President Donald Trump just gave a preview of how he plans to acquire Greenland: economic warfare.  That was the unmistakable warning embedded in Trump’s rambling, complaint-heavy speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, where he blasted European leaders and appeared to threaten retaliation if the US does not acquire Greenland. “We want a piece of ice for world protection, and they won’t give it,” Trump told the audience, before warning, “They have a choice. You can say yes, and we will be very appreciative. Or you can say no, and we will remember.” While Trump said that he wouldn’t “use force” to seize Greenland, he justified his ongoing demands to acquire the territory because the US keeps “the whole world afloat.” “Without us, right now, you’d all be speaking German and a little Japanese, perhaps,” he said. “After the war, we gave Greenland back to Denmark. How stupid were we to do that? But we did it. But we gave it back. But how ungrateful are they now?” The president then shared a startling anecdote, which many viewed as an implicit warning of how the US could retaliate if it did not acquire Greenland. Trump told the audience that after initially planning to slap a 30 percent tariff on Switzerland’s exports to the US, he ultimately went up to 39 percent because Switzerland’s president at the time, Karin Keller-Sutter, had rubbed him “the wrong way.” “She just rubbed me the wrong way, I’ll be honest with you,” Trump told the audience. “And I made it 39 percent.” The US later reduced the tariff on Switzerland to 15 percent, which Trump described on Wednesday as evidence of his compassion: “I don’t want to hurt people.” The remarks appeared to underscore the exact warnings Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney shared at the World Economic Forum just the day before.  “You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination,” Carney said on Tuesday, stressing that “great powers” like the US have used “tariffs as leverage” and “financial infrastructure as coercion.”  Now, some leaders in Europe seem to be taking Carney’s approach. In response to the Trump administration’s continued threats to take Greenland, the chair of the European Parliament’s international trade committee announced on Wednesday that it would pause a EU-US trade deal that would have, in part, suspended tariffs on all industrial goods.

President Donald Trump famously doesn’t like to read. And if his increasingly frequent public naps are any indication, his attention span is only getting shorter. But he did claim to watch what one historian praised as a “riveting, extraordinary and brutally honest” speech by Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada yesterday in Davos, Switzerland. And Trump’s reaction was typically petulant. Imploring an audience chock-full of European officials at the annual World Economic Forum to recognize that “nostalgia is not a strategy,” Carney rallied middle powers—countries with economies similar to Canada—to bind together in the face of unilateral military and economic coercion by bigger powers. (Unspoken but clear among them: Trump’s America.) In doing so, Carney painted a stark view of a new world in which old rules have been torn up, and countries should stop pretending otherwise. “We are in the midst of a rupture,” he said. “Not a transition.” His call to the world: Resist subordination to the “great powers” who “have the market size, the military capacity and the leverage to dictate terms.” “The middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” Carney said. Trump was clearly irked. “Canada gets a lot of freebies from us,” he said on Wednesday. “They should be grateful but they’re not.” “Canada lives because of the United States,” Trump said. “Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.” Carney’s speech, which received a standing ovation, is rooted in Carney’s personal experience after winning an election fought on protecting Canada’s sovereignty against economic attack from the United States in the form of tariffs and bellicose threats that Canada should be the 51st state of America. At Davos, Carney framed Trump’s attempts to “buy” Greenland as part of the same intimidation campaign: “Great powers began using economic integration as weapons,” he said. “Tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructure as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.” “We know the old order is not coming back,” he added. “But we believe that from the fracture, we can build something better, stronger, more just.” Read the full transcript here. And watch the speech below.

As President Donald Trump wraps up the first year of his second term—one marked by US aggression abroad and rising political violence at home—a wave of new polls released this week shows him and his policies at remarkably high, and in some cases record, levels of unpopularity. Across nearly every major measure, Trump is generating more backlash than loyalty, deepening distrust as his personal standing continues to slide. A new CNN poll released Friday found that nearly 60 percent of Americans describe Trump’s first year back in office as a failure. Trump is faltering even on issues that have historically been his strongest, like the economy. A majority of Americans (55 percent) say he has made the economy worse, while just 36 percent believe he has focused on the right priorities—a nine-point drop since the start of his term. CNN also found Trump’s overall job approval rating languishing at 39 percent, down from 48 percent last February. A clear majority say he has gone too far in using presidential power. You can read the full results here. > New from us: Public opinion on nearly every aspect of President Donald Trump’s > first year back in the White House is negative, a new CNN poll conducted by > SSRS finds.www.cnn.com/2026/01/16/p… > > — Ariel Edwards-Levy (@aedwardslevy.bsky.social) 2026-01-16T15:09:44.022Z CNN’s numbers are not outliers. A new Associated Press–NORC poll, released on Thursday, shows erosion even within Trump’s own party. Only 16 percent of Republicans say the president has helped “a lot” with the cost of living, down sharply from 49 percent in April 2024. Trump’s approval on immigration—still one of his strongest issues among Republicans—has slipped as well, falling from 88 percent in March to 76 percent in the latest survey. Overall, just 38 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, a marked decline, while 61 percent disapprove. Across the poll, voters say Trump is focused on the wrong priorities, abusing power, hurting the economy, and leaving the country worse off. The survey marked his lowest approval ratings on the economy reported by AP pollsters during both stints in the White House. Other surveys this week echoed the same themes. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll shows Trump deeply underwater overall, with 58 percent disapproving of his job performance and just 36 percent approving of his handling of the economy. The poll also found overwhelming opposition to Trump’s foreign adventurism, with 71 percent saying the use of military force against Greenland would be a bad idea. Meanwhile, a Marist poll released Friday found that 56 percent of Americans oppose the United States taking military action in Venezuela.

