POLITICS

MINNEAPOLIS — Minneapolis was on edge Thursday following the fatal shooting of a woman by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer taking part in the Trump administration’s latest immigration crackdown, with protesters venting their outrage, the governor urging restraint and schools canceling classes as a precaution.

State and local officials demanded ICE leave Minnesota after the unidentified ICE officer shot 37-year-old Renee Nicole Macklin Good in the head Wednesday morning. But Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said agents won’t be going anywhere.

The Department of Homeland Security has deployed more than 2,000 officers to the area in what it says is its largest immigration enforcement operation ever. Noem said more than 1,500 people have already been arrested.

Dozens of protesters gathered early Thursday outside of a federal building on the edge of Minneapolis that is serving as a major base for the immigration crackdown. They shouted “No More ICE,” “Go Home Nazis,” “Quit Your Job,” and “Justice Now!” as Border Patrol officers pushed them back from the gate and fired smoke grenades.

“We should be horrified,” protester Shanta Hejmadi said. “We should be saddened that our government is waging war on our citizens. We should get out and say no. What else can we do?”

Bystanders captured video of Macklin Good’s killing in a residential neighborhood south of downtown, and hundreds of people turned up for a Wednesday night vigil to mourn her and urge the public to resist the immigration crackdown. Some then chanted as they marched through the city, but there was no violence.

“I would love for ICE to leave our city and for more community members to come to see it happens,” said Sander Kolodziej, a painter who came to the vigil to support the community.

The videos of the shooting show an officer approaching an SUV stopped across the middle of the road, demanding the driver open the door and grabbing the handle. The Honda Pilot begins to pull forward, and a different ICE officer standing in front of it pulls his weapon and immediately fires at least two shots at close range, jumping back as the vehicle moves toward him.

It is not clear from the videos if the vehicle makes contact with the officer, and there is no indication of whether the woman had interactions with ICE agents earlier. After the shooting the SUV speeds into two cars parked on a curb before crashing to a stop.

In another recording made afterward, a woman who identifies Macklin Good as her spouse is seen crying near the vehicle. The woman, who is not identified, says the couple recently arrived in Minnesota and that they had a child.

Noem called the incident an “act of domestic terrorism” against ICE officers, saying the driver “attempted to run them over and rammed them with her vehicle. An officer of ours acted quickly and defensively, shot, to protect himself and the people around him.”

President Trump made similar accusations on social media and defended ICE’s work.

Noem alleged that the woman was part of a “mob of agitators” and said the officer followed his training. She said the FBI would investigate.

But Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called Noem’s version of events “garbage.”

“They are already trying to spin this as an action of self-defense,” Frey said. “Having seen the video myself, I wanna tell everybody directly, that is bullshit.”

He also criticized the federal deployment and said the agents should leave.

The shooting marked a dramatic escalation of the latest in a series of immigration enforcement operations in major cities under the Trump administration. Wednesday’s is at least the fifth death linked to the crackdowns.

The Twin Cities have been on edge since DHS announced the operation’s launch Tuesday, at least partly tied to allegations of fraud involving Somali residents.

A crowd of protesters gathered at the scene after the shooting to vent their anger at local and federal officers.

In a scene that hearkened back to crackdowns in Los Angeles and Chicago, people chanted “ICE out of Minnesota” and blew whistles that have become ubiquitous during the operations.

Gov. Tim Walz said he was prepared to deploy the National Guard if necessary. He expressed outrage over the shooting but called on people to keep protests peaceful.

“They want a show,” Walz said. “We can’t give it to them.”

There were calls on social media to prosecute the officer who shot Macklin Good.

Commissioner Bob Jacobson of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety said state authorities would investigate the shooting with federal authorities.

Sullivan and Dell’Orto write for the Associated Press. AP reporters Steve Karnowski, Ed White in Detroit, Valerie Gonzalez in Brownsville, Texas, Mark Vancleave in Las Vegas, Michael Biesecker In Washington, Jim Mustian in New York and Hallie Golden in Seattle contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — The woman shot and killed by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis on Wednesday was Renee Nicole Macklin Good, a 37-year-old mother of three who had recently moved to Minnesota.

She was a U.S. citizen born in Colorado and appears to never have been charged with anything involving law enforcement beyond a traffic ticket.

In social media accounts, Macklin Good described herself as a “poet and writer and wife and mom.” She said she was currently “experiencing Minneapolis,” displaying a pride flag emoji on her Instagram account. A profile picture posted to Pinterest shows her smiling and holding a young child against her cheek, along with posts about tattoos, hairstyles and home decorating.

Her ex-husband, who asked not to be named out of concern for the safety of their children, said Macklin Good had just dropped off her 6-year-old son at school Wednesday and was driving home with her current partner when they encountered a group of ICE agents on a snowy street in Minneapolis, where they had moved last year from Kansas City, Missouri.

Video taken by bystanders posted to social media shows an officer approaching her car, demanding she open the door and grabbing the handle. When she begins to pull forward, a different ICE officer standing in front of the vehicle pulls his weapon and immediately fires at least two shots into the vehicle at close range.

In another video taken after the shooting, a distraught woman is seen sitting near the vehicle, wailing, “That’s my wife, I don’t know what to do!”

Calls and messages to Macklin Good’s current partner received no response.

Trump administration officials painted Macklin Good as a domestic terrorist who had attempted to ram federal agents with her car. Her ex-husband said she was no activist and that he had never known her to participate in a protest of any kind.

He described her as a devoted Christian who took part in youth mission trips to Northern Ireland when she was younger. She loved to sing, participating in a chorus in high school and studying vocal performance in college.

She studied creative writing at Old Dominion University in Virginia and won a prize in 2020 for one of her works, according to a post on the school’s English department Facebook page. She also hosted a podcast with her second husband, who died in 2023.

Macklin Good had a daughter and her son from her first marriage, who are now ages 15 and 12. Her 6-year-old son was from her second marriage.

Her ex-husband said she had primarily been a stay-at-home mom in recent years but had previously worked as a dental assistant and at a credit union.

Donna Ganger, her mother, told the Minnesota Star Tribune the family was notified of the death late Wednesday morning.

“Renee was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known,” Ganger told the newspaper. “She was extremely compassionate. She’s taken care of people all her life. She was loving, forgiving and affectionate. She was an amazing human being.”

Ganger did not respond to calls or messages from the AP.

Biesecker and Mustian write for the Associated Press. Mustian reported from New York.

WASHINGTON — Five years after the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol by President Trump’s supporters, the White House released a website this week attempting to revise history.

Reasserting Trump’s false claim that he had won the 2020 presidential election, the administration doubled down on his decision to issue blanket pardons for the rioters, blamed Capitol Police for escalating tensions that day, and denounced Trump’s vice president at the time, Mike Pence, for “refusing to act” in defiance of the Constitution to stop congressional certification of Trump’s loss.

It was a display of political audacity that has become the hallmark of Trump’s second act — challenging anyone to stop him from asserting raw executive authority, both at home and increasingly abroad.

Whether on foreign or domestic policy, lawmakers have struggled to respond to an administration that moves with unfettered restraint and exceptional speed. The U.S. Supreme Court has only facilitated Trump’s expansion of unitary executive power. And governments abroad accustomed to Trump’s lack of predictability now face a president whose entire philosophy toward foreign interventionism appears to have turned on a dime.

“There are political checks. They are checks, though, that have been degraded,” said William Howell, dean of the School of Government and Policy at Johns Hopkins University and author of “Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency.”

“They are checks that are looked upon not just with frustration, but an outward animosity by the president,” Howell added. “It’s a feature of his populist politics for him to say, ‘anything that stands in my way is illegitimate.’”

Unitary rule

Trump’s extraordinary use of executive authority has no comparison in recent times. The president has issued more than 220 executive actions in his first year back in office — more than the 220 orders he issued throughout his entire first term, and dwarfing the 276 actions that President Obama issued over eight years in office.

Directing the Justice Department to prosecute his political enemies, and deploying his pardon power to shield his friends and allies, Trump risks fueling the very sort of politicized system of justice he campaigned against as a presidential candidate.

And his administration has shown derision for Congress, controlled by the president’s own party, approving historically few bills and neglecting those that have passed, such as the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Trump has attempted to unilaterally rename the Defense Department and the Kennedy Center, despite straightforward laws requiring acts of Congress to do so, and has impounded funds appropriated by Congress for child care and family assistance allocated to Democratic states.

“The nature of presidential power is that it is given as much as taken,” said Andrew Rudalevige, a professor of government at Bowdoin College and author of “The New Imperial Presidency.” “You can’t have an imperial presidency without an invisible Congress. And certainly, the current Congress is setting new records for intentional invisibility.”

After Trump bulldozed the East Wing of the White House, a reporter asked his press secretary what was stopping him from knocking down the entire building. Karoline Leavitt demurred. “That’s a legal opinion that’s been held for many years,” she said, suggesting he could, in fact, demolish the rest of it.

“The institutional constraints on the unilateral presidency are weak,” said Dino Christenson, a political science professor at Washington University in St. Louis and co-author of “The Myth of the Imperial Presidency.” “The conservative majority of the [Supreme] Court has also recently chosen to back executive power.

“Arguably,” he added, “international constraints are even weaker, at least for powerful nations like the U.S.”

‘Governed by force’

Trump’s order over the weekend to depose Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, seizing him and his wife from their bedroom in a stunning military raid, was the type of rare exercise in American power that has defined past presidencies. But Trump said he was just getting started.

Beaming from the operational success in Caracas, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he was considering military action against no fewer than five countries, allies and foes alike. His homeland security advisor, Stephen Miller, said that no one would even try to stop Trump from militarily taking over Greenland, an autonomous region of Denmark, a NATO ally and European Union member state.

“We live in a world,” Miller told CNN, “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

At the State Department, veteran U.S. diplomats waited anxiously for guidance from the administration on how it would justify the operation based on international law on the global stage. It never came. “At least with Iraq, Libya, Syria, there was an effort to seek legal cover,” one diplomat said, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “This is just grab-and-go.”

After the president vowed to run Venezuela going forward as a vassal state, Trump’s energy secretary said the United States would exert control over its oil production “indefinitely.”

And the Trump administration ordered the seizure of two foreign tankers on Wednesday in international waters that have violated its unilateral oil embargo against Caracas, risking precedent governing the laws of the seas that have for decades ensured international commercial flows.

It was a surprising turn for a president who had campaigned on a promise to focus on domestic policy, under a slogan of “America first.”

“So many of the claims that he was making — both in terms of his power and his politics — was about an inward turn, about standing up for America and attending to core problems that it had failed to face, whereas all these foreign entanglements were distractions to be avoided,” Howell said. “So it is striking that he has assumed this new posture of outward imperialism — land grabs, oil tankers, removing heads of state — all at once.”

Several Republican lawmakers expressed skepticism over Trump’s new posture, warning the president against entrenching the U.S. military in foreign conflicts. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, warned that U.S. military action against Denmark in Greenland “would not be appropriate” after the White House issued an explicit threat of force.

Scholars of the imperial presidency often say that public opinion — not the legislature or the courts — remains the strongest check on executive authority. Trump is ineligible for a third term in office, and has signaled in recent weeks that he recognizes that constitutional limit as unambiguous.

“I don’t think Trump is immune from the laws of political gravity,” Rudalevige said. “Despite his bluster, he is a lame duck. He has never had a Gallup approval rating above 50%, and that rating is in the 30s. His policy actions are even less popular.”

But he also said he believes the public supports him in his brash use of power, telling lawmakers there could be a “constitutional movement” to keep him in office.

“MAGA loves it,” Trump said in an interview with NBC News this week, defending his foreign policy approach. “MAGA loves what I’m doing. MAGA loves everything I do.”

“MAGA is me,” he added. “MAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do, too.”

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Palisades fire report was sent to mayor’s office for ‘refinements,’ Fire Commission president says
The deep dive: Michael Reagan’s death reverberates among Californians of both parties
The L.A. Times Special: One year since my childhood home burned

More to come,
Michael Wilner
—
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SACRAMENTO — In his final State of the State address, Gov. Gavin Newsom will look to define his legacy by touting California’s economic and policy achievements while casting the state as a counterweight to dysfunction in Washington.

