder about something else though. President Trump recently suggested that the United States might start land strikes in Venezuela. Do people there fear a land war?

Just to be clear, my conclusions come from the many conversations I’ve had with people here on the ground. But, of course, I haven’t spoken to everyone. From the people I’ve interviewed and small conversations I’ve been part of, they do fear something is going to happen. Some of them think it’s going to be like a small precise attack against some of the Venezuelan political leaders that are now in power. Others think that they might come in and attack Venezuela on the ground.

“Because of the censorship and the harassment that the government has put upon the population, no one dares to speak up.”

But everyone agrees on one thing: If any of those happen, they do believe it’s going to be really quick. This is not going to be a war that is going to last for five years because Venezuela doesn’t really have what they need to fight against the US. And the aftermath of that would be the end of Maduro’s regime. I haven’t heard anyone rejecting the idea and that is really interesting. The thing is that because of the censorship and the harassment that the government has put upon the population, no one dares to speak up. But in small conversations you can definitely hear that no one wants this, but it’s a last resort.

The people that you’ve spoken to, are they not rejecting the idea because they want Maduro out?

Well, ultimately, yes, most people would like Maduro to resign, but we know so far that probably that’s not going to happen. Maduro has shown amazing skills and ability to survive all the attacks that he has suffered from abroad and inside of the country. Definitely from the side of the Maduro supporters, now more than ever, they’re unified. They have the sense of an external enemy.

Maduro has been saying this for a long time: Our enemy is the US. But there was never a threat. Now, there’s a palpable threat that proves him right. And his followers are like, “Okay, now we do see that enemy and we are going to gather around you to protect the legacy of Hugo Chávez.” This is the narrative that the government has been using, but I don’t see this happening for the rest of the people.

When Trump makes these threats about Venezuela how are people reacting? Are people stockpiling food? Are they preparing in other ways?

It depends on the day. If President Donald Trump writes on social media, for example, as he did, that the airspace is closed, to get out of Venezuela. You’re definitely going to see people buying more food, more water, talking to each other, trying to call people who know people to see if they know something.

But if the general climate is peaceful, where you can feel the tension, but really nothing is happening, or at least we don’t know something’s happening, people are just trying to live their daily lives. People are still going to work. We are not seeing people running to the supermarkets whatsoever. Even if they do stock up on food weekly, it’s not pandemonium. It’s not something that you’re going to see on TV people lining up in the supermarkets like they did in 2016 to get something. The information is so scarce that people are just, “Okay, today I’ll buy food. Then if nothing happens, I’ll just eat it.”

Where is Maduro in all of this? How is he behaving knowing that these threats are coming from the US

Internally, we don’t really know what’s happening, but Maduro is trying to show absolute peace and joy during the Christmas celebrations. He actually said that that was a national mandate for people to party all week long because his followers needed to show the US and the world that they’re not worried about anything.

He claims this is just a psychological war that they’ve survived in the past. He has survived past pressure, not only from the US, but internally from the opposition. And he believes that, at least this is what he’s showing, if he sits down and waits, this is all going to go away. And he has done that in the past. So that’s his strategy.

Who is Nicolás Maduro?

2026-01-03T13:57:49-05:00

Nicolás Maduro’s regime is all about strength and exercising control over his opposition. | Jesus Vargas/Getty Images

Editor’s note, January 3, 2026, 10 am: President Donald Trump announced early on Saturday, January 3, that the United States had captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife after a “large-scale strike” on the country, a significant escalation of US involvement in the region. The article below was originally published December 9, 2025. For Vox’s latest coverage of the strike on Venezuela, see this article

Behind the crippling economic and political situation in Venezuela is Nicolás Maduro.

After years of high inflation and a tumultuous relationship with the United States, the president of Venezuela faces a country waiting for political intervention. US President Donald Trump wants to oust Maduro, a former revolutionary turned anti-democratic leader, and recently said his “days are numbered.”

Maduro’s regime is all about strength and exercising control over his opposition. His demeanor, rise to power, and relationship to his adversaries are pivotal to understanding where Venezuela goes next.

Host Noel King spoke with Jon Lee Anderson, a staff writer for the New Yorker, to understand the leader and how he got here. Anderson is a veteran journalist who has interviewed Maduro on multiple occasions.

Nicolás Maduro — you interviewed him in 2017. Pretty rare interview. What is he like as a person?

He’s a big man. He’s about 6 foot-4 or -5. He’s at least 250 pounds. He’s warm in person; he likes to hug; he’ll break into song if he’s with the right crowd or dance.

Maduro doesn’t have quite the same magnetic persona that his mentor and predecessor Hugo Chávez did. There has always been a pretty florid opposition in Venezuela, and [Maduro] has cracked down hard on them. He comes from the urban left. He was also a left-wing union organizer. He had some training in Cuba. He is not a democrat. He sees himself as a revolutionary.

I point this out to Americans because I think there’s this idea that obviously it’s a kind of touchstone. We all talk about democracy as the ultimate ideal. Well, people who see themselves as revolutionaries in the Marxist sense do not regard themselves as democrats. They regard themselves as revolutionaries, and it presupposes a different set of assumptions about the way you proceed once you have power. And in the case of Nicolás Maduro and his military comrades who uphold this regime, it is about not giving up power.