Journalist Mariana Zúñiga woke up in the middle of the night to the sounds of explosions and military planes in Caracas, Venezuela. Her WhatsApp chats flashed the news: The ruling dictator, Nicholás Maduro, had just been captured by the US military. She was surprised and felt uneasy about what was to come. In the days that followed, Zúñiga would go into the field, despite the dangers journalists face, to report on what the country feels like at this tumultuous moment.  Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. This week on Reveal, we speak with Venezuelans about witnessing this moment of history from up close and afar. For Freddy Guevara, an exiled Venezuelan opposition leader living in the US, there is little confidence in the country’s new leadership.  “They are not moderate at all,” Guevara says. “They are super radical, and they believe they are smarter than everyone.”  And historian Alejandro Velasco explains the role Venezuela’s most valuable resource—oil—has played in the country’s history and relations with the US.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In an era of rapid globalization, economic growth has come with trade-offs. To make room for urban development or fossil fuel extraction, countries often clear forests, pollute water and decimate wildlife populations.  However, while nations and businesses build lucrative markets around these activities, destroying nature often comes at a cost—literally. Natural resources underpin the global economy, from pollinators supporting agricultural supply chains to forests ensuring water quality and availability. One estimate suggests that more than half of the world’s gross domestic product is moderately or highly dependent on the environment.   Research shows the services that nature provides are diminishing as we degrade it. Now, a growing number of economists and ecologists around the world are helping decisionmakers understand the full extent of the contributions to local and national economies made by plants, animals, or entire ecosystems—and what’s at risk financially if they are lost.  Since time immemorial, humans have relied on natural resources like clean water, forests, and soil to prop up economies. As Stanford University ecologist Lisa Mandle put it to me bluntly, “if there were no nature, there would be no economy.” But it wasn’t until fairly recently that experts formally started to catalogue the environment’s financial contributions to society through an approach dubbed “natural capital accounting.” In 2005, a report compiled by hundreds of scientists from around the world, which was called for by the United Nations, estimated that human activities had driven the decline of two-thirds of ecosystem services on Earth, including freshwater supply, climate-change mitigation, and disease control.  > Pollinators contribute $800 billion in gross economic value annually, > including $34 billion in the United States. Dubbed the “Millennium Ecosystem Assessment,” the report also revealed how much was not known about the environment’s financial contributions, finding that the costs of degrading nature were rarely tracked in local and national economic accounts. Since then, experts have scrambled to fill these gaps.  Mandle is the co-executive director of Natural Capital Alliance, a Stanford-based collaboration of research institutions and nonprofits such as the Nature Conservancy working to help countries better understand their natural resource availability and how to balance those benefits with development. For example, the group recently worked with the Colombian National Planning Department to calculate the economic value of the country’s Upper Sinú Basin. Using input from locals and complex financial models, they found that ecosystems in the region deliver around $100 million in benefits to hydropower production and the delivery of clean water to households and economic sectors—nearly 2 percent of the region’s GDP.  “In many decisions, nature has been treated as essentially worthless or of negligible value when compared to other kinds of human activities,” said Mandle. “Natural capital accounting is an effort to correct that and to shine a light on the many different ways that nature and biodiversity supports human well-being and the economy.” It’s not just governments using this type of data; businesses around the world are increasingly required to disclose the biodiversity risks of their operations, the Financial Times reports. At the same time, investors have shown more interest in companies that can show they are environmentally friendly, Viorel Popescu, an ecologist at Columbia University, told me.  Large corporations are major contributors to biodiversity loss, but Popescu said they are also at “the forefront of being able to do something about it,” and can often move at a faster pace than governments. With this in mind, Columbia University announced in September the creation of a master’s program focusing on biodiversity data analytics. The idea is to help businesspeople understand the implications of corporate operations on nature.  “We’ve been training ecologists to do ecology forever, and they don’t always get into places where they can actually make decisions, unfortunately,” said Popescu, who is the director of the program. He has been an ecologist for more than two decades and stressed that the new program is “trying to get people that don’t have necessarily an ecology or a conservation background…but are in the position of making a difference.”  Ecosystem accounting has revealed some staggering stats on nature’s financial contributions. Pollinators contribute $800 billion in gross economic value annually, including $34 billion in the United States. A recent federal report found that US birders spent an estimated $108 billion related to their pursuits in 2022 alone, which is almost six times the total revenue generated by the National Football League that year. Mangrove forests prevent more than $65 billion in property damage around the world each year, according to a 2020 study.  Even a single species can bring in the big bucks: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that the endangered North Atlantic right whale generated $2.3 billion in sales for the whale-watching industry and across the broader economy in 2008 alone. Conservation groups often use these analyses to make the case for protection of plants and wildlife.  > “To participate in the commodification and financialization of our Relatives > is an affront to the Natural Laws.” Experts recognize that natural capital accounting has limitations, largely due to the diversity of ecosystems and what values different groups of people put on various services. Additionally, interactions across a single ecosystem can be incredibly complex, and “it can be hard to tease out what the value is of an individual component, because its value is not just [that component], but it’s how it interacts within this system to sustain life,” Mandle said. The UN has a framework to help countries track ecosystem services, though much of these processes are case by case.  In recent years, new markets have emerged to commodify nature-based solutions through the sale of carbon offsets or “biodiversity credits,” which represent a measured unit of biodiversity protection that companies can purchase to support conservation. However, critics say the “financialization of nature” fails to recognize its intrinsic value, and could actually work against its protection.  “Only humans would have the audacity to assign ‘financial value’, in their colonial thought process ways, to the Sources of Life and the living beings that are our relatives,” Casey Camp- Horinek, an elder of the Ponca Nation of Oklahoma and chairwoman of the Indigenous Council of the Global Alliance of the Rights of Nature, said in a statement on the group’s website. “We do not own anything that is called Nature, we are Nature, and to participate in the commodification and financialization of our Relatives is an affront to the Natural Laws and quite simply wrong.” Popescu said he’s “conflicted” about assigning financial values to ecosystem services. “But at the same time, I’m well aware that if we don’t try to do that, you’re not going to advance the conversation,” he said. Echoing this sentiment, Mandle said that while it’s crucial to also consider the intangible values of nature, “there are some decisions that get made, you know, comparing numbers, lines on a spreadsheet, or weighing costs and benefits.”  It’s a “head approach and a heart approach,” she said. “I think they work together.”  In any case, it’s clear that environmental degradation and climate change are already taking a heavy toll on the global economy, costing trillions of dollars annually, according to a UN report released in December. “I think [natural capital accounting] has become especially relevant recently as the size of the human enterprise relative to Earth systems has grown,” Mandle said. “Many of these values have only been apparent once they’ve been lost.” 