The speech, which he will deliver Thursday morning to lawmakers in the Capitol, highlights economic strength, falling homelessness and expanded education funding, while also offering a glimpse of how Newsom is positioning himself beyond his final year in office.

In a summary of the speech provided Thursday morning, Newsom portrayed California as a financial powerhouse that strives to help those in need and works diligently to address its own shortcomings, including high housing costs, unlike the chaotic Trump administration. Newsom, who has acknowleged that he is considered a 2028 bid for president, argues that the state is positioned not just to endure the moment but to help shape what comes next nationally.

Newsom is expected to announce an estimated 9% drop statewide in unsheltered homelessness last year, addressing a topic that has been a persistent political vulnerability for the two-term governor and former San Francisco mayor. Despite some improvements, California has been home to nearly a quarter of the nation’s homeless population, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

Newsom also said two of his top priorities — the mental health program known as CARE Court and Proposition 1, the statewide bond measure he championed to provide funding for mental health and homelessness — are achieving results ahead of schedule, with counties now equipped with funding, authority and tools to combat the crisis.

Calling affordability a multi-layered crisis, Newsom is expected to signal a tougher stance toward the buying spree of homes by private equity and institutional investors in California. That message is a rare point of rhetorical overlap with Trump, who has said the United States should bar such practices because they push prices beyond the reach of many Americans.

Newsom offered a few previews of select budget priorities, with his office set to unveil the full proposed budget on Friday. The governor will announce that the state would set a record on per-student funding in public schools and fully fund universal transitional kindergarten under his budget proposal. He is also expected to announce a major shift in how the state oversees education, unifying the policymaking State Board of Education with the California Department of Education, which is responsible for carrying out those policies.

The address will mark the first time in five years that Newsom delivers a State of the State from the Assembly rostrum. His last in-person address came shortly before COVID-19 shut down the Capitol in early 2020.

Last year, he delivered his written remarks unusually late, in September, during which he said the state was under siege by the Trump administration — which he accused of dismantling public services, flouting the rule of law and using extortion to bully businesses and universities — all while California grappled with the aftermath of the devastating Los Angeles County fires, spiraling housing costs and an uneven economic recovery.

Like past speeches, Newsom will tout the successes of California, now the world’s fourth-largest economy.

A mental health diversion granted to a former Kern County politician is coming under fire from numerous California lawmakers and child welfare advocates, who say a repeatedly amended state law is allowing an accused child abuser to avoid prosecution and possible jail time.

Zack Scrivner, a former Kern County supervisor, was charged with felony child abuse in February after he was accused of inappropriately touching one of his children in 2024. But because of a Dec. 19 ruling by a judge, he will avoid a trial and instead be funneled into a mental health diversion program — an initiative aimed at helping defendants with mental health disorders get treatment instead of imprisonment for certain crimes.

While supporters say mental health diversions help certain defendants get needed mental health treatment, lawmakers in both parties have blasted the Scrivner decision and the legislative changes that led to it. Assemblymember Dr. Jasmeet Bains (D-Delano) issued a scathing statement, describing the ruling as an “Epstein loophole,” a reference to convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

“I specialize in family and addiction medicine, so I know the value of mental health diversion … It was designed to help people get treatment and rehabilitation in appropriate cases, not to provide an escape hatch to sexually assault children,” she said. “This Epstein loophole needs to be closed.”

At the end of their 2018 legislative session, California lawmakers approved a number of legal reforms, many aimed at keeping homeless people out of jail. One of these altered what defendants could qualify for mental health diversions. The change specifically excluded people accused of crimes such as murder, rape and child sex crime but did not exclude those accused of child abuse. Then, in 2022, another amendment to the law directed courts to allow a diversion if a diagnosed mental health disorder played a significant role in the alleged crime unless there is “clear and convincing” evidence it wasn’t a motivating factor.

Since then, controversies have arisen over several judicial decisions. In 2024, a judge granted a mental health diversion to a Pasadena doctor accused of trying to kill his family by driving the family Tesla off a cliff with his wife and two children inside. In Sacramento County, Sheriff Jim Cooper and other officials have criticized a mental health diversion granted to a father arrested in connection with the death of 1-year-old “Baby A,” who had suffered from severe injuries while in her father’s custody.

Emergency personnel respond to a vehicle over the side of Highway 1 on Jan. 1, 2023, in San Mateo County. A Pasadena doctor, Dharmesh Patel, was charged that year with three counts of attempted murder in crashing the car over a cliff, injuring his two young children and his wife. A judge granted him a mental health diversion in 2024, allowing him to live with his parents while receiving treatment.

(Sgt. Brian Moore / Associated Press)

“People are becoming very skeptical of mental health treatment because it’s being used in ways nobody ever intended,” said Matthew Greco, deputy district attorney of San Diego County and author of the California Criminal Mental Health Handbook. The 2022 law change limited the discretion of judges — one reason the California District Attorneys Assn. opposed it, he said. Greco has since heard from judges across the state that they feel their hands are tied. In San Diego County, the number of mental health diversions granted has steadily risen since 2019.

The 2018 law establishing the program had good intentions, he said, but lacked proper legislative vetting.

“We know the central premise behind mental health diversion is that if we obtain mental health treatment for those that are mentally ill that are committing crimes, the public will be safer,” he said. “But we need to have both public safety and treatment.”

In Kern County, Scrivner has numerous political connections in the Republican Party and beyond. He served for 13 years as a county supervisor before resigning in August 2024. He also served on the Bakersfield City Council and had spent four years working for former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Kern County Dist. Atty. Cynthia Zimmer is also the aunt of Scrivner, and before recusing herself from the case, she played a key role in alerting law enforcement to his actions.

At a news conference in April 2024, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said he received a call from Zimmer that Scrivner was armed and experiencing “some type of psychotic episode” at his Tehachapi home. Deputies responded and found that Scrivner had fought with his children, with one of them stabbing him in his torso amid allegations that he had sexually assaulted another of his children, Youngblood said. While Scrivner’s four minor children were at the house at the time, his wife, who had previously filed for divorce, was not.

According to Youngblood, detectives obtained a search warrant and ended up seizing 30 firearms, psychedelic mushrooms, electronic devices and possible evidence of sexual assault in the house.

Things got complicated at that point, given that Kern County’s district attorney was obligated to recuse herself and Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office took over the case.

In February 2025, Bonta’s office charged Scrivner with two felony counts of possessing assault weapons and three felony counts of child abuse. The charges, however, did not include sexual assault, even though the state’s complaint said Scrivner had “consumed mind and/or mood altering drugs and substances, got into bed” with a child and inappropriately touched the child.

On Dec. 19, a Kern County Superior Court judge approved a motion filed by Scrivner’s attorney, H.A. Sala, to allow the former county supervisor to enter a mental health diversion program. Sala, who has not returned multiple requests for comment, presented the court with a medical diagnosis conducted by doctors that Scrivner had been suffering from mental health disorders, including alcohol-use disorder, depression and anxiety, according to a report in the Bakersfield Californian. Sala argued that a treatment program would be the best option for Scrivner, in keeping with the intent of the Legislature.

ln her ruling, Superior Court Judge Stephanie R. Childers sided with Sala, noting the state had “offered no alternative” to the medical diagnosis of Scrivner that had been submitted to the court, according to the Bakersfield Californian.

In response, the state attorney general’s office released a statement saying that it opposed the judge’s decision and “we are reviewing our options.” It added that the office filed charges that it believes the state “can prove beyond a reasonable doubt at trial.” So far, the Kern County Superior Court has declined to release Scrivner’s attorney’s motion, stating it is confidential.

During Scrivner’s Dec. 19 court appearance, according to the Californian, Deputy Atty. Gen. Joe Penney stated that Scrivner “got into bed with the minor victim — while he had alcohol, Ambien, benzos (benzodiazepines) and cocaine metabolites in his system — and fondled her breast area and genital area for a period about 10 minutes while she was frozen in fear.”

State Sen. Shannon Grove (R-Bakersfield) is one of the lawmakers calling for reform of the program in light of Scrivner’s case. She questioned when the state justice system would prioritize vulnerable victims over “the monsters who harm them.”

“A program intended to promote treatment must never be allowed to erode accountability for the most serious and violent crimes against children,” she said in a statement online.

Several lawmakers have introduced bills to modify the mental health diversion law. In 2024, Assemblymember Maggy Krell (D-Sacramento) was unsuccessful in her attempt to exclude defendants from qualifying from the program if they had been charged with child abuse and endangerment, domestic violence that causes great bodily harm or human trafficking.

Krell, a former deputy attorney general, said cases that have stirred outrage seem to be appearing in just about every county, including in her district.

“We should ensure that people who are mentally ill are receiving treatment,” she said, but there has to be accountability when people break the law as well. Krell said she intends to try to submit the bill again. “We need to give courts discretion to make these determinations. We also need to make sure we’re keeping victims safe. There’s just too many examples where this has failed.”

Although some elected officials are seeking reforms to the program, Kern County organizer Flor Olvera said she thinks the focus should include whether Scrivner received preferential treatment.

“You can have a mental health diversion granted, but what is the justice system doing to hold people accountable?” she said. “When it’s people in these powerful positions, it does seem like the system moves differently for them.”

In a Dec. 20 statement, Bains said she sent a letter asking U.S. Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet Dhillon and U.S. Atty. Eric Grant to investigate whether Scrivner violated federal civil rights statutes by leveraging his former status as an elected official.

“This is not justice, and this is not over,” she said.

In a Dec. 24 interview with radio host Ralph Bailey, Sheriff Youngblood said that deputies arrived at Scrivner’s home that day in 2024 and confirmed that the county supervisor was unarmed. Scrivner then got on the phone and asked the sheriff to send the deputies away.

“My response was, ‘no, they’re going to do what they have to do,’” he said. A deputy said there was more to investigate, and Youngblood supported it. Zimmer, the Kern County district attorney, did not ask for a favor, Youngblood said.

Yet questions remain as to why deputies did not arrest Scrivner immediately. Speaking to local media, Youngblood said he had no one who could arraign the supervisor within a limited time frame, but Kern County prosecutors dispute that. Late Wednesday, the sheriff’s office directed inquiries to the state attorney general’s office, after declining to respond to questions over the last week.

Joseph A. Kinzel, the county’s assistant district attorney, said in an email that because Scrivner was not arrested that night, there was no request from law enforcement that charges be filed. Kinzel said that the office immediately determined it would be inappropriate to get involved with the case, and that the office “did everything it should have to ensure that a conflict-free prosecution would occur.”

In the radio interview, Youngblood said that he believed the state attorney general’s office “didn’t do their job correctly” by letting Scrivner avoid a sex crime charge.

“I can only speak for the sheriff’s office, and I can tell you that the deputies that investigated that did absolutely the right thing,” he said. “I believe that the children were all on board and would have done exactly what the court asked them to do, and that is, tell the truth. So from my standpoint, this stinks.”

Who knew that by “America First,” President Trump meant all of the Americas?

In puzzling over that question at least, I’ve got company in Marjorie Taylor Greene, the now-former congresswoman from Georgia and onetime Trump devotee who remains stalwart in his America First movement. Greene tweeted on Saturday, just ahead of Trump’s triumphal news conference about the United States’ decapitation of Venezuela’s government by the military’s middle-of-the-night nabbing of Nicolás Maduro and his wife: “This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end. Boy were we wrong.”

Wrong indeed. Nearly a year into his second term, Trump has done nothing but exacerbate the domestic problems that Greene identified as America First priorities — bringing down the “increasing cost of living, housing, healthcare” within the 50 states — even as he’s pursued the “never ending military aggression” and foreign adventurism that America Firsters scorn, or at least used to. Another Trump con. Another lie.

Here’s a stunning stat, thanks to Military Times: In 2025, Trump ordered 626 missile strikes worldwide, 71 more than President Biden did in his entire four-year term. Targets, so far, have included Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Nigeria, Iran and the waters off Venezuela and Colombia. Lately he’s threatened to hit Iran again if it kills demonstrators who have been marching in Tehran’s streets to protest the country’s woeful economic conditions. (“We are locked and loaded and ready to go,” Trump posted Friday.)

