Only Time Will Tell

“Only time will tell,” said President Donald Trump, in response to questions about how long the United States expects to help run Venezuela following Nicolás Maduro’s ouster. “We will rebuild it in a very profitable way,” said the president. “We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil. We’re getting oil prices down, and we’re going to be giving money to Venezuela, which they desperately need.”

Trump also announced via Truth Social this morning that he has “cancelled the previously expected second Wave of Attacks, which looks like it will not be needed” due to Venezuela’s “cooperation.” Trump also said that Venezuela “is releasing large numbers of political prisoners as a sign of ‘Seeking Peace,'” which he called “a very important and smart gesture.”

Next week, Trump will meet with opposition leader María Corina Machado, with whom he’s had a complicated relationship since being passed over for the Nobel Peace Prize. (It was given to her instead, and she’s been sufficiently obsequious in the aftermath, trying to smooth over the relationship; Trump claims his hurt feelings have nothing to do with his antagonism toward Machado.) It would be “be very tough for [Machado] to be the leader, because she doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country,” Trump told reporters yesterday. Hopefully, Machado and Trump will be able to iron out their differences, since the profoundly corrupt Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president for the past six years, is currently in charge of Venezuela. (Reason‘s César Báez calls Rodríguez the “acting dictator” and is not so bullish on Venezuela’s post-Maduro future if Rodríguez stays in command.)

Hochul committed to giving Mamdani everything he wants: Like a step-parent trying to curry favor with the kids, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has decided her posture toward Mayor Zohran Mamdani is simply to give him everything he wants—budget be damned. That’s one way to do it, I suppose.

It looks like the Mamdani will get closer to enacting his vision of universal free (or, as I like to call it, taxpayer-funded, so not free at all) childcare for children as young as 6 weeks by first expanding the universal pre-K program from covering 3- and 4-year-olds to covering all 2-year-olds.

Big news from Gov. Kathy Hochul on child care. She will announce today that she’s “committing to fully fund the first two years” of Zohran Mamdani’s implementation of free preschool for 2-year-olds: pic.twitter.com/KmozPhqZhL

— Emma G. Fitzsimmons (@emmagf) January 8, 2026

But, as I wrote for the February/March magazine issue, “universal 3-K (for 3-year-olds) hasn’t served families as well as its supporters promised it would. It distorted the private market, driving day cares out of business. Rich families have used nifty hacks to get their kids into the best centers, while the poor are left with the rest. The universal nature of it might be politically valuable when you’re currying favor with the tony Park Slope crowd, but it means that child care for rich people is subsidized by the slightly richer, and that day cares serving the poorest neighborhoods don’t get what they need. Parents who choose to stay home with their kids or employ nannies get shafted, and costs for all forms of child care are driven up the more the government intervenes in the market. More government involvement won’t make that better.”

“The city actually doesn’t have money in its budget to do everything for everyone,” Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission, pointed out to The New York Times in August. Mamdani has yet to learn this, and Hochul appears to be positioning herself as his sugar mommy.

Scenes from New York: 

QUICK HITS

• Federal law enforcement shot two people on Thursday afternoon in East Portland, according to the Portland Police Bureau. The two were hospitalized, but no information about their condition was immediately available, reports KGW8.
• “Iran’s supreme leader vowed on Friday that the government ‘will not back down’ in the face of protests that have rocked the country in recent weeks, accusing demonstrators of being vandals who were trying to ‘please’ President Trump,” reports The New York Times. “‘There are people whose job is only about destruction,’ Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a defiant, televised speech in Tehran, the capital.” The images coming out of the protests are kind of amazing:

A new trend has emerged among Iranian women. pic.twitter.com/G038L2URrd

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) January 8, 2026

• A good read: “What Betty Friedan got wrong about motherhood,” by Nadya Williams at The Dispatch. 
• “Two weeks ago I gave my last lecture at Harvard, where I have been a history professor for forty years,” writes James Hankins for Compact. “My four decades of experience at one of the world’s leading universities have given me a unique vantage point to trace the replacement of Western history by global history. This change is part of the reason why the younger generation finds itself in a state of moral and intellectual disorientation.…I believe I can make far better use of my time and experience at my new institutional home—the Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida—than at Harvard. The reason why is that the Hamilton School is committed to teaching the history of Western civilization. When late liberal pedagogy replaced Western civilization courses with global history, serious harm was done to the socialization of young Americans. When you don’t teach the young what civilization is, it turns out, people become uncivilized.”
• “The Minneapolis public school system canceled classes for the rest of the week in the aftermath of a deadly shooting by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, as protests featuring tense standoffs with federal agents flared up again Thursday morning,” reports Bloomberg. It’s unclear to me why school must be canceled in the aftermath of this event. Is it that school administrators, law enforcement, etc. don’t believe themselves capable of handling protests? So the idea is to just give in, and ensure people don’t congregate? It seems like “cancel school” as the lowest hanging fruit for controlling civil unrest will come with plenty of bad side effects—namely, children not getting much of an education. Either we take educating our young seriously, or we don’t.
• New Substack series—”on caretaking my mom as she nears the end while fighting off the entities who prey on the old”—by my friend, Nancy Rommelmann, called “Musings of the Night Nurse.”
• Self-reflection in Cuba: “We have to start considering that maybe what’s wrong in Cuba is our fault as a party.”

Díaz-Canel : “Tenemos que empezar a pensar que a lo mejor lo que funciona mal de Cuba es culpa nuestra del partido”. pic.twitter.com/XUC4aJAJ3E

— Wall Street Wolverine (@wallstwolverine) January 8, 2026