On December 1, under President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—which more than 40 million Americans rely on—introduced new work requirements for people verging on retirement age. Millions of adults ages of 55 to 64 may now be locked out of the program if they’re not able to work—and in a one-two punch of attacks on federal services, the USDA has terminated its annual Food Insecurity Survey, making it impossible to know just how devastating an impact Trump’s backdoor SNAP cuts will have on aging adults who are unable to get exemptions from their state. In normal conditions, said Tufts University food economist Parke Wilde. policymakers and government workers would ask, “‘What are the consequences of policy changes this fall so that we can calibrate and improve the program in the future?’ We won’t be able to do that this year.” Targeted actions to eliminate federal government data have accompanied countless other Trump administration cuts and defundings: An executive order by Trump curtailed the collection of gender and sexuality information in federal surveys, and the Institute of Education Sciences, which disseminates education data, faced mass layoffs last year. What existing data tells us is that tacking on new SNAP work requirements leads people to lose their benefits. Research from George Washington University found that between 2013 and 2017, changes to SNAP work requirement waivers led to around one-third of adults without dependents losing SNAP benefits. “There is scant evidence that work requirements are effective in helping people gain employment or become more self-sufficient, and there is strong evidence that work requirements create hardships,” the researchers concluded. Colleen Helfin, a Syracuse University professor of public administration and international affairs, said that around half of early retirements between the ages of 55 and 65 are the result of health issues or difficulties maintaining employment, often compounded by challenging state processes to seek exemption from “It’s really important for states to be thinking about the administrative burden,” Helfin said. “All these things become a little bit harder as people become older, and they may have declines in hearing, sight or cognitive function.”  Some states try to reduce hurdles, rather than add them, explained Lauren Schuyler, a specialist in family welfare at the University of Maryland School of Social Work. “Having your practitioner provide documentation or proving that you have disabilities is just an added layer of that administrative burden,” Schuyler said, which is especially likely to strip SNAP from people in their fifties and through mid-sixties. With the USDA’s decision to quit tracking food insecurity, the impact will remain unclear and far more challenging to address. Helfin is wary of smaller organizations trying to fill the data gap left by USDA—but some states are seeing an effort to do so. “There’s a movement for state legislators to pass bills to mandate the state measurement of food insecurity, perhaps putting it on something like the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey,” Helfin said.  In response to a request for comment, a USDA spokesperson characterized the Food Insecurity Survey as “subjective, liberal fodder” designed “as a means to support the increase of SNAP eligibility and benefit allotments.”

A year ago this month, President Donald Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people responsible for the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. When Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political science professor who studies domestic political violence, heard about the pardons, he says he immediately thought it was “going to be the worst thing that happened in the second Trump presidency.” The first year of Trump’s second term has been a blizzard of policies and executive actions that have shattered presidential norms, been challenged in court as unlawful, threatened to remake the federal government, and redefined the limits of presidential power. But Pape argues that Trump’s decision to pardon and set free the January 6 insurrectionists, including hundreds who had been found guilty of assaulting police, could be the most consequential decision of his second term. “There are many ways we could lose our democracy. But the most worrisome way is through political violence,” Pape says. “Because the political violence is what would make the democratic backsliding you’re so used to hearing about irreversible. And then how might that actually happen? You get people willing to fight for Trump.” Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. On this week’s More To The Story, Pape talks with host Al Letson about how America’s transformation to a white minority is fueling the nation’s growing political violence, the remarkable political geography of the insurrectionists, and the glimmers of hope he’s found in his research that democracy can survive this pivotal moment in history. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: Bob, how are you today? Robert Pape: Oh, I’m great. I’m terrific. This is just a great time to be in Chicago. A little cold, but that’s Chicago. I was about to say, great time for you. I’m a Florida boy, so I was just in Chicago, I was like, let me go home. So Bob, I thought I would kind of start off a little bit and kind of give you my background into why I’m really interested about the things that we’re going to be talking about today, right after Charlottesville happened. When I look back now, I feel like it was such a precursor for where we are today. And also I think in 2016 I was looking back and it felt like… Strangely, it felt like Oklahoma City, the bombing in Oklahoma City was a precursor for that. Ever since then, I’ve just really been thinking a lot about where we are as a society and political violence in America. The origins of it, which I think are baked deeply into the country itself. But I’m also very interested on where we’re going, because I believe that leadership plays a big role in that, right? And so when you have leaders that try to walk us back from the edge, we walk back from the edge. When you have leaders that say charge forward, we go over the edge. And it feels like in the last decade or so we’ve been see-sawing between the two things. So let me just say that you are quite right, that political violence has been a big part of our country and this is not something that is in any way new to the last few years. And that’s also why you can think about this when you talk about 2016, going back to 1995, with the Oklahoma City bombing here and thinking about things from the right and militia groups and right-wing political violence. Because that in particular from the seventies through 2016, even afterwards of course, has been a big part of our country and what we’ve experienced. But I just have to say a big but here, it’s not just the same old story. Because starting right around 2016, it would’ve been hard to know this in 2016 and even really 2017, ’18 and ’19, you were there right at the beginning of a new layer, so to speak, of political violence that is growing. It’s not that the old layer went away, which is why it’s been a little bit, I think, mystifying and confusing for some folks, and that’s folks who even cover this pretty closely, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League and so forth. Because it took a few years before they started to see that there was some new trends emerging, growing political violence. It was getting larger. The old profiles of who was doing the violent attacks were starting to widen. And in many ways that’s scarier and more dangerous than if they’re kind of narrow because we like our villains to be monsters who are far away from us and they couldn’t possibly be living next door to us. Whereas the closer they come, the more edgy it feels. So what you’re really experiencing there is the very beginning of where I date the beginning of our shift to the era of violent populism. We’re in a new world, but it’s a world on top of the old world. The old world didn’t go away. No, no, no. It feels like the old world is really the foundation that this new house of violence has been raised around. All of that that happened in the past was the foundation. And then in 2016, 2017, some people would say 2014, in that timeframe, the scaffolding began to go up and then Trump gets into office and then suddenly it’s a full-blown house that now all of America is living in. Well, if you look at the attacks on African-Americans, on Jews and Hispanics, except for going all the way back to the 1920 race time, except for that, these large-scale attacks have clustered since 2016. Then we have the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, that’s the largest attack killing, mass killing of Jews ever in the United States. And then we have August, 2019, the attack at the El Paso Walmart killing more Hispanics in a day than has ever been killed in our country. So there’s a pointed wave, if you see what I mean here. And race is certainly playing a role. So when you say how does this tie to the old layer or the existing layer, one of the big foundations here is absolutely race. What’s really sad and really tragic is in this new era of violent populism, that’s a term I like to use because it’s not just the same old, but it’s not quite civil war. In this new era, we’ve seen things move from the fringe where they were bad but happened more or less rarely, to more the mainstream where they’re happening more and more. And our surveys show this, people feel very fearful right now, and there’s actual reason for that. That’s not just media hype. There have been more events. We see them and they are real. We really have a time here that people are, I’m sorry to say, concerned. And there’s reason to be concerned. Yeah, as you say, the