On Tuesday night, Donald Trump arrived at his Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve party in a tuxedo, Melania on his arm, and told reporters his resolution for 2026: “Peace. Peace on Earth.”
Inside, Vanilla Ice performed “Ice Ice Baby” while a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle danced on stage. Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration agenda, stood in the crowd, bobbing stiffly to the beat. His wife filmed it. The video went viral.
Three days later, Miller was seated at a table in that same resort, surrounded by screens and aides, monitoring a military strike on Venezuela.
Trump gave final approval for the operation at 10:46 p.m. Friday. By dawn Saturday, Nicolás Maduro and his wife had been captured and flown out of the country. Trump announced the news on Truth Social just before 4:30 a.m.—from the same building where he’d rung in the new year promising peace.
At a press conference that afternoon, he was asked what comes next for Venezuela.
“We’re going to run the country,” he said.
The timing is notable given Trump’s well-documented pursuit of the Nobel Peace Prize. He didn’t get it—the 2025 award went to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who dedicated it partly to Trump for “his decisive support of our cause.” FIFA, however, came through: just weeks before his peace resolution, Trump accepted the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize at the World Cup draw, calling it “one of the great honors of my life.”
As for Machado? When asked Saturday whether she might lead post-Maduro Venezuela, Trump waved her off. “She’s a very nice woman,” he said, “but she doesn’t have the respect.”
The Nobel laureate who dedicated her prize to him—dismissed in a sentence.
His resolution lasted 72 hours. The peace prizes are holding up about as well.
