How Venezuela became a prop, Isaacman became an experiment, and the Peace Institute became a punchline Trump wrote himself

PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK/STRINGERAL

Veni, Vidi, Venezuela

Every administration, sooner or later, finds itself needing to move military assets around without sending the country on a run for toilet paper. Most presidents handle this discreetly, via quiet memos, closed-door briefings, and an admiral or two, who swear not to breathe a word, on the life of their post-retirement yacht. While any other president would move assets with utmost discretion, Trump is not any other president.

Apparently, Trump decided to obscure his true objectives in a showdown with Venezuela. Not because Venezuela did anything, and not because Venezuela can do anything. In fact, Venezuela has less of an idea about what’s going on than the rest of us. If geopolitical confusion was a national export, Caracas would be running a trade surplus.

And that’s why Trump is suddenly “going after” Venezuela. Not because they matter, but because they’re convenient, plausible, and so strategically insignificant that Trump can park the entire US Navy off the Eastern Seaboard without anyone demanding to know why. The real mission? Let’s just say it rhymes with “finding Russian nuclear submarines before they find us.” Actually, numerous threats lurk across the bodies of water separating the North American continent from its very many enemies, from swarms of drones above to fiber-optic cables below.

So instead, Trump points at Venezuela, the geopolitical equivalent of a scarecrow with a flag, and says, “THEM.”

And the press, bless their caffeinated little hearts, grabs the decoy and runs with it. “BREAKING: Tensions Rise with Venezuela!” “BREAKING: Trump Clueless!” “BREAKING! Orange Man Bad!”

Meanwhile, the Navy quietly does what the Navy needs to do.

This is stagecraft meets statecraft. If you give Washington a storyline that looks absurd, they’ll spend three full news cycles debating the absurdity but never the strategy behind it. Trump understands the Beltway better than the Beltway understands itself.

And the strategy is simple: When you need to raise your defenses without raising alarms, pick a villain no one is afraid of. Venezuela fits the role perfectly. Not a threat. Not a challenge. Not even an extra in someone else’s conflict. Just a confused regime, blinking into the camera, muttering, “Us? Really? Are you sure?”

But while Washington argues over whether Trump is overreacting or underreacting or reacting to the wrong country entirely, the real message is getting delivered to the real audience: the one with satellites, submarines, listening posts, and long-range interests in the Atlantic corridor.

This standoff is not with Venezuela. It’s with whoever thought the United States wasn’t paying close enough attention.

Senior Moment

“The United States Institute of Peace was once a bloated, useless entity that blew $50 million per year while delivering no peace. Now, the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, which is both beautifully and aptly named after a president who ended eight wars in less than a year, will stand as a powerful reminder of what strong leadership can accomplish for global stability. Congratulations, world!”

—White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly

The Trump Science Experiment Nobody Noticed

For decades, Democrats held a monopoly on the word science. “Trust the science,” they said (which is Beltway code for “Don’t ask follow-up questions”).

Republicans, meanwhile, seemed content to let the other team hold the lab coat.

Enter Jared Isaacman. When Isaacman took his seat at Thursday’s re-nomination hearing (a phenomenon so rare that my spellcheck doesn’t recognize “renomination” as a word), he didn’t sound like someone auditioning for a bureaucratic post; he sounded like someone auditioning for the future. In a town addicted to process, Isaacman brought progress. He’s the civilian astronaut who’s personally advanced orbital missions, in-space research funding, and next-generation flight testing.

Trump’s plan isn’t to reclaim the “party of science” label through a debate. Debates are for people who don’t own rocket engines. His plan is to make the science of tomorrow (rockets, private missions, test flights, actual hardware) look like a MAGA export. Why fight over who believes the most studies, when you can claim the scientists who are actually building the things?

And that’s why Thursday mattered. Isaacman didn’t rebut the Democrats’ claim to science; he made it irrelevant. He didn’t argue; he demonstrated. By Beltway standards, that’s a full-blown plot twist. When one side brings footnotes and the other side brings flight plans, the word “science” starts packing its bags.

The bottom line is, the party of science is whichever side paints a more compelling picture of what the future looks like. Trump gets it. —

The Pundits’ Punt: Trolling With the Punches

In classic Washington tradition, the renaming of the US Institute of Peace should have generated a polite shrug, a press release nobody reads and maybe a C-SPAN caller from Pumpernickel Prairie, Ohio, asking why the logo suddenly looks different. But this is Trump, a man constitutionally incapable of letting institutions remain institutional, which is why we find ourselves blessed with the newly sanctified “Trump Institute of Peace.” The name was Trump’s idea.

And to drive home the point that this was more than a cosmetic change, Trump’s first diplomatic guests at the rebranded building were the presidents of Congo and Rwanda, two leaders who haven’t agreed on anything for a long time, except for engaging in brutal war against each other. Except now, in deference to the institution’s freshly minted titleholder, they agreed to suspend hostilities long enough to bless the newly renamed institute with a peace-themed photo-op.

Meanwhile, the foreign-policy establishment immediately did what it always does when Trump tosses a political grenade into the reflecting pool: It snickered, it sputtered and it asked one of its interns to draft strongly worded think pieces with words like “norms,” “precedent,” and “alarming.” But the joke, as usual, is on them. Trump understands something his critics chronically forget. Ridicule is still oxygen, and he owns the airways.

By slapping his name on the Peace Institute and then on the building, Trump forces every outlet, friendly, hostile and confused, to repeat the phrase “Trump” and “peace” in the same breath. They may mock it, but they still end up amplifying it. In the attention economy, the objective is to get the world talking because the buzzwords “Trump” and “Peace” are all they’ll remember.

And international audiences? They see something entirely different. Abroad, the renaming reads as a flex. America’s peace posture is now explicitly tied to the man who still considers tariffs a legitimate alternative to small talk, and who reshaped Middle East diplomacy as negotiated from a position of unapologetic strength.

But the Beltway reaction reveals the real magic trick: Trump once again hijacks the media ecosystem that swears it’s immune to him. The anchors laugh, the pundits scoff, the diplomats groan, but their audiences walk away remembering only one thing: Trump… Institute of Peace. We are more than a decade into the Trump Show, and the media that insists on resenting him is simultaneously giving him everything he wants in terms of reach, repetition, and relevance.

The building may be named for peace, but the naming itself was an act of war. Psychological warfare, waged with nothing more than a Sharpie, a podium, and the eternal complicity of his critics.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1090)