thing that pops up in my mind is the fact that white supremacy, which I think for a long time held sway over this country. And then I think that white supremacy in a lot of ways always held onto the power. But there was a time where being a racist was not cool and looked down upon. And so racism, while still evident, still holding people down, it’s built into institutions, all of that. I’m not saying that racism was away, I’m just saying that expressing it openly is now in the mainstream. I mean, we just heard President Trump recently talking about Somalis- Absolutely, yeah. In a very… I mean, just straight up, there is no difference between what he said about Somalis than what a Klansman in the forties in front of a burning cross would say about Black people, like zero difference. Yeah. So the reason I think we are in this new era, because I think you’re right, putting your finger on the mainstreaming of fringe ideas, which we used to think would stay under rocks and so forth, and white supremacy clearly fits that bill. But what I think is important to know is that we are transitioning for the first time in our country’s history from a white majority democracy to a white minority democracy. And social changes like that in other countries around the world, so I’ve studied political violence for 30 years in many countries around the world. Big social changes like that Al, often create super issues with politics, make them more fragile and often lead to political violence. Now, what’s happening in our country is that we’ve been going through a demographic change for quite some time. America up through the 1960s was about 85% white as a country. There was ebbs and flows to be sure. Well, that really started to change bit by bit, drip by drip in the mid 1960s, whereas by 1990 we were 76% white as a country. Today we’re 57% white as a country. In about 10 or 15 years, it depends on mass deportations, and you can see why then that could be an issue, we will become truly a white minority democracy for the first time. And that is one of the big issues we see in our national surveys that helps to explain support for political violence on the right. Because what you’re seeing Al, is the more we are in what I call the tipping point generation for this big demographic shift, the more there are folks on the right, and most of them Trump supporters, mega supporters, who want to stop and actually reverse that shift. Then there of course, once knowing that, there are folks on the left, not everybody on the left, but some on the left that want to keep it going or actually accelerate it a bit for fear that with the mega crowd you won’t get it, the shift will stop altogether. These are major issues and things that really rock politics and then can lead to political violence. Talk to me a little bit about January 6th, when that happened, I’m sure you were watching it on TV. Yeah. What were you thinking as all of it was kind of coming into play? Well, so I was not quite as surprised as some folks, Al. So on October 5th in Chicago, I was on the Talking Head show in Chicago, it’s called Chicago Tonight. So on October 5th, 2020, that was just after the Trump debate where he said to the Proud Boys, stand back, but stand by. Well, the Chicago folks brought me on TV to talk about that, and I said that this was really quite concerning because this has echoes of things we’ve seen in Bosnia with some other leaders that a lot of Americans are just not familiar with, but are really quite worrisome. And I said what this meant was we had to be worried about the counting of the vote, not just ballot day, the day of voting. And we had to be worried about that all the way through January 6th, the certification of the election. But you made a point earlier, Al, about the importance of leaders. This is part of the reason why it’s hard to predict. It’s not a precise science, political violence. I like to use the idea, the analogy of a wildfire when I give talks. When we have wildfires, what we know as scientists is we can measure the size of the combustible material and we know with global warming, the combustible dry wood that could be set afire is getting larger. So you know you’re in wildfire season, but it’s not enough to predict a wildfire because the wildfire’s touched off by an unpredictable set of triggers, a lightning strike, a power line that came down unpredictably. Well, that is also a point about political leaders. So it was really, I did see some sign of this that Donald Trump said too about the Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. And no other president had said anything like that ever before in our history, let’s be clear. And because of my background studying political violence, I could compare that to some playbooks from other leaders in other parts of the world. That said, even I wouldn’t have said, oh yeah, we’re 90% likely to have an event, because who would’ve thought Donald Trump would’ve given the speech at the Ellipse, not just call people to it, it will be wild. His speech at the Ellipse, Al, made it wild. You co-authored a pretty remarkable study that looked at the political geography of January 6th insurrectionists. Can you break down the findings of that paper? Yeah. So one of the things we know when we study as a scholar of political violence, we look at things other people just don’t look at because they just don’t know what’s important. We want to know, where did those people live, where’d they come from? And when you have indictments and then you have the court process in the United States, you get that as a fact. So now it does mean I had to have big research teams. There’s a hundred thousand pages of court documents to go through. But nonetheless, you could actually find this out. And we found out something stunning, Al, and it’s one of the reasons I came back to that issue of demographic change in America. What we found is that first of all, over half of those who stormed the capitol, that 1,576 were doctors, lawyers, accountants, white collar jobs, business owners, flower shop owners, if you’ve been to Washington DC, Al, they stayed at the Willard. I have never stayed at the Willard- Yeah. So my University of Chicago doesn’t provide that benefit. That is crazy to me because I think the general knowledge or what you think is that most of the people that were there were middle class to lower, middle class to poor. At least that’s what I’ve always thought. Yeah, it’s really stunning, Al. So we made some snap judgments on that day in the media that have just stayed with us over and over and over again. So the first is their economic profile. Whoa, these are people with something to lose. Then where did they come from? Well, it turned out they came from all 50 states, but huge numbers from blue states like California and New York. And then we started to look at, well, where are in the states are they coming from? Half of them came from counties won by Joe Biden, blue counties. So then we got even deeper into it. And what’s happening, Al, is they’re coming from the suburbs around the big cities. They’re coming from the suburbs around Chicago, Elmhurst, Schomburg. They’re not coming from the rural parts of Illinois. They’re coming… That’s why we call them suburban rage. They’re coming from the most diversifying parts of America, the counties that are losing the largest share of white population. Back to that issue of population change, these are the people on the front lines of that demographic shift from America is a white majority democracy, to a white minority democracy. These are the counties that will impact where the leadership between Republican and Democrat have either just changed or are about to change. So they are right on the front lines of this demographic change and they are the folks with a lot to lose. And they showed up, some took private planes to get there. This is not the poor part, the white rural rage we’re so used to hearing about. This is well off suburban rage, and it’s important for us to know this, Al, because now we know this with definitiveness here. So it’s not like a hand-wavy guess. And it’s really important because it means you can get much more serious political violence than we’re used to thinking about. Yeah. So what happens, let’s say if circumstances remain as they are, IE, the economy is not doing great, the middle class is getting squeezed and ultimately getting smaller, right? The affordability thing is a real issue. What wins? The first big social change that’s feeding into our plight as a country is this demographic social change. There’s a second one, Al, which is that over the last 30 years, just as we’re having this demographic shift to a white minority democracy, we have been like a tidal wave flowing wealth to the top 1%. And we’ve been flowing wealth to the top 1% of both Republicans and Democrats. And that has been coming out of the bottom 90% of both Republicans and Democrats. Unfortunately, both can be poorer and worse off. Whites can be worse off because of this shift of the wealth to the top 1%. And minorities can be worse off because of the shift. And you might say, well, wait a minute, maybe the American dream, we have social mobility. Well, sorry to say that at the same time, we’re shifting all this money to the top 1%, they’re spending that money to lock up and keep themselves to top 1%. It’s harder to get into that top 1% than it’s ever been in our society. And so what you see is, I just came back from Portland. What you see is a situation in Portland, which is a beautiful place, and wonderful place where ordinary people are constantly talking about how they’re feeling pinched and they’re working three jobs. Yeah. Just to make their middle, even lower middle class mortgages. I mean, this is what’s happening in America and why people have said, well, why does the establishment benefit me? Why shouldn’t I turn a blind eye if somebody’s going to attack the establishment viciously? Because it’s not working for a lot of folks, Al. And what I’m telling you is that you put these two together, you get this big demographic change happening, while you’re also getting a wealth shift like this and putting us in a negative sum society. Whoa, you really now have a cocktail where you’ve got a lot of people very angry, they’re not sure they want to have this shift and new people coming into power. And then on top of that, you have a lot of people that aren’t sure the system is worth saving. I really wanted to dive in on the polls that you’ve been conducting, and one of those, there seems to be a small but growing acceptance of political violence from both Democrats and Republicans. What do you think is driving that? I think these two social changes are underneath it, Al. So in our polls, just to put some numbers here, in 2025, we’ve done a survey in May and we did one in the end of September. So we do them every three or four months. We’ll do one in January I’m sure. And what we found is that on both sides of the political spectrum, high support for political violence. 