How did he get into power? You said Chávez was his mentor. Did Chávez hand the presidency over?

He did. From a very early time, Maduro made himself useful and very close to Chávez. He was foreign minister for about six years, and then he became his vice president. Chávez discovered that he had cancer in about 2011, early 2012. And privately knew he was dying. And he had a televised moment when he told the Venezuelan nation that he hoped to be around. But if anything happened to him, Nicholas Maduro was going to be their next president. Chávez died in 2013. And that’s exactly what happened.

To look at Venezuela today from the US is to see a country that is an economic basket case, a country that people desperately want to flee because they are so poor. What was Venezuela like when Maduro took over?

From 2003 or 2004 until about 2012, 2013, you had this worldwide spike in oil prices that brought in about a trillion dollars to Venezuela. It’s a massive amount of money. The oil prices in the world, they went up to a hundred, and it was $150 a barrel at one point. They dropped precipitously right around the time Nicholas Maduro succeeded Chávez in office. The effect on Venezuelan society was immediate.

Maduro showed an incapacity and inability to turn on a dime. So it’s been this kind of push me–pull you, very no-holds-barred, very polarized environment ever since.

And look, one doesn’t know the ultimate truth, but there’s a consensus that he’s stolen every election ever since. So ever since then, Maduro’s been in a corner. There’s very little to find in the way of infrastructure and investment. Where did those trillion dollars go? There was an effort at a social welfare system that never really existed before. On the other hand, a lot of it was ripped off. There was a huge amount of corruption.

Who is Maduro’s opposition? When and how do they start to form inside of Venezuela?

There’s always been an opposition to El Chavismo, which is the term given to the political movement that Hugo Chávez founded. Over time, [the movement has] been effective at grinding down most of the opposition. Having said that, there’s always someone who emerges from the murk and bears their chest to the regime and shakes their fist. And in the past couple of years, it’s been this woman, she’s been around a while, but she’s now emerged as the top dog of the opposition, the kind of saving grace of non-Chavista Venezuela. And that’s Maria Corina Machado.

She campaigned vigorously against Maduro and was declared to be illegitimate on fairly specious grounds by the country’s electoral tribunal, which is another way they neutralize the opposition. Now, she is clever, and she’s also very connected with Americans and other political groups outside. She found a retired former diplomat who wouldn’t harm a fly and who nobody in Venezuela knew as her strawman candidate: Edmundo González.

And he ran in the elections last summer against Maduro. But everybody knew if they voted for him, they were really voting for her and that somehow she would emerge from behind him. And all the evidence suggests that Edmundo González, fronting for her, won the election.

But of course Maduro is still president.

I wanna bring Trump into this. Donald Trump takes office in 2016, and he and Maduro seem to genuinely dislike each other. Is this just a case of an American president and a Venezuelan president really disliking each other because they have very different goals and ambitions? Or is there something unique about the Trump-Maduro relationship?

The very first meeting that Donald Trump in his first term had with his colleagues in Latin America, the first words out of Donald Trump’s mouth was, “I want to invade Venezuela” or “Let’s invade Venezuela,” something like that. And they were shocked. And they said, “Well, Mr. President, that’s probably not a good idea.”

And it went on from there. So he came into office, back in 2017, wanting to overthrow Maduro. Maduro had been vilified by the conservative American emigre community since he took office, as had Chávez before him. They were seen as a new Cuban revolution, Castro Chávismo.

And of course, Trump is Mar-a-Lago. And who is around him in Florida? Look at the panoply of characters that are there. You have an extremely conservative political environment. You have Colombian Americans, Venezuelan Americans, Cuban Americans, then others who have emerged as we’ve all seen over the past years as very effective lobbyists on behalf of the political opponents to anything smelling of the left in Latin America.

President Trump wants Nicholas Maduro out. How easy or hard would that be?

Chávez did a great deal to inculcate a new generation of soldiers and young officers with an ideology that was anti-imperialist, therefore anti-American.

So there’s several scenarios that I could see the Americans trying. Land attacks. Drone airstrikes against supposed drug transshipment points, which might or might not be isolated posts in the jungle or possibly military garrisons where they claim they’re colluding with narco traffickers as a way to destabilize or frighten Maduro.

Option two would be an assassination strike or an attempt to cause real damage, demoralizing damage to the armed forces and the regime itself. And thus make it appear weak in the face of the population, in the hopes that the population who — polls would suggest — love and cherish Maria Corina Machado would pour into the streets demanding the ouster of the regime.

I think by now most people believe that even if they were to change Maduro, it wouldn’t settle the country. How would Maria Corina Machado simply replace him in power? Would the Americans have to come and form a praetorian guard around her to protect her? I think if you ask most Venezuelans what they would like, they would like Maduro to leave and [for] there not to be any American military intervention. And I don’t know that those two are [happening] at the moment. We don’t know whether those two are mutually irreconcilable or not.