February 26th, 2026: Inside Nicolás Maduro's Last Days as Venezuela's Leader & CIA Launches Iran Operation
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It's Thursday, the 26th of February. Welcome to the President's Daily Brief. I'm Mike Baker, your eyes and ears on the world stage. All right, let's get briefed. First up, new reporting reveals how a five-minute phone call between President Trump and Nicolas Maduro may have sealed the Venezuelan strongman's fate. We'll break down the miscalculation that led Maduro from his life as Venezuela's dictator to a jail cell in Brooklyn. Later in the show, amid mounting pressure on Tehran, the CIA launches a rare recruitment push aimed directly at Iranians. Plus, the United Kingdom slaps sanctions on nearly 300 Russian-linked entities after an email blunder exposed a network of illicit oil traders tied to Moscow's energy and military sectors.
And in today's back of the brief, Moscow is accusing Ukraine of trying to acquire a nuclear weapon with help from Britain and France. Oh, they must be outraged. Apparently, Moscow forgot that it invaded Ukraine four years ago and is responsible for this entire sad, costly conflict. But first, today's PDB Spotlight. We're learning new details about the final weeks that led up to the fall of Nicolas Maduro, thanks to reporting from the New York Times. And at the center of this story wasn't a missile strike or a special forces raid. It was a five to ten minute phone call between Maduro and President Trump, where both leaders walked away with completely different impressions of what had just happened.
According to the reporting, the call, which took place in late November of this past year, was cordial, even light at moments. Trump complimented Maduro's strong voice and invited him to Washington. Maduro joked back through a translator. There were no explicit threats, no clear agreements, no roadmap laid out for Maduro's exit. And that was the problem. Trump reportedly expected Maduro to outline some kind of serious plan to step aside, or at least signal that he understood the gravity of the situation. Maduro believed he was projecting confidence and flexibility.
What led to Nicolás Maduro's downfall in Venezuela?
But what Trump heard was a leader who wasn't taking the moment seriously. Ultimately, Maduro ended the call believing that he had the upper hand. He thought he had bought time, that the U.S. military buildup offshore was leverage, a pressure tactic designed to extract concessions. Trump, by contrast, concluded that Maduro wasn't leaving voluntarily. Now, the phone call wasn't the only miscalculation. It was part of a pattern. And in the weeks after that late November phone call, Maduro's public behavior became another point of contention. He made televised appearances where he danced and delivered slogans in English, moments that were widely circulated and reportedly irritated members of the Trump team, who saw them as a kind of mockery rather than genuine outreach.
That perception fed into the White House's view that he wasn't taking U.S. pressure seriously. Maduro never actually considered resigning, even as sanctions tightened, even as U.S. officials, intermediaries, and foreign governments relayed warnings. At one point, he floated the idea of early elections in 2026, not immediate resignation, which tells you he still believed he could control the timeline. More telling, according to the reporting, Maduro fundamentally misread Trump's motivations. He believed the White House didn't see him personally as the problem. Instead, he thought he simply needed to identify an economic spoil, something Trump wanted, and structure a deal around it.
How did a phone call between Trump and Maduro change the course of events?
In other words, he believed this was transactional. And given President Trump's history of dealmaking, that wasn't an irrational assumption. But in this particular circumstance, well, it was wrong. Meanwhile, inside Maduro's government, fault lines were widening. Maduro reportedly considered firing his vice president, Delcy Rodriguez. He suspected that she was consolidating power, tightening her grip on the national purse strings, sidelining rivals, simultaneously holding the roles of vice president, oil minister, and finance minister. That concentration of authority would normally be threatening to an autocrat.
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