30% in our most recent survey in September, 30% of Democrats support the use of force to prevent Trump from being president. 30%. 10% of Democrats think the death of Charlie Kirk is acceptable. His assassination was acceptable. These represent millions and millions of adults. That’s a lot of people, you see. What you’re saying is right, we’re seeing it. And I think what you’re really seeing here is as these two changes keep going, this era of violent populism is getting worse. Yeah, I mean, so I’ve seen that Democrats and Republicans are accusing each other of using violent rhetoric. So in your research, what’s actually more common in this modern area where we are right now, is it right wing or left wing on the violent rhetoric, but also who’s actually doing it? So we’ve had, just after the Kirk assassination, your listeners will probably remember and they can Google, we had these dueling studies come out almost instantly, because they’re kind of flash studies and they’re by think tanks in Washington DC. One basically saying there’s more right-wing violence than left. And one saying there’s more left-wing violence than right. Well, I just want your listeners to know that if you go under the hood, so my job is to be like the surgeon and really look at the data. You’re going to be stunned, maybe not so stunned, Al, because you live in the media, to learn the headlines and what’s actually in the content are very different. Both studies essentially have the same, similar findings, although slightly different numbers, which is they’re both going up. They’re both going up. So it’s really not the world that it was either always been one side or now it’s newly the other. So the Trump administration’s rhetoric, JD Vance is wrong to say it’s all coming from the left, but it’s also wrong to say it’s all coming from the right. Now, what I think you’re also seeing, Al, is that the politicians, if left to their own devices, rarely, I’m sorry to say do the right thing, they cater to their own constituents. But there’s some exceptions and they’ve been helpful, I think. There’s two exceptions I want to draw attention to, one who’s a Republican and one who’s a Democrat. On the Democratic side, the person who’s been just spectacular at trying to lower the temperature is Governor Shapiro. He’s a Democrat, the Governor of Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro has given numerous interviews public, where he has condemned violence on all sides. He’s recognizing, as very few others are, that it’s a problem on both sides. He personally was almost burned to death, only minutes from being burned to death with his family here back in April. So he knows this personally about what’s at stake and he has done a great job, I think in recognizing that here. Now on the Republican side, we have Erika Kirk and what Erika Kirk, of course the wife of Charlie Kirk who was assassinated did, was at Kirk’s funeral, she forgave the shooter. But let’s just be clear, she’s a very powerful voice here. Now, I think we need more of those kind of voices, Al, because you see, they really are figures people pay attention to. They’re listening to people like that. They have personal skin in the game and they can speak with sort of a lens on this few others can. But we need more people to follow in that wake and I wish we had that, and that can actually help as we go forward. And I’m hoping they, both of those people will do more and more events, and others who have been the targets of political violence will come out and do exactly the same thing. I want to go back a little bit to January 6th and just talk about those insurrectionists. So when President Trump pardoned them, what was going through your mind? That it was probably going to be the worst thing that happened in the second Trump presidency. And I know I’m saying quite a bit. I know that he’s insulted every community under the sun many, many, many times. But the reason I’m so concerned about this, Al, is that there are many ways we could lose our democracy, but the most worrisome way is through political violence. You see, because the political violence is what would make the democratic backsliding you’re so used to hearing about, irreversible. And then how might that actually happen? You get people willing to fight for Trump. And already on January 6th, we collected all the public statements on their social media videos, et cetera, et cetera, in their trials about why those people did it. And the biggest reason they did it was Trump told them so, and they say this over and over and over again, I did it because Trump told me to do it. Well, now Trump has not forgiven them, he’s actually helping them. They may be suing the government to get millions of dollars in ‘restitution’. So this is going in a very bad way if you look at this in terms of thinking you’re going to deter people from fighting for Trump. And now of course others are going to know that as well on the other side. So again, this is a very dangerous move. Once he pardoned it, no president in history has ever pardoned people who use violence for him. Yeah. So you have the insurrectionist bucket. But there’s another bucket that I’ve been thinking about a lot and I haven’t heard a lot of people talk about this, and that is that under President Trump, ICE has expanded exponentially. Yep. The amount of money that they get in the budget is- Enormous. Enormous. I’ve never seen an agency ramp up, A, within a term, like so much money and so many people- It is about to become its own army. Right. And Al, what this means concretely is, we really don’t want any ICE agents in liberal cities in October, November, December. We don’t want to be in this world of predicting, well, Trump would never do X, he would never do Y. No, we’ve got real history now to know these are not good ways to think. What we just need to do is we need to recognize that when we have national elections that are actually going to determine the future of who governs our country, you want nothing like those agents who, many of them going to be very loyal to Trump, on the ground. We should already be saying, look, we want this to stop on October 1st to December 31st, 2026, and we want to have a clean separation, so there’s no issue here of intimidation. And why would you say that? It’s because even President Trump, do you really want to go down in history as having intimidated your way to victory? So I think we really need to talk about this as a country, Al. And we really want a clean break here in the three months that will be the election, the run-up to the election, the voting, and then the counting of the vote. In closing, one of the major themes of this conversation has been that America is changing into a white minority. The question that just keeps coming to mind to me is, as somebody who studies this, do you think that America can survive that transition? Well, I am going to argue, and I’m still a little nervous about it, but we are in for a medium, soft landing. Okay. One of the things we see is that every survey we’ve done, 70% to 80% of Americans abhor political violence. And that’s on both sides of the aisle. And I think in many ways there are saving grace and it’s why, Al, when we have public conversations about political violence, what we see in our surveys is that helps to take the temperature down. Because you might worry that, oh, we’ll talk about it, we’ll stir people up and they’ll go… It seems to be the other way around, Al, as best we can tell. That there’s 70% to 80% of the population that really, really doesn’t want to go down this road. They know intuitively this is just a bad idea. This is not going to be good for the country, for their goals. And so they are the anchor of optimism that I think is going to carry us to that medium soft landing here. I think we could help that more if we have some more politicians joining that anchor of optimism. They’re essentially giving voice to the 70%, 80%. And if you look at our no Kings protests, the number of people that have shown up and how peaceful they have been, how peaceful they have been, those are the 70% to 80%, Al. And I think that gives me a lot of hope for the future that we can navigate this peacefully. But again, I’m saying it’s a medium soft landing, doesn’t mean we’re getting off the hook without some more… I’m sorry to say, likely violence, yeah. Listen, I’ll take a medium. I would prefer not at all, but the way things are going, I’ll take the medium. Thank you very much. Bob, Professor Robert Pape, it has been such a delight talking to you. Thank you so much for taking the time out. Well, thank you Al, and thanks for such a thoughtful, great conversation about this. It’s just been wonderful. So thank you very much.