The president doesn’t like “forever wars,” he’s said many times, but he sure loves quick booms and cinematic secret ops. Leave aside, for now, the attacks in the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. It’s Trump’s new claim to “run” Venezuela that has signaled the beginning of his mind-boggling bid for U.S. hegemony over the Western Hemisphere. Any such ambition raises the potential for quick actions to become quagmires.

As Stephen Miller, perhaps Trump’s closest and most like-minded (read: unhinged) advisor, described the administration’s worldview on Monday to CNN’s Jake Tapper: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

You know, that old, amoral iron law: “Might makes right.” Music to Vladimir Putin’s and Xi Jinping’s ears as they seek hegemonic expansion of their own, confident that the United States has given up the moral high ground from which to object.

But it was Trump, the branding maven, who gave the White House worldview its name — his own, of course: the Donroe Doctrine. And it was Trump who spelled out what that might mean in practice for the Americas, in a chest-thumping, war-mongering performance on Sunday returning to Washington aboard Air Force One. The wannabe U.S. king turns out to be a wannabe emperor of an entire hemisphere.

“We’re in charge,” Trump said of Venezuela to reporters. “We’re gonna run it. Fix it. We’ll have elections at the right time.” He added, “If they don’t behave, we’ll do a second strike.” He went on, suggestively, ominously: “Colombia is very sick too,” and “Cuba is ready to fall.” Looking northward, he coveted more: “We need Greenland from a national security situation.”

Separately, Trump recently has said that Colombia’s leftist President Gustavo Petro “does have to watch his ass,” and that, given Trump’s unhappiness with the ungenuflecting Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, “Something’s going to have to be done with Mexico.” In their cases as well as Maduro’s, Trump’s ostensible complaints have been that each has been complacent or complicit with drug cartels.

And yet, just last month Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted in a U.S. court and given a 45-year sentence for his central role in “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.” Hernández helped traffickers ship 400 tons of cocaine into the United States — to “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.” And Trump pardoned him after less than two years in prison.

So it’s implausible that a few weeks later, the U.S. president truly believes in taking a hard line against leaders he suspects of abetting the drug trade. Maybe Trump’s real motivation is something other than drug-running?

In his appearance after the Maduro arrest, Trump used the word “oil” 21 times. On Tuesday, he announced, in a social media post, of course, that he was taking control of the proceeds from up to 50 barrels of Venezuelan oil. (Not that he cares, but that would violate the Constitution, which gives Congress power to appropriate money that comes into the U.S. Treasury.)

Or perhaps, in line with the Monroe Doctrine, our current president has a retro urge to dominate half the world.

Lately his focus has been on Venezuela and South America, but North America is also in his sights. Trump has long said he might target Mexico to hit cartels and that the United States’ other North American neighbor, Canada, should become the 51st state. But it’s a third part of North America — Greenland — that he’s most intent on.

The icy island has fewer than 60,000 people but mineral wealth that’s increasingly accessible given the climate warming that Trump calls a hoax. For him to lay claim isn’t just a problem for the Americas. It’s an existential threat to NATO given that Greenland is an autonomous part of NATO ally Denmark — as Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warned.

Not in 80 years did anyone imagine that NATO — bound by its tenet that an attack on one member is an attack on all — would be attacked from within, least of all from the United States. In a remarkable statement on Tuesday, U.S. allies rallied around Denmark: “It is for Denmark and Greenland, and them only, to decide on matters concerning Denmark and Greenland.”

Trump’s insistence that controlling Greenland is essential to U.S. national security is nuts. The United States has had military bases there since World War II, and all of NATO sees Greenland as critical to defend against Russian and Chinese encroachment in the Arctic. Still, Trump hasn’t ruled out the use of force to take the island.

He imagines himself to be the emperor of the Americas — all of it. Americas First.

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WASHINGTON — The Trump administration will withdraw from dozens of international organizations, including the U.N.’s population agency and the U.N. treaty that establishes international climate negotiations, as the U.S. further retreats from global cooperation.

President Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order suspending U.S. support for 66 organizations, agencies and commissions following his instructions for his administration to review participation in and funding for all international organizations, including those affiliated with the United Nations, according to a White House statement on social media.

Most of the targets are U.N.-related agencies, commissions and advisory panels that focus on climate, labor and other issues that the Trump administration has categorized as catering to diversity and “woke” initiatives, according to a partial list obtained by The Associated Press.

“The Trump Administration has found these institutions to be redundant in their scope, mismanaged, unnecessary, wasteful, poorly run, captured by the interests of actors advancing their own agendas contrary to our own, or a threat to our nation’s sovereignty, freedoms, and general prosperity,” the State Department said in a statement.

Trump’s decision to withdraw from organizations that foster cooperation among nations to address global challenges comes as his administration has launched military efforts or issued threats that have rattled allies and adversaries alike, including capturing autocratic Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and indicating an intention to take over Greenland.

This is the latest U.S. withdrawal from global agencies

The administration previously suspended support from agencies like the World Health Organization, the U.N. for Palestinian refugees known as UNRWA, the U.N. Human Rights Council and the U.N. cultural agency UNESCO as it has taken a larger, a-la-carte approach to paying its dues to the world body, picking which operations and agencies they believe align with Trump’s agenda and those which no longer serve U.S. interests.

“I think what we’re seeing is the crystallization of the U.S. approach to multilateralism, which is ‘my way or the highway,’” said Daniel Forti, head of U.N. affairs at the International Crisis Group. “It’s a very clear vision of wanting international cooperation on Washington’s own terms.”

It has marked a major shift from how previous administrations — both Republican and Democratic — have dealt with the U.N., and it has forced the world body, already undergoing its own internal reckoning, to respond with a series of staffing and program cuts.

Many independent nongovernmental agencies — some that work with the United Nations — have cited many project closures because of the U.S. administration’s decision last year to slash foreign assistance through the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID.

Despite the massive shift, the U.S. officials, including Trump himself, say they have seen the potential of the U.N. and want to instead focus taxpayer money on expanding American influence in many of the standard-setting U.N. initiatives where there is competition with China, like the International Telecommunications Union, the International Maritime Organization and the International Labor Organization.

The global organizations from which the U.S. is departing

The withdrawal from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, is the latest effort by Trump and his allies to distance the U.S. from international organizations focused on climate and addressing climate change.

UNFCC, the 1992 agreement between 198 countries to financially support climate change activities in developing countries, is the underlying treaty for the landmark Paris climate agreement. Trump — who calls climate change a hoax — withdrew from that agreement soon after reclaiming the White House.

Mainstream scientists say climate change is behind increasing instances of deadly and costly extreme weather, including flooding, droughts, wildfires, intense rainfall events and dangerous heat.

The U.S. withdrawal could hinder global efforts to curb greenhouse gases because it “gives other nations the excuse to delay their own actions and commitments,” said Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson, who chairs the Global Carbon Project, a group of scientists that tracks countries’ carbon dioxide emissions.

It also will be difficult to achieve meaningful progress on climate change without cooperation from the U.S., one of the world’s largest emitters and economies, experts said.

The U.N.’s population agency, which provides sexual and reproductive health across the world, has long been a lightning rod for Republican opposition and Trump himself cut funding for the agency during his first term in office. He and other GOP officials have accused the agency of participating in “coercive abortion practices” in countries like China.

When President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, he restored funding for the agency. A State Department review conducted the following year found no evidence to support these claims.

Other organizations and agencies that the U.S. will quit include the Carbon Free Energy Compact, the United Nations University, the International Cotton Advisory Committee, the International Tropical Timber Organization, the Partnership for Atlantic Cooperation, the Pan-American Institute for Geography and History, the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies and the International Lead and Zinc Study Group.

The State Department said additional reviews are ongoing.

Lee and Amiri write for the Associated Press. Amiri reported from the United Nations. AP writer Tammy Webber reported from Fenton, Mich.

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s administration on Wednesday sought to assert its control over Venezuelan oil, seizing a pair of sanctioned tankers transporting petroleum and announcing plans to relax some sanctions so the U.S. can oversee the sale of Venezuela’s petroleum worldwide.

Trump’s administration intends to control the distribution of Venezuela’s oil products globally following its ouster of President Nicolás Maduro in a surprise nighttime raid. Besides the United States enforcing an existing oil embargo, the Energy Department says the “only oil transported in and out of Venezuela” will be through approved channels consistent with U.S. law and national security interests.

That level of control over the world’s largest proven reserves of crude oil could give the Trump administration a broader hold on oil supplies globally in ways that could enable it to influence prices. Both moves reflect the Republican administration’s determination to make good on its effort to control the next steps in Venezuela through its vast oil resources after Trump has pledged the U.S. will “run” the country.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested that the oil taken from the sanctioned vessels seized in the North Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea would be sold as part of the deal announced by Trump on Tuesday under which Venezuela would provide up to 50 million barrels of oil to the U.S.

“One of those ships that was seized that had oil in the Caribbean, you know what the interim authorities are asking for in Venezuela?” Rubio told reporters after briefing lawmakers Wednesday about the Maduro operation. “They want that oil that was seized to be part of this deal. They understand that the only way they can move oil and generate revenue and not have economic collapse is if they cooperate and work with the United States.”

Seizing 2 more vessels

U.S. European Command said on social media that the merchant vessel Bella 1 was seized in the North Atlantic for “violations of U.S. sanctions.” The U.S. had been pursuing the tanker since last month after it tried to evade a blockade on sanctioned oil vessels around Venezuela.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem revealed U.S. forces also took control of the M Sophia in the Caribbean Sea. Noem said on social media that both ships were “either last docked in Venezuela or en route to it.”

The two ships join at least two others that were taken by U.S. forces last month — the Skipper and the Centuries.

The Bella 1 had been cruising across the Atlantic nearing the Caribbean on Dec. 15 when it abruptly turned and headed north, toward Europe. The change in direction came days after the first U.S. tanker seizure of a ship on Dec. 10 after it had left Venezuela carrying oil.

When the U.S. Coast Guard tried to board the Bella 1, it fled. U.S. European Command said a Coast Guard vessel had tracked the ship “pursuant to a warrant issued by a U.S. federal court.”

As the U.S. pursued it, the Bella 1 was renamed Marinera and flagged to Russia, shipping databases show. A U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations, said the ship’s crew had painted a Russian flag on the side of the hull.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said it had information about Russian nationals among the Marinera’s crew and, in a statement carried by Russia’s state news agencies Tass and RIA Novosti, demanded that “the American side ensure humane and dignified treatment of them, strictly respect their rights and interests, and not hinder their speedy return to their homeland.”

Separately, a senior Russian lawmaker, Andrei Klishas, decried the U.S. action as “blatant piracy.”

The Justice Department is investigating crew members of the Bella 1 vessel for failing to obey Coast Guard orders and “criminal charges will be pursued against all culpable actors,” Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said.

“The Department of Justice is monitoring several other vessels for similar enforcement action — anyone on any vessel who fails to obey instructions of the Coast Guard or other federal officials will be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Bondi said on X.

The ship had been sanctioned by the U.S. in 2024 on allegations of smuggling cargo for a company linked to Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran.

Easing sanctions so U.S. can sell oil

The Trump administration, meanwhile, is “selectively” removing sanctions to enable the shipping and sale of Venezuelan oil to markets worldwide, according to an outline of the policies published Wednesday by the Energy Department.

The sales are slated to begin immediately with 30 million to 50 million barrels of oil. The U.S. government said the sales “will continue indefinitely,” with the proceeds settling in U.S.-controlled accounts at “globally recognized banks.” The money would be disbursed to the U.S. and Venezuelan populations at the “discretion” of Trump’s government.

Venezuelan state-owned oil company PDVSA said it is in negotiations with the U.S. government for the sale of crude oil.

“This process is developed under schemes similar to those in force with international companies, such as Chevron, and is based on a strictly commercial transaction, with criteria of legality, transparency and benefit for both parties,” the company said in the statement.

The U.S. plans to authorize the importation of oil field equipment, parts and services to increase Venezuela’s oil production, which has been roughly 1 million barrels a day.

