January 27th, 2026: Venezuela’s Acting Leader Rebels Against Washington & Israel Backs Militias In Gaza
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It's Tuesday, the 27th of January. Welcome to the President's Daily Brief. I'm Mike Baker. Your eyes and ears on the world stage. And yes, look at that. I'm still on the road. All right, let's get briefed. First up, defiant words out of Caracas, where Venezuela's acting leader, Delce Rodriguez, is openly defying the Trump administration and rejecting claims that she's governing at Washington's direction. I'll have the details. Later in the show, we return to a story that we've been tracking for some time. Israel's quiet support for armed Palestinian militias inside Gaza, with a new report shining a spotlight on its efforts to weaken Hamas from within. Plus, an important milestone in the Gaza conflict, as Israel announces it's recovered the body of the last remaining hostage from Hamas's brutal 7 October 2023 attacks.
It's a development that clears a major hurdle in the ongoing peace plan. Now they just have to clear all the other major hurdles. And in today's back of the brief, TikTok survives Washington's ban threat. Oh, good. Agreeing to new U.S.-based operations aimed at easing national security concerns. Well, continuing to give you access to those amazing cat videos. But first, today's PDB Spotlight. I want to start things off today by returning to Venezuela, where the nation's interim leader, Delcy Rodriguez, the former VP under Nicolas Maduro, is striking a defiant tone toward Washington. In comments that quickly rippled through Caracas and beyond, Rodriguez said Venezuela has, quote, had enough of taking orders from the U.S.
So there, that didn't take long. A shot aimed squarely at the Trump administration just weeks after U.S. forces removed Nicolas Maduro from power.
How did Delcy Rodríguez publicly respond to U.S. claims she's ruling at Washington's direction?
The message was unmistakable. Whatever role Washington played in Maduro's fall, Rodriguez wants it understood that she is not governing at America's direction. Now, it's worth pausing here because, of course, some of this, and by that I mean quite a bit of it, may be political theater. Rodriguez is speaking to a domestic audience that has spent years marinating in anti-American rhetoric alongside her old boss Maduro. Publicly pushing back against Washington helps her shore up nationalist credentials and blunt criticism that she's simply become a U.S.-backed placeholder. In that sense, the comments could be as much about optics as policy. But rhetoric aside, the more interesting question is this. What has actually changed in Venezuela since Maduro's removal, and what hasn't?
Well, according to new reporting from the New York Times, on the economic front, the shift has been dramatic. In just three weeks, Rodriguez has moved aggressively to liberalize Venezuela's economy. With President Trump's blessing, her government has redirected oil exports away from China and toward the far more lucrative U.S. market. The first tranche of oil revenue, roughly $300 million, has already been injected into Venezuela's banking system, stabilizing the currency and easing fears of another hyperinflationary spiral. She's also busy rewriting laws to attract foreign investment, boost wages, and introduce a degree of transparency that implicitly acknowledges what everyone already knows, that for years, the Venezuelan state was looted under Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez.
Markets have responded to the developments with some enthusiasm. Caracas' small stock exchange is rallying. Real estate prices are surging. Venezuelan bonds, long considered toxic, are climbing on expectations of a debt restructuring. Foreign investors are flying in, eyeing mines and factories and properties that were devastated during years of economic collapse. And Rodriguez herself has been encouraging optimism, just not too much of it. In a recent televised address to governors and mayors, she promised that 2026 would be a better year, projecting confidence and momentum. But that economic opening is unfolding in the shadow of a political system that looks, in many ways, eerily familiar. As we've been noting here on the PDB, the fall of Maduro didn't necessarily change much in terms of the centers of power in Caracas.
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