GD POLITICS

How Will Americans React To U.S. Involvement In Venezuela?

Heads up: Our first live show of 2026 is scheduled for Tuesday, January 27th at the Comedy Cellar in New York City! Nate Silver, Clare Malone, and I are recording a live 2028 Democratic Primary draft. You can get tickets here [https://shop.comedycellar.com/product/galen/]. If you listened to the end of our 2025 time capsule episode [https://www.gdpolitics.com/p/the-10-numbers-that-defined-2025], you heard me say that I might have to put a disclaimer at the top of the episode because we invaded Venezuela in between when we recorded the podcast and when we published it. Well, that didn’t quite happen, but we weren’t so far off. Early Saturday morning the U.S. launched a series of strikes on Venezuela, captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, and brought them to New York, where Maduro was indicted in 2020 and Flores was added to an updated indictment. It’s an uncertain moment for Venezuela and American policy towards the country. President Trump said during his Saturday press conference, “We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” without giving much more detail than that. He suggested that Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez would comply with U.S. demands under threat of further military action, though Rodríguez subsequently referred to the U.S. intervention as illegal armed aggression and stated that Maduro remains the president of Venezuela. There are plenty of questions about the legality of Trump’s approach to Venezuela, the internal dynamics of the country and how this compares to past American foreign intervention. We covered a good amount of that in our December 18th episode titled “Is Venezuela The Next Iraq? [https://www.gdpolitics.com/p/is-venezuela-the-next-iraq]” and I encourage folks to listen to that if they haven’t already. In today’s episode, Nathaniel Rakich and Mary Radcliffe join me to discuss how Americans are already reacting to U.S. involvement in Venezuela and how it could reverberate politically from here. In classic fashion, we also dissect some questionable uses of data, including tracking of pizza orders near the Pentagon and alleged insider trading on online betting markets. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.gdpolitics.com/subscribe [https://www.gdpolitics.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

The 10 Numbers That Defined 2025

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.gdpolitics.com [https://www.gdpolitics.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] Happy almost new year! 2025 has been a big year for this GD podcast. It’s the year of our birth, of course, but we didn’t stop there. We hosted live shows [https://www.gdpolitics.com/p/video-election-eve-live-at-the-comedy], got rebranded, created merch [https://gdpolitics.myshopify.com/], and even made some news [https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/06/23/congress/murkowski-as-independent-00419045]. An enormous thank you to everyone who joined us this year 🙏. You made this all possible. 2025 was also a big year for America. We began our semiquincentennial year, for the second time ever a U.S. president was inaugurated to a nonconsecutive term. The country also got a rebrand of sorts. There’s more gold detailing on the walls these days and the East Wing no longer exists. A lot more happened, but I don’t want to give away today’s episode. To mark the end of 2025 we are building a time capsule and filling it with numbers that represent the year in politics. I asked friends of the podcast Nathaniel Rakich and Mary Radcliffe to choose five numbers each they’d like to place in the capsule. I also have plenty of numbers of my own. The bad news is that only 10 numbers fit in the time capsule, so we have to duke it out to see who gets their way. We also shared new year’s resolutions for the two parties and ourselves in 2026. As a sneak preview, here are the 10 numbers we settled on, without any indication of what they represent. See if you can guess!

'Roman Empire' Elections Part 2

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.gdpolitics.com [https://www.gdpolitics.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] This is the second installment of “Roman Empire” elections, in which friends of the podcast Jacob Rubashkin and Leah Askarinam join me to discuss the elections that we just can’t stop thinking about. If you missed the first installment [https://www.gdpolitics.com/p/roman-empire-elections-part-1], definitely start there. We talked about the 2000 election (of course), the crazy turn of events that indirectly resulted in Glenn Youngkin becoming the governor of Virginia, and the even crazier turn of events that links the election of Barack Obama to the reboot of Star Trek. Today the fun doesn’t stop. We discuss the nomination of Andrew Johnson at the Republican convention of 1864 (he ended up taking the oath of office blackout drunk), the story of the only dead person in U.S. history to win an Senate race, and how the Republican party might be different today if Mitt Romney won the presidency in 2012. Today’s episode is for paid subscribers and will cut off shortly for free subscribers. If you are not a paid subscriber, now is a great time to upgrade! If you are a paid subscriber, thank you! Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.

'Roman Empire' Elections Part 1

In 2022, a Swedish influencer told her followers on Instagram to ask the men in their lives about the Roman Empire. Her instinct was that men, for some reason, have plenty of thoughts about the ancient civilization. She turned out to be correct. The suggestion led to a proliferation of videos on social media of women asking men how often they think about the Roman Empire. For some men, it was daily. For others, weekly. (This is the part where I admit that as a teenager I got a large SPQR henna tattoo on my forearm, although technically those are the initials of the Roman Republic, not the Roman Empire, and with that distinction, I am probably already telling on myself.) In any case, a meme was born. What began as a question of how often men think about the Roman Empire, morphed into the idea that any topic that occupies an inordinate amount of one’s mental space is one’s own personal Roman Empire. For example, someone might say their Roman Empire is 2003-era pop culture or The Titanic. You can quickly fall down a Reddit rabbit hole where people share obsessions as wide ranging as women’s bible studies groups and Chicago’s alleyways. Now that I’ve got all of the Boomers who listen to this podcast up to speed (hi, dad), you have the context for today’s episode, which is “Roman Empire elections.” Not elections that happened in the Roman Empire (which, again, wouldn’t be possible because the start of the empire marked the end of representative government), but instead American elections that take up an inordinate amount of our mental space. Dear friends of the podcast Leah Askarinam, Jacob Rubashkin and I came up with this idea while we were recording a different podcast a while back, so this week we are actually indulging. Part 2 will publish Tuesday, December 23rd for paid subscribers. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.gdpolitics.com/subscribe [https://www.gdpolitics.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Is Venezuela The Next Iraq?

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.gdpolitics.com [https://www.gdpolitics.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] The full episode is available to paid subscribers. Once you become a paid subscriber, you can connect your account to your preferred podcast player by following the directions here [https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/4519588148244-How-do-I-listen-to-episodes-on-my-podcast-app]. On Monday’s podcast, while we were talking about shifting political landscapes, I quipped that perhaps by the midterms we would be at war with Venezuela. If you keep up with the news coming out of the Caribbean, it seems like it could be a lot sooner than that. Things appear to be escalating quickly. The U.S. has launched 26 strikes in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific since early September, killing 99 people, per tracking at the New York Times [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/29/us/us-caribbean-pacific-boat-strikes.html]. The stated goal of the strikes has been to stop drug traffickers that the Trump administration has labeled terrorist organizations, but there are questions about the legality of the strikes, as well as questions about whether the goal is really to put pressure on Maduro with the hopes of ousting him. Speaking of pressure, last week the U.S. seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, and this week President Trump announced a “complete blockade” on sanctioned oil tankers going to and from Venezuela. This comes closer to threatening the lifeblood of the Venezuelan economy. Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves and oil makes up 90-95 percent of its export revenue. The U.S. has also deployed military assets to the region capable of land strikes and disabling Venezuela’s defenses and Trump has said he’s authorized covert CIA operations in the country. To better understand the unfolding conflict with Venezuela, I invited on Michael O’Hanlon on today’s podcast. He’s the Phil Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy at the Brookings Institution and author of the forthcoming book To Dare Mighty Things: U.S. Defense Strategy Since the Revolution [https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300279931/to-dare-mighty-things/].