Weekly Member Update - January 5, 2026

Happy New Year, friends. 2026 seemed to get off to a strong start with the inspirational inauguration of Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York City. If you have not yet watched the full inaugural speech of Mayor Mamdani, we strongly encourage you to do so. It was not just a rhetorical tour de force, it was also a bold vision for governance that is founded on diversity, “the warmth of collectivism” and an affirmative promise to truly be by-and-for the People. Not only did Mayor Mamdani not “pivot to the center” even a little, he also chastised the centrists — “those fluent in the good grammar of civility [who] have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty” — who have advanced austerity and moderation to the detriment of working people. As we embark on the most consequential and important election season in American history, Mayor Mamdani articulated a vision of “expansive and audacious” governance that we hope to see adopted in the messaging of Democrats nationwide. With the November midterms perhaps our final chance to stop the permanent entrenchment of the authoritarian right, it is clear that the old model of “vote blue no matter who” centrism adorned with corporate cash and focus-group-think is not the way forward. The existing Democratic Party leadership and messaging class has proven time and again that it is not up to the task of preserving our democracy and drawing working people to our cause. It is now time for the oppositional left to embrace a bold and unabashed progressive vision that is unafraid of the “socialism” label — our socialism is for the people, the right’s socialism is for corporations and oligarchs — and is willing to fight with every tool at our disposal to preserve our constitutional Republic. While Mayor Mamdani may be a singular creation of New York City, Democrats everywhere would do well to embrace his “agenda of safety, affordability, and abundance — where government looks and lives like the people it represents, never flinches in the fight against corporate greed, and refuses to cower before challenges that others have deemed too complicated.”

In case you were somehow unaware of the stakes before us this coming Fall, the Orange King and his band of criminals quickly reminded us on Friday night with the astounding abduction of Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro and his wife by American armed forces. To be clear, this blatantly unconstitutional action was effectively a Latin American coup in the grandest of American traditions; between 1898 and 1994, the United States intervened successfully to change governments in Latin America a total of at least 41 times. For those of us who lived through the Administration of George W. Bush — remember thinking that no President could ever be worse than W? — Trump’s reckless intervention in Venezuela also has strong shades of the tragedy that was the Iraq War, complete with contrived justifications for the use of our military might and widespread public opposition to yet another foreign war. But, if you can stomach watching Trump’s press conference on the military action from his country club on Saturday, we think you’ll see that this particular misadventure is crucially different from that prior escapade. Whereas W, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld at least put forward the pretense of contending that our 2003 invasion of Iraq was about advancing democracy, Trump hardly even bothers. While Maduro’s abduction may have been couched in the language of law enforcement — Maduro and his wife will apparently be prosecuted for drug trafficking and machine-gun possession, of all things — Trump was not afraid to tell anyone that was listening that our military intervention in Venezuela was only really about making that nation’s vast oil resources available to American corporations. Trump mentioned Venezuela’s oil reserves more that 20 times in his shambolic remarks, often referring to Venezuelan oil as “ours” and characterizing the nationalization of Venezuela’s oil industry in 1976 as a theft of property from from American oil companies like Exxon, Shell and Mobil. But Trump’s remarks also articulated a renewal of 19th Century American Imperialism — with the Monroe Doctrine now Trumpified into the ridiculous “Donroe Doctrine” — and suggested that other sovereign nations like Cuba, Colombia and Mexico could be next in line for our Country’s renewed focus on might-makes-right colonialism.