The Trump administration has indicated it also will invest in Venezuela’s electricity grid to increase production and the quality of life for people in Venezuela, whose economy has been unraveling amid changes to foreign aid and cuts to state subsidies, making necessities, including food, unaffordable to millions.

Ships said to be part of a shadow fleet

Noem said both seized ships were part of a shadow fleet of rusting oil tankers that smuggle oil for countries facing sanctions, such as Venezuela, Russia and Iran.

After the seizure of the now-named Marinera, which open-source maritime tracking sites showed was between Scotland and Iceland earlier Wednesday, the U.K. defense ministry said Britain’s military provided support, including surveillance aircraft.

“This ship, with a nefarious history, is part of a Russian-Iranian axis of sanctions evasion which is fueling terrorism, conflict, and misery from the Middle East to Ukraine,” U.K. Defense Secretary John Healey said.

The capture of the M Sophia, on the U.S. sanctions list for moving illicit cargos of oil from Russia, in the Caribbean was much less prolonged.

The ship had been “running dark,” not having transmitted location data since July. Tankers involved in smuggling often turn off their transponders or broadcast inaccurate data to hide their locations.

Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, said his organization used satellite imagery and surface-level photos to document that at least 16 tankers had left the Venezuelan coast since Saturday, after the U.S. captured Maduro.

The M Sophia was among them, Madani said, citing a recent photo showing it in the waters near Jose Terminal, Venezuela’s main oil export hub.

Windward, a maritime intelligence firm that tracks such vessels, said in a briefing to reporters the M Sophia loaded at the terminal on Dec. 26 and was carrying about 1.8 million barrels of crude oil — a cargo that would be worth about $108 million at current price of about $60 a barrel.

The press office for Venezuela’s government did not immediately respond to an Associated Press request for comment on the seizures.

Toropin, Boak, Lawless and Biesecker write for the Associated Press. Lawless reported from London.

Spencer Pratt, a reality television star who lost his home in the Palisades fire and then emerged as a sharp critic of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom, announced Wednesday that he will run for mayor.

The former star of “The Hills” has spent much of the last year firing off social media posts blaming the mayor and governor for the Palisades fire, which killed 12 people and burned more than 6,800 homes.

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Pratt made his announcement at the “They Let Us Burn” event in Pacific Palisades on the one-year anniversary of the fire.

“We’re going to expose the system. We’re going into every dark corner of L.A. politics and disinfecting the city with our light,” he said to a crowd of hundreds, many of whom cheered.

Former L.A. schools Supt. Austin Beutner, who is running against Bass, has also attacked the mayor’s performance on the fire, saying she has not accepted responsibility for the city’s failures.

Community organizer Rae Huang, who is running from Bass’ left, has offered her own critique, saying the mayor has engaged in too much finger-pointing.

Still unclear is whether real estate developer Rick Caruso — another outspoken critic of Bass on the fire — will launch a second mayoral bid. Bass defeated him in 2022 by a comfortable margin.

L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, who represents the areas that burned in the Palisades fire and who has also criticized the city’s response to the fire, said Monday night that she is still considering her own run for L.A. mayor.

Speaking with CNN’s Elex Michaelson, Horvath said she is “listening to a lot of the people who are encouraging me to get into this race, people who are looking for a different kind of leadership.”

“You know, there are a lot of people who are asking me about running for mayor,” Horvath said. “And I think it’s because they see that we are setting up in the county a different structure of accountability, and that’s long overdue for the region.”

The Palisades fire has become a serious political liability for Bass as the mayoral race gains momentum. She was out of the country on a diplomatic mission to Ghana when the fire ignited.

Since then, she has faced criticism over a series of issues surrounding the city’s emergency response, including LAFD deployment, the fact that the Santa Ynez reservoir was empty, and the Fire Department’s failure to put out a New Year’s Day fire that eventually rekindled into the Palisades fire.

Bass, for her part, said Tuesday that she is using the full extent of her mayoral powers to “restore the Palisades community and return families home as quickly and safely as possible.”

Bass’ campaign team did not immediately respond to an inquiry about Pratt’s announcement. But earlier this week, they took direct aim at Pratt and other critics, accusing them of using the disaster for their personal benefit.

“For the first time ever we saw a major wildfire politicized by MAGA leaders and monetized by social influencers making tens of thousands of dollars per month and hawking books on the backs of a devastated community,” said Bass campaign spokesperson Doug Herman. “While some may choose to divide people and tear down the progress that’s being made, Mayor Bass will continue to work to unite people and focus on doing everything that she can to get everyone in the Palisades back in homes, business re-opened, and beloved community spaces up and running again so that the Palisades can once again thrive.

Pratt and his wife, reality television personality Heidi Montag, sued the city in January after their Palisades house burned down, arguing that the Santa Ynez reservoir should not have been offline and empty when the fire erupted.

As recently as Tuesday, Pratt posted on X saying he was “shocked that 7% of Angelenos have ‘a great deal of confidence’ in their city and state government.”

“Have they looked around?” he wrote.

In the past, Pratt has also hinted at a run for governor. On his website, he still advertises “Spencer for Governor” shirts for $20, at a more than a 50% discount.

Pratt became famous in the aughts for his role on “The Hills,” where he was known as Montag’s boyfriend-turned-husband. He has also appeared on “Celebrity Big Brother” and “The Hills: New Beginnings.”

The Trump administration announced a major overhaul of American nutrition guidelines Wednesday, replacing the old, carbohydrate-heavy food pyramid with one that prioritizes protein, healthy fats and whole grains.

“Our government declares war on added sugar,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a White House news conference announcing the changes. “We are ending the war on saturated fats.”

“If a foreign adversary sought to destroy the health of our children, to cripple our economy, to weaken our national security, there would be no better strategy than to addict us to ultra-processed foods,” Kennedy said.

Improving U.S. eating habits and the availability of nutritious foods is an issue with broad bipartisan support, and has been a long-standing goal of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement.

During the news conference, he acknowledged both the American Medical Assn. and the American Academy of Pediatrics for partnering on the new guidelines — two organizations that earlier this week condemned the administration’s decision to slash the number of diseases that U.S. children are vaccinated against.

“The American Medical Association applauds the administration’s new Dietary Guidelines for spotlighting the highly processed foods, sugar-sweetened beverages, and excess sodium that fuel heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and other chronic illnesses,” AMA President Bobby Mukkamala said in a statement.

Russian officials indicated in 2019 that the Kremlin would be willing to back off from its support for Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela in exchange for a free hand in Ukraine, according to Fiona Hill, an advisor to President Trump at the time.

The Russians repeatedly floated the idea of a “very strange swap arrangement between Venezuela and Ukraine,” Hill said during a congressional hearing in 2019. Her comments surfaced again this week and were shared on social media after the U.S. stealth operation to capture Maduro.

Hill said Russia pushed the idea through articles in Russian media that referenced the Monroe Doctrine — a 19th-century principle in which the U.S. opposed European meddling in the Western Hemisphere and, in return, agreed to stay out of European affairs. It was invoked by Trump to justify the U.S. intervention in Venezuela.

Even though Russian officials never made a formal offer, Moscow’s then-ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, hinted many times to her that Russia was willing to allow the United States to act as it wished in Venezuela if the U.S. did the same for Russia in Europe, Hill told the Associated Press this week.

“Before there was a ‘hint hint, nudge nudge, wink wink, how about doing a deal?’ But nobody [in the U.S.] was interested then,” Hill said.

Trump dispatched Hill — then his senior advisor on Russia and Europe — to Moscow in April 2019 to deliver that message. She said she told Russian officials “Ukraine and Venezuela are not related to each other.”

At that time, she said, the White House was aligned with allies in recognizing Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido as the country’s interim president.

But fast forward seven years and the situation is different.

After ousting Maduro, the U.S. has said it will now “run” Venezuela policy. Trump also has renewed his threat to take over Greenland — a self-governing territory of Denmark and part of the NATO military alliance — and threatened to take military action against Colombia for facilitating the global sale of cocaine.

The Kremlin will be “thrilled” with the idea that large countries — such as Russia, the United States and China — get spheres of influence because it proves “might makes right,” Hill said.

Trump’s actions in Venezuela make it harder for Kyiv’s allies to condemn Russia’s designs on Ukraine as “illegitimate” because “we’ve just had a situation where the U.S. has taken over — or at least decapitated the government of another country — using fiction,” Hill told AP.

The Trump administration has described its raid in Venezuela as a law enforcement operation and has insisted that capturing Maduro was legal.

The Russian Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Hill’s account.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has not commented on the military operation to oust Maduro but the Foreign Ministry issued statements condemning U.S. “aggression.”

Burrows writes for the Associated Press.

CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuela’s opposition supporters have long hoped for the day when Nicolás Maduro is no longer in power — a dream that was fulfilled when the U.S. military whisked the authoritarian leader away. But while Maduro is in jail in New York on drug trafficking charges, the leaders of his repressive administration remain in charge.

The nation’s opposition — backed by consecutive Republican and Democratic administrations in the U.S. — for years vowed to immediately replace Maduro with one of their own and restore democracy to the oil-rich country. But President Trump delivered them a heavy blow by allowing Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, to assume control.

Meanwhile, most opposition leaders, including Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado, are in exile or prison.

“They were clearly unimpressed by the sort of ethereal magical realism of the opposition, about how if they just gave Maduro a push, it would just be this instant move toward democracy,” David Smilde, a Tulane University professor who has studied Venezuela for three decades, said of the Trump administration.

The U.S. seized Maduro and first lady Cilia Flores in a military operation Saturday, removing them both from their home on a military base in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas. Hours later, Trump said the U.S. would “run” Venezuela and expressed skepticism that Machado could ever be its leader.

“She doesn’t have the support within, or the respect within, the country,” Trump told reporters. “She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect.”

Ironically, Machado’s unending praise for the American president, including dedicating her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump and her backing of U.S. campaigns to deport Venezuelan migrants and attack alleged drug traffickers in international waters, has lost her some support at home.

The rightful winner of Venezuela’s presidential election

Machado rose to become Maduro’s strongest opponent in recent years, but his government barred her from running for office to prevent her from challenging — and likely beating — him in the 2024 presidential election. She chose retired ambassador Edmundo González Urrutia to represent her on the ballot.

Officials loyal to the ruling party declared Maduro the winner mere hours after the polls closed, but Machado’s well-organized campaign stunned the nation by collecting detailed tally sheets showing González had defeated Maduro by a 2-to-1 margin.

The U.S. and other nations recognized González as the legitimate winner.

However, Venezuelans identify Machado, not González, as the winner, and the charismatic opposition leader has remained the voice of the campaign, pushing for international support and insisting her movement will replace Maduro.

In her first televised interview since Maduro’s capture, Machado effusively praised Trump and failed to acknowledge his snub of her opposition movement in the latest transition of power.

“I spoke with President Trump on Oct. 10, the same day the prize was announced, not since then,” she told Fox News on Monday. “What he has done as I said is historic, and it’s a huge step toward a democratic transition.”

Hopes for a new election

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday seemed to walk back Trump’s assertion that the U.S. would “run” Venezuela. In interviews, Rubio insisted that Washington will use control of Venezuela’s oil industry to force policy changes, and called its current government illegitimate. The country is home to the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves.

Neither Trump nor Rodríguez have said when, or if, elections might take place in Venezuela.

Venezuela’s constitution requires an election within 30 days whenever a president becomes “permanently unavailable” to serve. Reasons listed include death, resignation, removal from office or “abandonment” of duties as declared by the National Assembly. That electoral timeline was rigorously followed when Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, died of cancer in 2013.

On Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally who traveled with the president on Air Force One on Sunday, said he believes an election will happen but did not specify when or how.

“We’re going to build the country up – infrastructure wise – crescendoing with an election that will be free,” the South Carolina Republican told reporters.

But Maduro loyalists in the high court Saturday, citing another provision of the constitution, declared Maduro’s absence “temporary” meaning there is no election requirement. Instead, the vice president — which is not an elected position — takes over for up to 90 days, with a provision to extend to six months if approved by the National Assembly, which is controlled by the ruling party.