On Sunday night, news broke that the Justice Department has commenced a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, an unprecedented move that marked an aggressive escalation of Donald Trump’s ongoing effort to seize more control of the historically independent Fed, which sets monetary policy for the US economy. For months, Trump has expressed frustration with Powell because the Fed has refused to decidedly lower interest rates. The administration claims that this investigation is not retaliation for the president’s dissatisfaction with the Fed, but rather about lies Powell allegedly has told about the $2.5 billion renovation of the Fed’s office building in Washington, DC. In a rare public statement on Sunday night, the usually reserved Powell called out this framing: “The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President,” he said. > Video message from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell: > https://t.co/5dfrkByGyX pic.twitter.com/O4ecNaYaGH > > — Federal Reserve (@federalreserve) January 12, 2026 The investigation has raised concerns among economists and the business world about the potential impact to the US economy if a first-in-history DOJ prosecution against the Fed chair is allowed to move forward—and how it might compare to cases of political intimidation or prosecution of central bankers in other countries, from Turkey to Argentina. > What can history teach us about what happens when a populist strongman with an > idiosyncratic taste for low interest rates undermines central bank > independence? > > — Justin Wolfers (@justinwolfers.bsky.social) 2026-01-12T01:44:26.533Z I spoke to Jason Furman about these questions. A Harvard economist, Furman previously served as President Barack Obama’s chief economist, leading his Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) during Obama’s second term. On Monday, Furman signed on to a statement decrying the Powell investigation that is cosigned by every living former Fed chair, as well as former Treasury secretaries and CEA chairs who’ve served both Democratic and Republican presidents. Our conversation below, edited for length and clarity, explores the importance of central bank independence to strong economies, and the grave consequences that have arisen around the globe when that independence has been compromised. Let’s back up for a second: Why is central bank independence important? If you don’t have an independent central bank, you’re investing enormous power in a president who can abuse it and follow their whims. There are also two broader arguments: Number one is that we have fiat money, which means you can print as much as you want, whenever you want. That is a wonderful, amazing thing to help respond to recessions and prevent depressions, but it also can be really abused and cause a lot of inflation. So, we need some way to make sure that it’s limited. An independent central bank is the way to have your cake and eat it too—a fiat currency that you can use aggressively to respond to recessions, without a huge amount of inflation. Finally, there’s been an awful lot of economics research for several decades now which has documented that the more independent your central bank, the lower your inflation, the lower your interest rates, at no cost at all, in terms of recessions or higher unemployment and the like. So, it really does empirically seem to be a free lunch. The statement you signed on Monday, along with other economists who’ve served at the highest levels of government, is short—just four sentences. One of them says that this attack on Powell is akin to what happens in nations that have far less developed economies than America’s—what you call “emerging markets with weak institutions.” What are some of them? There are examples in other places, though many of them get complicated. In Zimbabwe, they prosecuted the central banker. The central banker probably had messed up pretty badly the way they handled monetary policy, but they also messed it up badly because they listened to the government. So they listened to the government, caused a lot of inflation, and then got prosecuted for it. Indonesia had a case like this, though it’s possible that the central bank actually was somewhat corrupt and had misused money. So when you start looking at cases in emerging markets with weaker institutions, you know, there’s a certain amount of messiness and complexity that differs from the unfortunately simple, clear-cut thing happening the United States right now: Jay Powell is not corrupt. The people prosecuting him are. What happened in these other markets once central bank independence was compromised? > “I don’t think the United States is going to be like Zimbabwe anytime soon, > but the reason it’s not going to be is precisely if we know about those > examples, talk about them, and make sure that they don’t happen here.” In Argentina, they ended up with so much inflation they stopped publishing the data. They had a massive default, a very, very deep recession, and ended up with the largest bailout program in the history of the International Monetary Fund. The poverty rate went up. The unemployment rate went up. This was in 2015, but in 2001, Argentina had a similar recession, and dozens of people were killed in demonstrations related to it. Zimbabwe ended up with inflation in the trillions of percent—just absolutely mind-boggling—and almost complete economic collapse. So these, to me, are very, very extreme warnings for the United States. Of course, I don’t think the United States is going to be like Zimbabwe anytime soon, but the reason it’s not going to be is precisely if we know about those examples, talk about them, and make sure that they don’t happen here. You also mentioned these countries in a post on Bluesky, where you listed governments that have either prosecuted or threatened to prosecute central bankers as political intimidation or punishment for monetary policy. It’s a long list! Is there one country that is a particularly relevant example for what seems to be starting here? The closest analogy to what President Trump is trying to do is what President Recep Erdogan did in Turkey. So Turkey had a relatively high inflation rate. It was in the low double digits, and President Erdogan thought that the way to reduce inflation was to cut interest rates. When his central banker refused, the person was fired. In another case, a central banker was threatened with criminal prosecution and investigated for officially unrelated things—but it was obviously about the choice of monetary policy. That central banker was forced out in the face of this investigation. Then Erdogan got someone along the lines of what he wanted: They cut interest rates dramatically. Inflation took off and rose to 85 percent. There has been a lot of suffering in Turkey in the years since, and a lot of political discontent. The systems that are meant to protect central banks from being overly politicized failed in Turkey, and the result was a very serious crisis for people there. So Erdogan prosecuted central bankers for something unrelated—but it was clearly a punishment for monetary policy the leader didn’t like. That rings true with what is now happening with Powell, where the investigation is ostensibly into his statements about the renovation of the Fed’s DC headquarters.  