Currying Favor

Plus: Starlink in Iran, lady activism in Minnesota, and more...

Nobel for Trump: María Corina Machado, Venezuela's opposition leader and the most recent Nobel Peace Prize recipient, decided to hand over the prize to President Donald Trump during a meeting at the White House yesterday, knowing he'd long coveted it.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee, ever the hall monitors, quickly clarified that the prize is not transferable. Who cares? If Machado believes this is strategically smart, in order to garner influence over Trump during this tenuous transition period in Venezuela, then it makes a lot of sense that she'd try to give him the thing he believes was taken from him.

"She is a wonderful woman who has been through so much. María presented me with her Nobel Peace Prize for the work I have done," wrote Trump on social media. "Such a wonderful gesture of mutual respect. Thank you María!"

Trump has, of course, repeatedly made the claim that he's ended seven (or eight) wars, depending on how you count. In a September address to the United Nations General Assembly, Trump lamented that "it's too bad I had to do these things instead of the United Nations doing them" (which is kind of hilarious, and points to the total uselessness of the U.N.).

("What is the purpose of the United Nations?" he added, waxing poetic. All it does is "write a really strongly worded letter and then never follow that letter up.")

Here's his tally, courtesy of the Times:

He's taking credit for getting delegates from Armenia and Azerbaijan to the White House to sign a joint declaration; ditto for Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda; India and Pakistan, which he claims credit for given the May 2025 fighting in Kashmir; Cambodia and Thailand; Kosovo and Serbia; Egypt and Ethiopia; then, most notably, Israel and Iran (and the freeing of hostages that were kidnapped by Hamas). Now, he has deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, exiling him to Brooklyn (there can be no worse fate), but replaced him with old regime stalwart Delcy Rodríguez, and claimed that the U.S. will exert control over the country for the foreseeable future, maybe even a very long time, so it's not totally clear how the situation in Venezuela will play out. Of course, Trump has also ordered boat strike after boat strike, of questionable legality (with no congressional approval), in the process of trying to bring about regime change in Venezuela, claiming the boats are full of narcotraffickers, but failing to supply such evidence to American lawmakers.

From Machado's perspective, obsequiousness is probably a small price to pay for the possibility of better influencing Trump to help Venezuela transition to good governance. After all, the opposition party that Machado has helmed really does have the mandate to govern; Rodríguez is notoriously corrupt, having served as Maduro's vice president.

Not all peace prize types are so down on Machado: "It is easy to sit in comfortable Norway and criticize her for talking sweet to Trump," Marianne Dahl, research director at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, told the Times.

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Scenes from New York:

There are still the NYers who will say to you, "You shop at Whole Foods, you must be a millionaire." Well no. One of the funny things about NYC is that across the product line, the Whole Foods is cheaper than our neighborhood grocery stores, and the WF still does things like have…

— Nicole (@nicolegelinas) January 15, 2026

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QUICK HITS

• "Since 2022, activists and civil society groups have worked on sneaking Starlink terminals into the country, aided by a U.S. government sanctions exemption for Starlink and American companies to offer communication tools in Iran," reports The New York Times. "About 50,000 of the terminals are now in Iran, according to digital activists, in defiance of an Iranian law passed last year that bans the systems, and rules prohibiting unlicensed services."
• "Palantir is working on a tool for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a 'confidence score' on the person's current address," per 404 Media. "ICE is using it to find locations where lots of people it might detain could be based."
• "Why are so many middle-class people, and especially women, behaving with such callous disregard for their own safety, seemingly without realizing it?" asks a Substacker who goes by Kitten in a piece entitled "Stochastic Martyrdom." "Yes, they oppose immigration enforcement, they consider ICE's mission illegitimate. But most people who hold these views do not engage in direct action with armed law enforcement, and even fewer would put themselves in a position to be beaten or shot by physically obstructing or interfering with officers. Yet a critical minority of mostly white, mostly middle-class activists, disproportionately women, have been radicalized into this extreme form of activist protest in large numbers. How did this happen? To understand why, first understand that activist groups of the kind that Good belonged to encourage their members to use the exact interference tactics she employed, as well as other, even more dangerous once. These groups publish various guides on how to prevent law enforcement from fulfilling their mission or arresting their fellow travelers. They conduct training sessions for members to rehearse these tactics before deploying them in the field. They are well organized and well funded.…The citizen-led anti-ICE operations taking place in Minneapolis and in every city where ICE shows its masked faces are better understood as a kind of militia action, rather than as a form of protest. Even when technically non-violent in nature, these operations are designed to provoke a violent response from law enforcement, thereby producing mediagenic victims to use in propaganda. The goal is to trap enforcement efforts in a double bind—either obstruction tactics disrupt immigration enforcement, so activists win; or somebody gets hurt or killed for the dozens of cameras filming every encounter, producing a new martyr to dominate media coverage, so activists win."
• To borrow from Morrissey, I've got the 21st century breathing down my neck:

Trying to scan the QR code on the ICE agent choking me but first I have to watch a 10 second FanDuel ad https://t.co/wfTJ2vGJXP

— Deconstructed Cachapa (@AntiClimaco) January 14, 2026