Challenges lie ahead for the opposition

In its ruling, Venezuela’s Supreme Court made no mention of the 180-day limit, leading to speculation that Rodríguez could try to cling to power as she seeks to unite ruling party factions and shield it from what would certainly be a stiff electoral challenge.

Machado on Monday criticized Rodríguez as “one the main architects of torture, persecution, corruption, narco-trafficking … certainly not an individual that can be trusted by international investors.”

Even if an election takes place, Machado and González would first have to find a way back into Venezuela.

González has been in exile in Spain since September 2024 and Machado left Venezuela last month when she appeared in public for the first time in 11 months to receive her Nobel Prize in Norway.

Ronal Rodríguez, a researcher at the Venezuela Observatory in Colombia’s Universidad del Rosario, said the Trump administration’s decision to work with Rodríguez could harm the nation’s “democratic spirit.”

“What the opposition did in the 2024 election was to unite with a desire to transform the situation in Venezuela through democratic means, and that is embodied by María Corina Machado and, obviously, Edmundo González Urrutia,” he said. “To disregard that is to belittle, almost to humiliate, Venezuelans.”

Cano writes for the Associated Press.

MIAMI — In 2017, as political outsider Donald Trump headed to Washington, Delcy Rodríguez spotted an opening.

Then Venezuela’s foreign minister, Rodríguez directed Citgo — a subsidiary of the state oil company — to make a $500,000 donation to the president’s inauguration. With the socialist administration of Nicolas Maduro struggling to feed Venezuela, Rodríguez gambled on a deal that would have opened the door to American investment. Around the same time, she saw that Trump’s ex-campaign manager was hired as a lobbyist for Citgo, courted Republicans in Congress and tried to secure a meeting with the head of Exxon.

The charm offensive flopped. Within weeks of taking office, Trump, urged by then-Sen. Marco Rubio, made restoring Venezuela’s democracy his driving focus in response to Maduro’s crackdown on opponents. But the outreach did bear fruit for Rodríguez, making her a prominent face in U.S. business and political circles and paving the way for her own rise.

“She’s an ideologue, but a practical one,” said Lee McClenny, a retired foreign service officer who was the top U.S. diplomat in Caracas during the period of Rodríguez’s outreach. “She knew that Venezuela needed to find a way to resuscitate a moribund oil economy and seemed willing to work with the Trump administration to do that.”

Nearly a decade later, as Venezuela’s interim president, Rodríguez’s message — that Venezuela is open for business — seems to have persuaded Trump. In the days since Maduro’s stunning capture Saturday, he’s alternately praised Rodríguez as a “gracious” American partner while threatening a similar fate as her former boss if she doesn’t keep the ruling party in check and provide the U.S. with “total access” to the country’s vast oil reserves. One thing neither has mentioned is elections, something the constitution mandates must take place within 30 days of the presidency being permanently vacated.

This account of Rodríguez’s political rise is drawn from interviews with 10 former U.S. and Venezuelan officials as well as businessmen from both countries who’ve had extensive dealings with Rodríguez and in some cases have known her since childhood. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from someone who they almost universally described as bookishly smart, sometimes charming but above all a cutthroat operator who doesn’t tolerate dissent. Rodríguez didn’t respond to AP requests for an interview.

Father’s murder hardens leftist outlook

Rodríguez entered the leftist movement started by Hugo Chávez late — and on the coattails of her older brother, Jorge Rodríguez, who as head of the National Assembly swore her in as interim president Monday.

Tragedy during their childhood fed a hardened leftist outlook that would stick with the siblings throughout their lives. In 1976 — when, amid the Cold War, U.S. oil companies, American political spin doctors and Pentagon advisers exerted great influence in Venezuela — a little-known urban guerrilla group kidnapped a Midwestern businessman. Rodriguez’s father, a socialist leader, was picked up for questioning and died in custody.

McClenny remembers Rodríguez bringing up the murder in their meetings and bitterly blaming the U.S. for being left fatherless at the age of 7. The crime would radicalize another leftist of the era: Maduro.

Years later, while Jorge Rodríguez was a top electoral official under Chávez, he secured for his sister a position in the president’s office.

But she advanced slowly at first and clashed with colleagues who viewed her as a haughty know-it-all.

In 2006, on a whirlwind international tour, Chávez booted her from the presidential plane and ordered her to fly home from Moscow on her own, according to two former officials who were on the trip. Chávez was upset because the delegation’s schedule of meetings had fallen apart and that triggered a feud with Rodriguez, who was responsible for the agenda.

“It was painful to watch how Chávez talked about her,” said one of the former officials. “He would never say a bad thing about women but the whole flight home he kept saying she was conceited, arrogant, incompetent.”

Days later, she was fired and never occupied another high-profile role with Chávez.

Political revival and soaring power under Maduro

Years later, in 2013, Maduro revived Rodríguez’s career after Chávez died of cancer and he took over.

A lawyer educated in Britain and France, Rodríguez speaks English and spent large amounts of time in the United States. That gave her an edge in the internal power struggles among Chavismo — the movement started by Chávez, whose many factions include democratic socialists, military hardliners who Chávez led in a 1992 coup attempt and corrupt actors, some with ties to drug trafficking.

Her more worldly outlook, and refined tastes, also made Rodríguez a favorite of the so-called “boligarchs” — a new elite that made fortunes during Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution. One of those insiders, media tycoon Raul Gorrín, worked hand-in-glove with Rodríguez’s back-channel efforts to mend relations with the first Trump administration and helped organize a secret visit by Rep. Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican, to Caracas in April 2018 for a meeting with Maduro. A few months later, U.S. federal prosecutors unsealed the first of two money laundering indictments against Gorrin.

After Maduro promoted Rodríguez to vice president in 2018, she gained control over large swaths of Venezuela’s oil economy. To help manage the petro-state, she brought in foreign advisers with experience in global markets. Among them were two former finance ministers in Ecuador who helped run a dollarized, export-driven economy under fellow leftist Rafael Correa. Another key associate is French lawyer David Syed, who for years has been trying to renegotiate Venezuela’s foreign debt in the face of crippling U.S. sanctions that make it impossible for Wall Street investors to get repaid.

“She sacrificed her personal life for her political career,” said one former friend.

As she amassed more power, she crushed internal rivals. Among them: once powerful Oil Minister Tareck El Aissami, who was jailed in 2024 as part of an anti-corruption crackdown spearheaded by Rodríguez.

In her de-facto role as Venezuela’s chief operating officer, Rodríguez proved a more flexible, trustworthy partner than Maduro. Some have likened her to a sort of Venezuelan Deng Xiaoping — the architect of modern China.

Hans Humes, chief executive of Greylock Capital Management, said that experience will serve her well as she tries to jump-start the economy, unite Chavismo and shield Venezuela from stricter terms dictated by Trump. Imposing an opposition-led government right now, he said, could trigger bloodshed of the sort that ripped apart Iraq after U.S. forces toppled Saddam Hussein and formed a provisional government including many leaders who had been exiled for years.

“We’ve seen how expats who have been outside of the country for too long think things should be the way it was before they left,” said Humes, who has met with Maduro as well as Rodríguez on several occasions. “You need people who know how to work with how things are not how they were.”

Democracy deferred?

Where Rodríguez’s more pragmatic leadership style leaves Venezuela’s democracy is uncertain.

Trump, in remarks after Maduro’s capture, said Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado lacks the “respect” to govern Venezuela despite her handpicked candidate winning what the U.S. and other governments consider a landslide victory in 2024 presidential elections stolen by Maduro.

Elliott Abrams, who served as special envoy to Venezuela during the first Trump administration, said it is impossible for the president to fulfill his goal of banishing criminal gangs, drug traffickers and Middle Eastern terrorists from the Western Hemisphere with the various factions of Chavismo sharing power.

“Nothing that Trump has said suggests his administration is contemplating a quick transition away from Delcy. No one is talking about elections,” said Abrams. “If they think Delcy is running things, they are completely wrong.”

Goodman writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security said Tuesday that it launched what it described as the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out by the agency — with 2,000 federal agents and officers expected in the Minneapolis area for a crackdown tied in part to allegations of fraud involving Somali residents.

“The largest DHS operation ever is happening right now in Minnesota,” the department said in a post on X, dramatically expanding the federal law enforcement footprint in the state amid heightened political and community tensions.

The government planned to send about 2,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and officers to Minnesota, according to a U.S. official and a person briefed on the matter. The agents are expected to be dispatched in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, the person said. The people were not authorized to publicly discuss operational details and spoke with the Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.

Immigrant rights groups and elected officials in the Twin Cities reported a sharp increase Tuesday in sightings of federal agents, notably around St. Paul. Numerous agents’ vehicles were reported making traffic stops, outside area businesses and apartment buildings.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was also present and accompanied U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers during at least one arrest. A video posted on X showed Noem wearing a tactical vest and knit cap as agents arrested a man in St. Paul. In the video, she tells the handcuffed man: “You will be held accountable for your crimes.”

DHS said in a news release that the man was from Ecuador and was wanted in his homeland and Connecticut on charges including murder and sexual assault. It said agents arrested 150 people Monday in enforcement actions in Minneapolis.

Minnesota governor blasts surge

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, criticized the federal enforcement surge as “a war that’s being waged against Minnesota.”

“You’re seeing that we have a ridiculous surge of apparently 2,000 people not coordinating with us, that are for a show of cameras,” Walz told reporters in Minneapolis on Tuesday, a day after announcing he was ending his campaign for a third term.

Many residents were already on edge. The Trump administration has singled out the area’s Somali community, the largest in the U.S. Last month, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara criticized federal agents for using “questionable methods” following a confrontation between agents and protesters.

Molly Coleman, a St. Paul City Council member whose district includes a manufacturing plant where agents arrested more than a dozen people in November, said Tuesday was “unlike any other day we’ve experienced.”

“It’s incredibly distressing,” Coleman said. “What we know happens when ICE comes into a city, it’s an enforcement in which every single person is on guard and afraid.”

Julia Decker, policy director at the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, said there had been an increase in sightings of federal agents and enforcement vehicles in locations like parking lots.

“We can definitely a feel a heavier presence,” said Dieu Do, an organizer with the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee, which dispatches response teams to reports of agents.

Surge includes investigators focused on fraud allegations

Roughly three-quarters of the enforcement personnel are expected to come from ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, which carries out immigration arrests and deportations, said the person with knowledge of the operation. The force also includes agents from Homeland Security Investigations, ICE’s investigative arm, which typically focuses on fraud and cross-border criminal networks.

HSI agents were going door-to-door in the Twin Cities area investigating allegations of fraud, human smuggling and unlawful employment practices, Lyons said.

The HSI agents are largely expected to concentrate on identifying suspected fraud, while deportation officers will conduct arrests of immigrants accused of violating immigration law, according to the person briefed on the operation. Specialized tactical units are also expected to be involved.

The operation also includes personnel from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, including Cmdr. Gregory Bovino, the person familiar with the deployment said. Bovino’s tactics during previous federal operations in other cities have drawn scrutiny from local officials and civil rights advocates.

Hilton drops Minnesota hotel that canceled agents’ reservations

Hilton said in a statement Tuesday that it was removing a Minnesota hotel from its systems for “not meeting our standards and values” when it denied service to federal agents.

The Hampton Inn Lakeville hotel, about 20 miles outside Minneapolis, apologized Monday for canceling the reservations of federal agents, saying it would work to accommodate them. The hotel, like the majority of Hampton Inns, is owned and operated by a franchisee.

The Hampton Inn Lakeville did not respond to requests for comment.

Federal authorities began increasing immigration arrests in the Minneapolis area late last year. Noem and FBI Director Kash Patel announced last week that federal agencies were intensifying operations in Minnesota, with an emphasis on fraud investigations.

President Trump has repeatedly linked his administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota to fraud cases involving federal nutrition and pandemic aid programs, many of which have involved defendants with roots in Somalia.

The person with information about the current operation cautioned that its scope and duration could shift in the coming days as it develops.