But how far does that analogy extend? How likely is it that the chain of events turns out like they did in Turkey? I do think the United States is very different from Turkey, and so Trump is much less likely to succeed. There are a few protections here. One is that monetary policy is made by the votes of 12 people on a committee (the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed’s primary policymaking body), and the chair of that committee is just one of the 12. I think that those 12 people historically often did what the chair told them to do. But they are getting increasingly independent. And if they thought it was Donald Trump trying to tell them what to do, they would get more independent. > “What Donald Trump would love is to be able to change the independence of the > Central Bank tomorrow. To do that, he would need to be able to fire people or > intimidate them into leaving with criminal prosecution.” The second protection is the Senate, which has had way too little backbone over the last year, but when it comes to things that might mess with financial markets and the stock market, you’re seeing a little bit of backbone: Two senators have already come out strongly critical of this, talking about concrete actions they’re going to take to not confirm anyone else to the Fed as long as this [Powell investigation] is going on. And then finally, it’s just hard for me to imagine that US courts would follow through. With [the Justice Department prosecutions of] James Comey and Leticia James, the courts threw those cases out. And if there was a really, truly spurious case here—and this looks like a really, truly spurious case—I have enough faith in the legal system, which has placed some constraints on Trump in general and looks like it’s going to place more constraints when business and the economy are at stake. This is the latest and most dramatic turn in a list of actions the administration has taken to assert more control over the Fed—like Trump’s ongoing court battle to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook. Why do you think the Trump administration is doing this? I think Trump has a deep-seated conviction from decades in the real estate industry that low interest rates let you do more. My guess is the low interest rates help him personally. But I actually don’t think that’s the essential motive here. I think he is capable of all sorts of personal corruption, but in this case, it’s much more a mindset of: You think it’s good for you, you think it’s good for the world, and you think it’s good for a lot of the people around you. So what Donald Trump would love is to be able to change the independence of the Central Bank tomorrow. To do that, he would need to be able to fire people or intimidate them into leaving with criminal prosecution. My guess is the courts will stop that from happening. So then, the threat here is not a sort of instant decapitation—it is a longer-term, patient effort. Even if the courts stop a prosecution from happening, Trump does get one appointment to a vacancy, both Fed governor and chair slot this year. He gets another appointment two years from now. Maybe someone else leaves early, and he gets another appointment. Over six years President Trump and his successor could appoint multiple people and basically use that to take over. If that longer-term takeover happens, how much closer do you think monetary policy gets to some of these extreme emerging market situations that you’ve talked about? I don’t think it’s something that would happen super-fast, but it could last a long time: You know, Argentina was a great economy, and now it’s very different than the United States. And central bank independence really is one of those few items you’d have on the list as to why those two countries are so different. So I don’t know how much closer it gets. It depends on just how rigid the people appointed are. And just how much they’re willing to ignore warning signs in markets—and their own appearance with the public that they would be failing.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On Friday morning, the US House of Representatives approved a bill that would get the Department of Energy (DOE) out of the business of energy standards for mobile homes, also known as manufactured homes, and could set the efficiency requirements back decades.  Advocates say the changes will streamline the regulatory process and keep the upfront costs of manufactured homes down. Critics argue that less efficient homes will cost people more money overall and mostly benefit builders.   “This is not about poor people. This is not about working people,” said Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.), who grew up in a manufactured home, on the House floor before the vote. “This is about doing the bidding of corporations.” The average income of a manufactured home resident is around $40,000, and they “already face disproportionately high energy costs and energy use,” said Johanna Neumann, senior director of the Campaign for 100% Renewable Energy at Environment America. That, she said, is why more stringent energy codes are so important. But the Energy Department, which oversees national energy policy and production, didn’t always have a say over these standards.  Starting in 1974, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, became tasked with setting building codes for manufactured homes. But HUD last updated the relevant energy-efficiency standards in 1994, and they have long lagged behind modern insulation and weatherization practices. So in 2007, Congress assigned that task to the DOE. It still took 15 years and a lawsuit before President Joe Biden’s administration finalized new rules in 2022 that were projected to reduce utility bills in double-wide manufactured homes by an average of $475 a year. Even with higher upfront costs taken into account, the government predicted around $5 billion in avoided energy bills over 30-years. At the time, the manufactured housing industry argued that DOE’s calculations were wrong and that the upfront cost of the home should be the primary metric of affordability. Both the Biden and now Trump administrations have delayed implementation of the rule and compliance deadlines, which still aren’t in effect.  This House legislation would eliminate the DOE rule and return sole regulatory authority to HUD. Lesli Gooch, CEO of the Manufactured Housing Institute, a trade organization, describes it as essentially a process bill aimed at removing bureaucracy that has stood in the way of action. “The paralysis is because you have two different agencies that have been tasked with creating energy standards,” Gooch said. “You can’t build a house to two different sets of blueprints.” Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.), agreed and called the move “commonsense regulatory reform” in a letter urging his colleagues to support the bill. Ultimately, 57 Democrats joined 206 Republicans in voting for the bill, and it now moves to the Senate, where its prospects are uncertain.  If the bill becomes law, however, the only operative benchmark would be HUD’s 1994 code and it could take years to make a new one. While more than half of the roughly 100,000 homes sold in the US each year already meet or exceed the DOE’s 2022 efficiency rules, the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy estimates that tens of thousands are still built to just the outdated standard. “Families are struggling,” said Mark Kresowik, senior policy director at the council, and he does not expect HUD under Trump to move particularly quickly on a fix. “I have not seen this administration lowering energy bills.” For now, though, it’s the Senate’s turn to weigh in.