Naturally, because this is the Trump Administration, renewed and robust American Imperialism now comes wrapped in the Orange King’s trademark incompetence and not even the concept of a plan going forward. In his press conference, Trump clearly articulated his view that “we” — meaning him and his minions like Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller and Pete Hegseth — are going to be “running” Venezuela for the foreseeable future. By Sunday morning, however, Rubio was contradicting his boss, incredulous at people’s “fixation” with the issue of who is in charge of a nation with 29 million people. Adding to the uncertainty is the open question of who the Trump Administration is actually working with on the ground in Venezuela. Conventional wisdom was that Nobel Peace Prize recipient Maria Corina Machado, a pro-American and right-wing figure with broad popularity at home, would be natural fit as the latest in a long line of American puppets in Central and South America. But, according to the Washington Post, Trump is big mad at Machado for winning the Nobel Prize he has long coveted, even though Machado licked Trump’s boots in her Nobel acceptance speech. It seems that Machado learned the hard way that it doesn’t pay to suck up to a petulant and malignant narcissist. So, instead of Machado, the Trump Administration appears to be content to be dealing with Maduro’s still-in-place inner circle, including newly installed Interim President Delcy Rodriguez, who may or may not have been in Russia when US troops captured Maduro and who has since proclaimed that Maduro remains the one and only Venezuelan President. In short, it’s typical Trumpian mismanagement and chaos, only this time, our standing in the international community and the well-being of American servicemembers is at stake. To top it off, as Politico has reported, it is not even clear that American oil companies — many of whom donated millions to the Trump reelection effort last year — are actually on board with rebuilding the Venezuelan oil infrastructure. As the renowned Philadelphia columnist Will Bunch aptly put it: “Trump’s splendid little war in Venezuela comes drenched in so many lies, buried under layers of justifications that change almost hourly, and so far outside the boundaries of both U.S. and international law that it makes George W. Bush’s dishonest and disastrous misadventure in Iraq feel like Gettysburg by comparison.” For another insightful perspective on Trump’s War in Venezuela, we highly recommend the incomparable Rebecca Solnit, who has written “Five Facets of the Attack on Venezuela by the Rogue Nation the US Has Become.”

Of course, it would not be a crisis in Trump 2.0 without the requisite impotence of Democratic Party leadership. Don’t get us wrong, there were plenty of Democrats who issued strong statements in response to this Venezuelan misadventure — Rep. Ted Lieu, Senators Chris Van Hollen and Tammy Duckworth and New York’s own Rep. Pat Ryan come immediately to mind — and it appears that a war powers resolution with an uncertain future will come before the US Senate this coming week. But our old friends Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer did little to dispel their growing reputation for tepid fecklessness, issuing a joint statement on Saturday calling for “briefings” on Trump’s “announced plan to run Venezuela.” Later, Schumer was quoted on a call with members of the press in characterizing members of the Senate Democratic Caucus as “very, very just totally, totally, totaling troubled” and in labeling Trump’s use of the American military to capture a foreign head of state as a mere “distraction” from skyrocketing costs and the Epstein files. But Schumer declined to embrace the prospect of impeachment or the use of the impending government shutdown as leverage against further action in the Caribbean, choosing instead to call upon Republicans to take responsibility for their Mad King and “resist him.” We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, it is long past time for Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries to resign from their leadership roles and yield to new leaders who are willing and able to rise to the moment. On the subject of impeachment, in particular, we are of the view that the failure to even consider that path because of the perception that it will not succeed in a Republican-controlled Congress sends a message that the conduct of Trump and his lackeys is not an impeachable offense. The wiser path, it seems to us, is to vigorously pursue impeachment in order to persuade and educate an American public that is already skeptical of military entanglement in Venezuela. As usual, Schumer and Jeffries demonstrate no appetite to actually try and shape public opinion and instead fall back on tired and ineffective approaches borne of a different era. It’s time for them both to go. Meanwhile, Indivisible has established a toolkit to make it easy to call or email Schumer, Senator Gillibrand, Congressman Tonko or any other member of Congress to demand that they reassert their Constitutional authorities and put a check on Trump’s colonial ambitions.

We close with a thank you to the hundreds of hearty souls that braved the cold and perilous snowbanks on Wolf Road on Sunday afternoon for an emergency protest against Trump’s Venezuelan misadventure. We also hope to also see you this Tuesday evening, when we hold vigil outside of the State Capitol in solidarity with our immigrant communities to mark the occasion of Three Kings Day and observe the five-year anniversary of the January 6 Insurrection. Finally, we are working on securing a new location within the Albany City limits for our Monthly Member meeting, so we will be skipping our January meeting with a promise to be back up and running in time for our next scheduled meeting on February 9 at a location to be announced soon!