Santana and Balsamo write for the Associated Press. Balsamo reported from New York. AP journalists Steve Karnowski in Minneapolis, Sophia Tareen in Chicago and Sarah Raza in Sioux Falls, S.D., Russ Bynum in Savannah, Ga., and Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.

Former vice presidential contender and current aw-shucks Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz announced this week that he won’t run for a third term, dogged by a scandal over child care funds that may or may not be going to fraudsters.

It’s a politically driven mess that not coincidentally focuses on a Black immigrant community, tying the real problem of scammers stealing government funds to the growing MAGA frenzy around an imaginary version of America that thrives on whiteness and Christianity.

Despite the ugliness of current racial politics in America, the fraud remains real, and not just in Minnesota. California has lost billions to cheats in the last few years, leaving our own governor, who also harbors D.C. dreams, vulnerable to the same sort of attack that has taken down Walz.

As we edge closer to the 2028 presidential election, Republicans and Democrats alike will probably come at Gavin Newsom with critiques of the state’s handling of COVID-19 funds, unemployment insurance and community college financial aid to name a few of the honeypots that have been successfully swiped by thieves during his tenure.

In fact, President Trump said as much on his social media barf-fest this week.

“California, under Governor Gavin Newscum, is more corrupt than Minnesota, if that’s possible??? The Fraud Investigation of California has begun,” he wrote.

Right-wing commentator Benny Johnson also said he’s conducting his own “investigation.” And Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton is claiming his fraud tip line has turned up “(c)orruption, fraud and abuse on an epic scale.”

Just to bring home that this vulnerability is serious and bipartisan, Rep. Ro Khanna, the Silicon Valley congressman rumored to have his own interest in the Oval Office, is also circling the fraud feast like a vulture eyeing his next meal.

“I want to hear from residents in my district and across the state about waste, mismanagement, inefficiencies, or fraud that we must tackle,” Khanna wrote on social media.

Newsom’s spokesman Izzy Gardon questioned the validity of many fraud claims.

“In the actual world where adults govern,” Gardon said, “Gavin Newsom has been cleaning house. Since taking office, he’s blocked over $125 BILLION in fraud, arrested criminal parasites leaching off of taxpayers, and protected taxpayers from the exact kind of scam artists Trump celebrates, excuses, and pardons.”

What exactly are we talking about here? Well, it’s a pick-your-scandal type of thing. Even before the federal government dumped billions in aid into the states during the pandemic, California’s unemployment system was plagued by inefficiencies and yes, scammers. But when the world shut down and folks needed that government cash to survive, malfeasance skyrocketed.

Every thief with a half-baked plan — including CEOs, prisoners behind bars and overseas organized crime rackets — came for California’s cash, and seemingly got it. The sad part is these weren’t criminal geniuses. More often than not, they were low-level swindlers looking at a system full of holes because it was trying to do too much too fast.

In a matter of months, billions had been siphoned away. A state audit in 2021 found that at least $10 billion had been paid out on suspicious unemployment claims — never mind small business loans or other types of aid. An investigation by CalMatters in 2023 suggested the final figure may be up to triple that amount for unemployment. In truth, no one knows exactly how much was stolen — in California, or across the country.

It hasn’t entirely stopped. California is still paying out fraudulent unemployment claims at too high a rate, totaling up to $1.5 billion over the last few years — more than $500 million in 2024 alone, according to the state auditor.

But that’s not all. Enterprising thieves looked elsewhere when COVID-19 money largely dried up. Recently, that has been our community colleges, where millions in federal student aid has been lost to grifters who use bots to sign up for classes, receive government money to help with school, then disappear. Another CalMatters investigation using data obtained from a public records request found that up to 34% of community college applications in 2024 may have been false — though that number represents fraudulent admissions that were flagged and blocked, Gardon points out.

Still, community college fraud will probably be a bigger issue for Newsom because it’s fresher, and can be tied (albeit disingenuously) to immigrants and progressive policies.

California allows undocumented residents to enroll in community colleges, and it made those classes free — two terrific policies that have been exploited by the unscrupulous. For a while, community colleges didn’t do enough to ensure that students were real people, because they didn’t require enough proof of identity. This was in part to accommodate vulnerable students such as foster kids, homeless people and undocumented folks who lacked papers.

With no up-front costs for attempting to enroll, phonies threw thousands of identities at the system’s 116 schools, which were technologically unprepared for the assaults. These “ghost” students were often accepted and given grants and loans.

My former colleague Kaitlyn Huamani reported that in 2024, scammers stole roughly $8.4 million in federal financial aid and more than $2.7 million in state aid from our community colleges. That‘s a pittance compared with the tens of billions that was handed out in state and federal financial aid, but more than enough for a political fiasco.

As Walz would probably explain if nuanced policy conversations were still a thing, it’s both a fair and unfair criticism to blame these robberies on a governor alone — state government should be careful of its cash and aggressive in protecting it, and the buck stops with the governor, but crises and technology have collided to create opportunities for swindlers that frankly few governmental leaders, from the feds on down, have handled with any skill or luck.

The crooks have simply been smarter and faster than the rest of us to capitalize first on the pandemic, then on evolving technology including AI that makes scamming easier and scalable to levels our institutions were unprepared to handle.

Since being so roundly fleeced during the pandemic, multiple state and federal agencies have taken steps in combating fraud — including community colleges using their own AI tools to stop fake students before they get in.

And the state is holding thieves accountable. Newsom hired a former Trump-appointed federal prosecutor, McGregor Scott, to go after scam artists on unemployment. And other county, state and federal prosecutors have also dedicated resources to clawing back some of the lost money.

With the slow pace of our courts (burdened by their own aging technology), many of those cases are still ongoing or just winding up. For example, 24 L.A. County employees were charged in recent months with allegedly stealing more than $740,000 in unemployment benefits, which really is chump change in this whole mess.

Another California man recently pleaded guilty to allegedly cheating his way into $15.9 million in federal loans through the Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loan programs.

And in one of the most colorful schemes, four Californians with nicknames including “Red boy” and “Scooby” allegedly ran a scam that boosted nearly $250 million in federal tax refunds before three of them attempted to murder the fourth to keep him from ratting them out to the feds.

There are literally hundreds of cases across the country of pandemic fraud. And these schemes are just the tip of the cash-berg. Fraudsters are also targeting fire relief funds, food benefits — really, any pot of public money is fair game to them. And the truth is, the majority of that stolen money is gone for good.

So it’s hard to hear the numbers and not be shocked and angry, especially as the Golden State is faced with a budget shortfall that may be as much as $18 billion.

Whether you blame Newsom personally or not for all this fraud, it’s hard to be forgiving of so much public money being handed to scoundrels when our schools are in need, our healthcare in jeopardy and our bills on an upward trajectory.

The failure is going to stick to somebody, and it doesn’t take a criminal mastermind to figure out who it’s going to be.

The son of a storied Republican president, Michael Reagan, who recently died, was memorialized as a stalwart supporter of his father’s legacy. But in his home state of California, Reagan was remembered as much for his community involvement — which was at times so low-key that some didn’t even realize his father was Ronald Reagan.

“The cool thing about Michael is you never would have known that he was the son of a president,” said Victor Franco, a Democratic strategist who met Reagan more than a decade ago while Franco’s kids were students at St. Mel’s Catholic school in Woodland Hills, where Reagan’s daughter was a teacher. “He was an everyday guy chatting up with the dads.”

Though Reagan would speak at career days and donate tours of the Reagan ranch near Santa Barbara for school fundraisers, Franco recalls Reagan’s presence during the fathers club’s annual chili cook-offs and barbecue competitions.

“We referred to him as our taste tester. He was always, ‘Hey, I need to taste that brisket, or I need to taste the chicken and make sure that it’s good,’” Franco said. “Even though he had the pedigree of, you know, a dad who was president, he was a regular guy to all of us, and just a really sweet, nice person.”

After battling cancer, Reagan died Sunday, according to statements released on Tuesday by organizations affiliated with former President Reagan.

Michael Reagan was lauded by former state GOP leaders not only for his work in leading the conservative movement through his nationally syndicated radio show, but also his willingness to engage in California politics.

He was “a thoughtful and compassionate conservative leader. Clearly his father’s son, he nonetheless forged his own distinct and influential voice within the conservative movement,” said former California Republican Party Chairman Ron Nehring. “Through his long career in radio, Michael was a tireless advocate for the everyday American who felt ignored or left behind by politics.”

Jim Brulte, a former state GOP chairman and powerful legislative leader, said Reagan was always available to aid the state party.

“He was a good man with a big heart who loved America,” Brulte said. “And he was a crowd favorite. He knew how to connect with everyone in the room.”

Conservative strategist Jon Fleischman, a former executive director of the state party, added that Reagan was as comfortable in informal settings as in the more privileged environs he grew up in as the son of the president.

Fleischman recalled going to dinner with Reagan at Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant in Beverly Hills, and the celebrity chef — upon hearing that the former president’s son was dining at his establishment — greeting them.

“So Michael started doing his impressions of his dad. And I don’t know if it’s normally that easy to make Wolfgang Puck laugh, but it was a very funny moment watching him,” Fleischman said. “He basically said, ‘You sound just like your old man.’”

The move was on brand, said Fleischman, who first met Reagan in 1989 and regularly interacted with him when Reagan was hosting a talk radio show and Fleischman had started a powerful conservative website.

“This is a guy who could speak to the ballroom at the Century Plaza Hotel back in the day, and then the next day speak to six activists at a California Republican Assembly meeting at a Denny’s,” Fleischman said, recalling that whenever Reagan called, a picture of Michael and Ronald together would appear on his phone’s screen.

“He just loved people, and he loved to try to make a difference,” Fleischman said. “And I think he spent a lot of time in the latter years of his life just trying to be someone that his dad would look up to. His dad loomed, obviously, very large in his life.”

Franco, the Democratic strategist, recalled similarly fond memories about his interactions with Reagan despite their political differences, such as when he spoke about the Secret Service being alarmed that the elder Reagan was driving an old pick-up truck to ferry VIP guests around his ranch or riding horses with them.

“Michael was great to grab a cocktail with at a casino night and talk,” Franco said.

Months after the devastating Palisades fire, the head of the Los Angeles Fire Commission inquired about the Fire Department’s long-awaited after-action report.

Interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva said that a “working draft” had been sent to Mayor Karen Bass’ office, Genethia Hudley Hayes told The Times on Tuesday.

In the conversation, which took place in mid-August or later, Villanueva said that the mayor’s office had asked for “refinements,” but he did not say what they were, according to Hudley Hayes.

Hudley Hayes, who was appointed by Bass in June 2023 to serve on the five-member commission that provides civilian oversight of the LAFD, said that in her long career in civic roles, she had learned that words like “refinements” could mean troubling changes to a government report, made for the purpose of hiding facts.

Earlier Tuesday, Fire Chief Jaime Moore, responding to the findings of a Times investigation, acknowledged that the after-action report had been edited to soften criticism of the LAFD leadership’s handling of the Palisades fire.

The Times had previously reported that Hudley Hayes was concerned enough about possible edits that she sought advice from a deputy city attorney.

But Hudley Hayes’ remarks Tuesday were her first public statements that her concerns stemmed from what she understood to be the mayor’s office’s possible intent to influence the report, which was supposed to lay out what went wrong in fighting the Palisades fire and how to prevent the mistakes from happening again.

Hudley Hayes said that after reviewing an early draft of the after-action report, as well as the final document released by the LAFD on Oct. 8, she was satisfied that “material findings” were not altered.

But her account raises questions about the mayor’s role in revisions to the report that, as Moore conceded Tuesday, downplayed the city’s failures in preparing for and responding to the fire, which killed 12 people and leveled much of the Palisades and surrounding areas.

On Tuesday, Bass’ office did not immediately explain what the refinements were. A spokesperson previously said that the office did not demand changes to the drafts and only asked the LAFD to confirm the accuracy of items such as how the weather and the department’s budget factored into the disaster.

“The report was written and edited by the Fire Department,” the spokesperson, Clara Karger, said in an email last month. “We did not red-line, review every page or review every draft of the report.”