This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. President Donald Trump has made it clear: His vision for Venezuela’s future involves the US profiting from its oil. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies—the biggest anywhere in the world—go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure,” the president told reporters at a news conference Saturday, following the shocking capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife. But experts caution that a number of realities—including international oil prices and longer-term questions of stability in the country—are likely to make this oil revolution much harder to execute than Trump seems to think. > Trump seems to view the situation almost like “a Settlers of Catan board—you > kidnap the president of Venezuela and, ipso facto, you now control all the > oil.” “The disconnect between the Trump administration and what’s really going on in the oil world, and what American companies want, is huge,” says Lorne Stockman, an analyst with Oil Change International, a clean energy and fossil fuels research and advocacy organization. Venezuela sits on some of the largest oil reserves in the world. But production of oil there has plummeted since the mid 1990s, after President Hugo Chávez nationalized much of the industry. The country was producing just 1.3 million barrels of oil each day in 2018, down from a high of more than 3 million barrels each day in the late 1990s. (The US, the top producer of crude oil in the world, produced an average of 21.7 million barrels each day in 2023.) Sanctions placed on Venezuela during the first Trump administration, meanwhile, have driven production even further down. Trump has repeatedly implied that freeing up all that oil and increasing production would be a boon for the oil and gas industry—and that he expects American oil companies to take the lead. This kind of thinking—a natural offshoot of his “drill, baby, drill” philosophy—is typical for the president. One of Trump’s main critiques of the Iraq war, which he first voiced years before he ran for office, was that the US did not “take the oil” from the region to “reimburse ourselves” for the war. The president views energy geopolitics “almost like the world is a Settlers of Catan board—you kidnap the president of Venezuela and, ipso facto, you now control all the oil,” says Rory Johnston, a Canadian oil market researcher. “I do think he legitimately, to a degree, believes that. It’s not true, but I think that’s an important frame for how he’s justifying and driving the momentum of his policy.” Some Trump administration policies that were intended to boost American oil and gas have actually hurt the industry. US oil producers have repeatedly voiced concerns about how tariffs and a volatile market have contributed to a dramatic decline in global oil prices, which fell 20 percent in 2025—the biggest losses since 2020. Oil and gas companies, like most big industries with a lot of capital invested in infrastructure, value long-term political and financial stability. Any more big, unpredictable shakeups—in supply, regulatory environments, tariffs, or otherwise—could not come at a worse time for American oil. “Right now the oil market’s somewhat oversupplied,” Stockman says. “That’s hurting American companies. The last thing they want is for a massive oil reserve to suddenly be opened up.” A number of both short- and long-term decisions could affect how the US invasion of Venezuela plays out for American oil. First there’s the question of what happens to all the oil Venezuela is currently sitting on. Over the past few months, the administration has significantly ramped up sanctions and blockades on Venezuela, creating a massive glut of oil that hasn’t been able to find its way out of the country. If Trump decides to totally lift sanctions on Venezuela, that surplus could enter the wider market. The most likely buyers are US oil refineries in the Gulf of Mexico, which are close by and equipped to handle the type of oil produced in Venezuela. This could create investment opportunities for oil companies based there. When it comes to developing even more of Venezuela’s oil capacity, things get trickier. While it’s tempting to draw direct lines between the Iraq invasion and Trump’s move against Maduro, the economic conditions for oil, both in the US and abroad, are much different than they were in 2002. Oil supply was tight when the US invaded Iraq, and the shale revolution—which flooded the market with cheap fracked gas and oil from American producers—was still several years away. Now, with oil prices sitting almost as low as they were in the pandemic, most big producers are not drilling with abandon, but picking and choosing where they spend their money. Renewable energy, meanwhile, has become astronomically cheaper than it was in the early 2000s. > “Lots of corruption, poor governance, nationalization… [It’s] gonna take time > for companies to trust again.” “We are entering a world where oil demand growth is slowing,” Stockman says. “Despite what the Trump administration wants, we are in the midst of a transition. No matter where you believe the peak is, whether it’s 2030 or beyond, the peak is coming.” It’s not clear if restarting production in Venezuela will see a guaranteed return on investment for many years. Venezuela’s oil reserves are extra-heavy, requiring extra processing—and cost—to make the oil light enough for transport. Meanwhile, the infrastructure used to produce oil in Venezuela is falling apart after decades of disrepair and neglect. Significantly ramping up production in these circumstances, experts say, will likely take years and tens of millions of dollars. Some major American companies seem poised to profit more immediately from a regime change. Chevron, the only company still operating in Venezuela, could have enough of a foothold to more quickly expand production. ExxonMobil, meanwhile, has poured money into oil fields in nearby Guyana; American control in Venezuela could be helpful in stabilizing those investments over the long term. But as a whole, the industry has shown initial hesitation to a possibly open playing field in Venezuela. Politico reported Saturday that the Trump administration has told oil companies that it expects them to pour money into the country—but industry has been cautious. “The infrastructure currently there is so dilapidated that no one at these companies can adequately assess what is needed to make it operable,” an energy insider told Politico. And oil reserves in a specific region don’t guarantee a stable environment for a massive influx of investment cash—and American oil employees. The New York Times reported Saturday that the Trump administration has for weeks eyed Venezuelan vice president Delcy Rodríguez to replace Maduro, based partly on her management of the oil industry since she was named the nation’s oil minister in 2020. But it’s far from clear if this administration will be able to control a regime change in a way that creates a stable investing environment for big oil companies for the next few decades. That initial plan appears to be unraveling already. On Saturday, Rodríguez, who has been sworn in as Venezuela’s interim leader, denounced US actions there and said that Maduro is the country’s “only president.” Sunday morning, US secretary of state Marco Rubio said on ABC’s This Week that Rodríguez is not the “legitimate” president of Venezuela. “Ultimately,” he said, “legitimacy for their system of government will come about through a period of transition and real elections, which they have not had.” “There’s a lot of history, and I mean that in, like, a capital H kind of weight to it, History,” says Johnston. “Lots of corruption, poor governance, nationalization…That is gonna take time for companies to trust again if they don’t have to. Step one is: Who is now president of Venezuela? We have no idea at this point.” Still, there’s a chance some companies may choose to play ball in the short term. Investors have learned that acceding to Trump’s interests can present financial and regulatory wins, even when the market is not necessarily behind those decisions; companies that don’t follow along, by contrast, could face consequences. On Saturday, The Wall Street Journal reported that a group of hedge fund officials and asset managers were already planning a trip to Venezuela to explore investment opportunities, including ones in energy. “I think there’s going to be a lot of that,” Johnston says. “Is that window dressing for investments, or is that window dressing for the White House? I think there’s gonna be a lot of people wanting to please Trump and say, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s our oil industry now.’”