The Times obtained and analyzed seven drafts of the report and identified deletions and revisions. The most significant changes in the various iterations of the report involved the LAFD’s deployment decisions before the fire, as the wind warnings became increasingly dire.

In one instance, LAFD officials removed language saying that the decision not to fully staff up and pre-deploy all available crews and engines ahead of the extreme wind forecast “did not align” with the department’s policy and procedures during red flag days. Instead, the final report said that the number of engine companies rolled out ahead of the fire “went above and beyond the standard LAFD pre-deployment matrix.”

Moore, who replaced Villanueva in November, admitted that the report was watered down to shield top brass from scrutiny.

“It is now clear that multiple drafts were edited to soften language and reduce explicit criticism of department leadership in that final report,” Moore said at a Fire Commission meeting Tuesday. “This editing occurred prior to my appointment as fire chief. And I can assure you that nothing of this sort will ever again happen while I am fire chief.”

The LAFD did not respond to a query about who ordered the changes to the report. Villanueva also did not respond Tuesday to requests for comment.

Hudley Hayes said she reached out to Villanueva around Aug. 21, when The Times published a story quoting a colleague on the Fire Commission, Sharon Delugach, expressing a desire to see the after-action report.

“It occurred to me then that she was correct. We hadn’t seen one — it was taking a long time,” Hudley Hayes said. “That’s the point I called interim Chief Villanueva.”

Meanwhile, the author of the report, Battalion Chief Kenneth Cook, had emailed a PDF of his report to Villanueva in early August, asking the chief to select a couple of people to provide edits so he could make the changes in his Word document.

The following week, Cook emailed the chief his final draft.

“Thank you for all your hard work,” Villanueva responded. “I’ll let you know how we’re going to move forward.”

Over the next two months, the report went through a series of edits — behind closed doors and without Cook’s involvement, as The Times disclosed last month.

On Oct. 8, the same day the report was released, Cook emailed Villanueva, declining to endorse the public version because of changes that altered his findings and made the report “highly unprofessional and inconsistent with our established standards.”

“Having reviewed the revised version submitted by your office, I must respectfully decline to endorse it in its current form,” Cook wrote in the email obtained by The Times. “The document has undergone substantial modifications and contains significant deletions of information that, in some instances, alter the conclusions originally presented.”

A July email thread reviewed by The Times shows that the LAFD formed a “crisis management workgroup” to deal with concerns about how the after-action report would be received.

“The primary goal of this workgroup is to collaboratively manage communications for any critical public relations issue that may arise. The immediate and most pressing crisis is the Palisades After Action Report,” LAFD Assistant Chief Kairi Brown wrote in an email to eight other people.

“With significant interest from media, politicians, and the community, it is crucial that we present a unified response to anticipated questions and concerns,” Brown wrote. “By doing so, we can ensure our messaging is clear and consistent, allowing us to create our own narrative rather than reactive responses.”

Hudley Hayes, who previously served on the L.A. Unified school board, said she did not think “there was any critical material removed” from the final report.

She said she noticed only small differences, such as “mistakes” being changed to “challenges,” and the removal of firefighters’ names.

She added that she does not know who ordered the changes disclosed by The Times — and despite her oversight role, is “not particularly” interested in finding out.

“Our job is to take the report that we have in front of us. Our job is to make sure those recommendations that came to us from a public report are taken care of,” she said. “You’re asking me political questions.”

Pringle is a former Times staff writer.

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, one of the top Republican candidates running for California governor, met a woman sprawled on the sidewalk as he walked around Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles.

“I’m waiting for the sun to come out from the clouds. I’m sunbathing,” the woman said Tuesday morning, lying on her jacket on the cold concrete, denying that any drug use was taking place in the roughly 50-block swath of downtown Los Angeles. “This is what we do here in California.”

Bianco and Kate Monroe, chief executive of VetComm, talks with a woman on the sidewalk as they walk around of Skid Row.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

Bianco shook his head, and as he walked away said there was zero chance the woman was not high on methamphetamines or something else. He said it was immoral for the state’s leaders to allow people to live in such conditions, and pledged to clean up Skid Row within four years if he is elected governor in November.

“Why on God’s green earth, why would we allow this to happen?” Bianco later said. “And why would you have something that you call Skid Row, that you just accept, instead of doing something to fix … these people’s lives.”

Bianco squarely blamed the problem on waste, fraud and mismanagement under Gov. Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and prior elected leaders, who he argued failed to effectively tackle the issue. He is among the critics who points to a 2024 state audit that found the state had spent $24 billion to combat homelessness over the prior five years without tracking the results.

A spokesman for Newsom disputed such characterizations of the spending.

“There is no ‘lost’ $24 billion for homelessness. All the money is accounted for,” Newsom spokesman Izzy Gardon said. “What the report found was that not all state programs required locals to report, at the time, how those dollars improved homelessness outcomes. Gov. Newsom has since changed the law to fix this longstanding issue.”

Bianco also pledged to use existing laws against drug dealing, human trafficking, prostitution and other crimes to clean up these blocks, while offering addicts and the mentally ill who are breaking the law the option of going to jail or being placed in treatment programs.

Democrats shot back that Bianco was not offering realistic approaches to an intractable problem.

Bianco talks with Antonio Fuller, left, and John Shepar.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

“Chad Bianco is the best example of an all-hat, no-cattle politician with tough talk and no solutions,” state Democratic Party Chair Rusty Hicks said. “That is not what California voters want in our next governor.”

Throughout his campaign, Bianco has leaned into his role as a law enforcement leader. On Tuesday, as his allies shot video after his visit to Skid Row, he pulled up the edge of his T-shirt to reveal his Riverside County sheriff badge.

Amid scenes of desperation, chaos and squalor, Bianco was surrounded by a gaggle of invited media.

Los Angeles Police Department patrol cars were frequently seen nearby as the group sidestepped feces, used condoms, sidewalk fires, open-air drug use and drug dealing, barely clothed women, and people screaming and cursing.

People make their way around Skid Row on Tuesday.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

Monroe talks with Emilio Marroquin.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

Bianco was accompanied by veteran and homeless advocate Kate Monroe, who handed the homeless envelopes containing $5 bills and cigarettes as encouragement to talk. Some did not take kindly to the offer.

“Get out of my face. Get out of my face. You’re offering me cigarettes,” the woman said. Monroe replied, ‘I’ll give you five bucks.” The woman repeated, “Get out of my face.”

But others were more receptive, including Emilio Marroquin.

The 42-year-old said he had started drinking as a teenager as he struggled with being gay in a Christian home. He didn’t come out until his father, a pastor, passed away. His drinking spiraled out of control, he said, leading friends and family to abandon him. After Marroquin ended up on the streets eight years ago, he said, he started using crystal meth and crack, and explained the splotchy wounds on his hand were the result of being beaten up for failing to pay drug debts.

After learning that Marroquin briefly lived in sober housing, Bianco asked him about the difficulties of transitioning from living on the streets to structured housing, and then spoke with a passing community service provider who identified herself as S.R.

“We need a new change. We need something other than what we’ve been hearing for the past, I don’t know, 20 years or longer,” she said, to which Bianco replied that she had “more courage, passion and commitment and a big heart than probably anyone to be able to come down here and do this over.”

Bianco greets a man who goes by Cigaretteman.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

The Riverside County sheriff’s appearance on Skid Row comes as the 2026 governor’s race is finally starting to see some energy.

A crowded field of prominent though little-known Democrats is competing to finish in the top two spots in the June primary. If they all remain in the race, the Democrats could splinter the vote and allow one of the far smaller number of top Republican candidates to win one of the spots.

Bianco’s top GOP rival, former Fox News commentator and British political strategist Steve Hilton, held a rainy-day news conference on Monday in front of the California Employment Development Department in San Francisco to highlight alleged fraud in state government.

Saying that Newsom has turned the state into “Califraudia,” Hilton and GOP controller candidate Herb Morgan called on the U.S. Department of Justice and other federal officials to investigate waste and fraud in state spending.

“This gets to that question that every Californian is asking: How is it that we have the highest taxes in the country? They’ve doubled the budget of the state of California nearly in the last five years, and everything is worse,” Hilton said. “We have the worst outcomes in America. How is that possible, that they spend so much and we get so little? … We are going to get to the bottom of this when we are elected.”

WASHINGTON — CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames, who betrayed Western intelligence assets to the Soviet Union and Russia in one of the most damaging intelligence breaches in U.S. history, has died in a Maryland prison. He was 84.

A spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons confirmed Ames died Monday.

Ames, a 31-year CIA veteran, admitted being paid $2.5 million by Moscow for U.S. secrets from 1985 until his arrest in 1994. His disclosures included the identities of 10 Russian officials and one Eastern European who were spying for the United States or Great Britain, along with spy satellite operations, eavesdropping and general spy procedures. His betrayals are blamed for the executions of Western agents working behind the Iron Curtain and were a major setback to the CIA during the Cold War.

He pleaded guilty without a trial to espionage and tax evasion and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Prosecutors said he deprived the United States of valuable intelligence material for years.

He professed “profound shame and guilt” for “this betrayal of trust, done for the basest motives,” money to pay debts. But he downplayed the damage he caused, telling the court he did not believe he had “noticeably damaged” the United States or “noticeably aided” Moscow.

“These spy wars are a sideshow which have had no real impact on our significant security interests over the years,” he told the court, questioning the value that leaders of any country derived from vast networks of human spies around the globe.

In a jailhouse interview with the Washington Post the day before he was sentenced, Ames said he was motivated to spy by “financial troubles, immediate and continuing.”

Ames was working in the Soviet/Eastern European division at the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Va., when he first approached the KGB, according to an FBI history of the case. He continued passing secrets to the Soviets while stationed in Rome for the CIA and after returning to Washington. Meanwhile, the U.S. intelligence community was frantically trying to figure out why so many agents were being discovered by Moscow.

Ames’ spying coincided with that of FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who was caught in 2001 and charged with taking $1.4 million in cash and diamonds to sell secrets to Moscow. He died in prison in 2023.

Ames’ wife, Rosario, pleaded guilty to lesser espionage charges of assisting his spying and was sentenced to 63 months in prison.

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state Democratic leaders accused President Trump of unleashing a political vendetta after he announced plans to freeze roughly $10 billion in federal funding for child care and social services programs in California and four other Democrat-controlled states.

Trump justified the action in comments posted on his social media platform Truth Social, where he accused Newsom of widespread fraud. The governor’s office dismissed the accusation as “deranged.”

Trump’s announcement came amid a broader administration push to target Democratic-led states over alleged fraud in taxpayer-funded programs, following sweeping prosecutions in Minnesota. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services confirmed the planned funding freeze, which was first reported by The New York Post.

California officials said they have received no formal notice and argued the president is using unsubstantiated claims to justify a move that could jeopardize child care and social services for low-income families.

How we got here

Trump posted on his social media site Truth Social on Tuesday that under Newsom, California is “more corrupt than Minnesota, if that’s possible???” In the post, Trump used a derogatory nickname for Newsom that has become popular with the governor’s critics, referring to him as “Newscum.”

“The Fraud Investigation of California has begun,” Trump wrote.

The president also retweeted a story by the New York Post that said his Department of Health and Human Services will freeze taxpayer funding from the Child Care Development Fund, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which is known as CalWORKS in California, and the Social Services Block Grant program. HHS said that the impacted states are California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York.

“For too long, Democrat-led states and Governors have been complicit in allowing massive amounts of fraud to occur under their watch,” said Andrew Nixon, a HHS spokesperson. “Under the Trump Administration, we are ensuring that federal taxpayer dollars are being used for legitimate purposes. We will ensure these states are following the law and protecting hard-earned taxpayer money.”

HHS announced last month that all 50 states will have to provide additional levels of verification and administrative data before they receive more funding from the Child Care and Development Fund following a series of fraud schemes at Minnesota day care centers run by Somali residents.

“The Trump Administration is using the moral guise of eliminating ‘fraud and abuse’ to undermine essential programs and punish families and children who depend on these services to survive, many of whom have no other options if this funding disappears,” Kristin McGuire, president of Young Invincibles, a young-adult nonprofit economic advocacy group, said in a statement. “This is yet another ideologically motivated attack on states that treats millions of families as pawns in a political game.”

California pushes back

Newsom’s office brushed off Trump’s post about fraud allegations, calling the president “a deranged, habitual liar whose relationship with reality ended years ago.” Newsom himself said he welcomes federal fraud investigations in the state, adding in an interview on MS NOW that aired Monday night: “Bring it on … if he has some unique insight and information, I look forward to partnering with him. I can’t stand fraud.”

However, Newsom said cutting off funding hurts hard-working families who rely on the assistance.

“You want to support families? You believe in families? Then you believe in supporting child care and child care workers in the workforce,” Newsom told MS NOW.

California has not been notified of any changes to federal child care or social services funding. H.D. Palmer, a spokesperson for the Department of Finance, said the only indication from Washington that California’s childcare funding could be in jeopardy was the vague 5 a.m. post Tuesday by the president on Truth Social.

“The president tosses these social media missives in the same way Mardi Gras revelers throw beads on Bourbon Street — with zero regard for accuracy or precision,” Palmer said.

In the current state budget, Palmer said California’s childcare spending is $7.3 billion, of which $2.2 billion is federal dollars. Newsom is set to unveil his budget proposal Friday for the upcoming fiscal year that begins July 1, which will mark the governor’s final spending plan before he terms out. Newsom has acknowledged that he is considering a 2028 bid for president, but has repeatedly brushed aside reporters’ questions about it, saying his focus remains on governing California.

Palmer said while details about the potential threat to federal childcare dollars remain unclear, what is known is that federal dollars are not like “a spigot that will be turned off by the end of the week.”

“There is no immediate cutoff that will happen,” Palmer said.

Since Trump took office, California has filed dozens of legal actions to block the president’s policy changes and funding cuts, and the state has prevailed in many of them.

What happened in Minnesota

Federal prosecutors say Minnesota has been hit by some of the largest fraud schemes involving state-run, federally funded programs in the country. Federal prosecutors estimate that as much as half of roughly $18 billion paid to 14 Minnesota programs since 2018 may be fraudulent, with providers accused of billing for services never delivered and diverting money for personal use.

The scale of the fraud has drawn national attention and fueled the Trump administration’s decision to freeze child care funds while demanding additional safeguards prior to doling out money, moves that critics say risk harming families who rely on the programs. Gov. Tim Walz has ordered a third-party audit and appointed a director of program integrity. Amid the fallout, Walz announced he will not seek a third term.

Outrage over the fraud reached a fever pitch in the White House after a video posted online by an influencer purported to expose extensive fraud at Somali-run child care centers in Minnesota. On Monday, that influencer, Nick Shirley, posted on the social media site X, “I ENDED TIM WALZ,” a claim that prompted calls from conservative activists to shift scrutiny to Newsom and California next.

Right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson posted on X that his team will be traveling to California next week to show “how criminal California fraud is robbing our nation blind.”

California officials have acknowledged fraud failures in the past, most notably at the Employment Development Department during the COVID-19 pandemic, when weakened safeguards led to billions of dollars in unemployment payments later deemed potentially fraudulent.

An independent state audit released last month found administrative vulnerabilities in some of California’s social services programs but stopped short of alleging widespread fraud or corruption. The California State Auditor added the Department of Social Services to its high-risk list because of persistent errors in calculating CalFresh benefits, which provides food assistance to those in need — a measure of payment accuracy rather than criminal activity — warning that federal law changes could eventually force the state to absorb billions of dollars in additional costs if those errors are not reduced.

What’s at stake in California

The Trump administration’s plans to freeze federal child care, welfare and social services funding would impact $7.3 billion in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families funding, $2.4 billion for child care subsidies and more than $800 million for social services programs in the five states.

The move was quickly criticized as politically motivated because the targeted states were all Democrat-led.

“Trump is now illegally freezing childcare and other funding for working families, but only in blue states,” state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) said in a statement. “He says it’s because of ‘fraud,’ but it has nothing to do with fraud and everything to do with politics. Florida had the largest Medicaid fraud in U.S. history yet isn’t on this list.”

Added California Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas: “It is unconscionable for Trump and Republicans to rip away billions of dollars that support child care and families in need, and this has nothing to do with fraud. California taxpayers pay for these programs — period — and Trump has no right to steal from our hard-working residents. We will continue to fight back.”

Times staff writer Daniel Miller contributed to this report.

SACRAMENTO — A far-reaching proposal to outlaw hydraulic fracturing and ban oil and gas wells from operating near homes, schools and healthcare facilities failed in the California Legislature on Tuesday, a major setback for progressive leaders who hail the state as the nation’s bellwether on environmental protection.

Gov. Gavin Newsom in September called on state lawmakers to ban fracking and voiced his support for safety buffer zones around wells, saying they posed a significant health threat to vulnerable Californians, primarily in predominantly Black and Latino communities near well fields and refineries.

The legislation that failed Tuesday was much more ambitious than what Newsom proposed, however, and faced fierce opposition from California’s oil industry, which holds tremendous political sway among Central Valley legislators, along with trade unions, a powerful force within the Democratic Party.

The bill would have banned fracking and a series of other well injection methods used to extract oil — all opposed by environmental activists. It would also have prohibited wells from operating within 2,500 feet of homes, schools, healthcare facilities and other populated areas. Newsom’s proposals were limited to a ban only on fracking and the consideration of a buffer zone.

“Obviously I’m very disappointed,” said state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), one of the legislators who introduced the legislation. “California really has not done what it needs to do in terms of addressing the oil problem. We have communities that are suffering right now, and the Legislature has repeatedly failed to act.”

Wiener’s bill failed to receive the five votes necessary to pass the Senate’s Natural Resources and Water Committee, the proposal’s first stop in the legislative process. State Sen. Susan Eggman (D-Stockton) was the only Democrat to vote against the legislation, but it failed largely because two other Democrats, state Sens. Bob Hertzberg of Van Nuys and Ben Hueso of San Diego, did not cast votes.

After the vote, Hertzberg said he supported California’s efforts to wean itself from fossil fuels but argued the bill did “nothing to foster that transition by reducing demand for oil in our state or in the global marketplace.”

Rudy Gonzalez of the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council made a similar argument when testifying by video during the committee hearing, saying the legislation would lead to the loss of thousands of well-paying union jobs at California’s refineries and in other petroleum-related industries.

“It doesn’t do for workers or for the environment what it claims,” Gonzalez said. “Our domestic supply factors in 32 million cars and trucks that are on our roads today. Ending extraction in California won’t end the supply or the demand for that. In fact, they’ll shift production outside of California or supply avenues to other nations.”

Oil industry officials have argued that a mandate for 2,500-foot buffer zones around wells would effectively shut down the vast majority of oil production in California. California was the seventh-largest oil-producing state in 2020, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

At the beginning of Tuesday’s hearing, Wiener acknowledged that the bill would have a major impact on oil production in California and faced major obstacles in the Capitol. But he said he was open to amending the bill and having a conversation with opponents of the legislation.

Before the hearing, Wiener amended the bill to extend the period of time allowed to phase out fracking and other forms of ejection wells. But that did little to temper opposition. On Tuesday, four senators on the committee, all Democrats, voted in favor of the bill while three senators opposed it — the proposal needed five votes to pass the nine-member committee.

Wiener said he is weighing whether to ask the committee to reconsider the legislation. He vowed to continue pushing the bill, in total or in part, during the current session and said his top priority is establishing health and safety buffer zones around oil and gas wells.

“If there is a path to narrowing the bill and getting the votes, we are very open to doing that,” he said. “We’ll have to see what’s possible.”

Even if the bill cannot be revived, buffer zones may still be mandated by administrative action. At the direction of an executive order by Newsom, officials with the state Department of Conservation have been holding public hearings in person and online throughout the year on proposed public health and safety protections for communities near oil and gas operations, including imposing possible buffer zones around wells. Those proposed regulations are expected to be made public this spring.

From the outset, the fracking ban and mandatory buffer zones created a fissure within the Legislature’s Democratic majority, with liberal legislators from coastal areas and major cities seeing the proposals as essential to combat climate change and protect vulnerable families, and business-friendly lawmakers and those from inland areas worried about the potential loss of tens of thousands of jobs and the effect on local economies in California’s oil-rich San Joaquin Valley.

A proposed fracking moratorium stalled in the Legislature in 2014, and just last year a bill calling for less stringent buffer zone requirements around oil and gas wells failed in the same Senate committee as this year’s bill.

Eggman voted in favor of the setbacks proposed in last year’s bill but against this legislation, saying it would “shut down oil production in California.” Most of her Central Valley constituents cannot afford expensive electric cars, she said.

“I’m just thinking about the rest of California and in my district: the people who commute, the people who have to drive trucks, the people who drive tractors. None of those are electric,” she said.

WASHINGTON — A highly confidential CIA assessment produced at the request of the White House warned President Trump of a wider conflict in Venezuela if he were to support the country’s democratic opposition once its president, Nicolás Maduro, was deposed, a person familiar with the matter told The Times.

The assessment was a tightly held CIA product commissioned at the request of senior policymakers before Trump decided whether to authorize Operation Absolute Resolve, the stunning U.S. mission that seized Maduro and his wife from their bedroom in Caracas over the weekend.

Announcing the results of the operation on Sunday, Trump surprised an anxious Venezuelan public when he was quick to dismiss the leadership of the democratic opposition — led by María Corina Machado, last year’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and Edmundo González Urrutia, the opposition candidate who won the 2024 presidential election that was ultimately stolen by Maduro.

Instead, Trump said his administration was working with Maduro’s handpicked vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who has since been named the country’s interim president. The rest of Maduro’s government remains in place.

Endorsing the opposition would probably have required U.S. military backing, with the Venezuelan armed forces still under the control of loyalists to Maduro unwilling to relinquish power.

A second official said that the administration sought to avoid one of the cardinal mistakes of the invasion of Iraq, when the Bush administration ordered party loyalists of the deposed Saddam Hussein to be excluded from the country’s interim government. That decision, known as de-Baathification, led those in charge of Iraq’s stockpiles of weapons to establish armed resistance to the U.S. campaign.

The CIA product was not an assessment that was shared across the 18 government agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, whose head, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, was largely absent from deliberations — and who has yet to comment on the operation, despite CIA operatives being deployed in harm’s way before and throughout the weekend mission.

The core team that worked on Absolute Resolve included Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who met routinely over several months, sometimes daily, the source added.

The existence of the CIA assessment was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Signs have emerged that Trump’s team was in communication with Rodríguez ahead of the operation, although the president has denied that his administration gave Rodríguez advance notice of Maduro’s ouster.

“There are a number of unanswered questions,” said Evan Ellis, who served in Trump’s first term planning State Department policy on Latin America, the Caribbean and international narcotics. “There may have a been a cynical calculation that one can work with them.”

Rodríguez served as a point of contact with the Biden administration, experts note, and also was in touch with Richard Grenell, a top Trump aide who heads the Kennedy Center, early on in Trump’s second term, when he was testing engagement with Caracas.

While the federal indictment unsealed against Maduro after his seizure named several other senior officials in his government, Rodríguez’s name was notably absent.

Rodríguez was sworn in as Venezuela’s interim president Monday in a ceremony attended by diplomats from Russia, China and Iran. Publicly, the leader has offered mixed messages, at once vowing to prevent Venezuela from becoming a colonial outpost of an American empire, while also offering to forge a newly collaborative relationship with Washington.

“Of course, for political reasons, Delcy Rodríguez can’t say, ‘I’ve cut a deal with Trump, and we’re going to stop the revolution now and start working with the U.S.,” Ellis said.

“It’s not about the democracy,” he said. “It’s about him not wanting to work with Maduro.”

In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Machado said she had yet to speak with Trump since the U.S. operation over the weekend, but hoped to do so soon, offering to share her Nobel Peace Prize with him as a gesture of gratitude. Trump has repeatedly touted himself as a worthy recipient of the award.

“What he has done is historic,” Machado said, vowing to return to the country from hiding abroad since accepting the prize in Oslo last month.

“It’s a huge step,” she added, “towards a democratic transition.”