Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, a newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the White House, Capitol Hill and the campaign trail.
Happy New Year! We hope you had a restful holiday break.
We have a jam-packed edition to ring in 2026: Andrea Mitchell and Abigail Williams examine Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s ever-growing administration portfolio. Plus, Kristen Welker speaks with President Donald Trump about what comes next in Venezuela. And we dive into Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s decision to not seek re-election.
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— Adam Wollner
Marco Rubio takes on his most daunting role yet
By Andrea Mitchell and Abigail Williams
Tasked with overseeing the transition of a post-Nicolás Maduro Venezuela, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has stepped into his fourth — and potentially riskiest — Trump administration role.
The 54-year-old former Florida senator, a potential 2028 presidential contender, has been at the forefront of the increasingly aggressive and complex foreign policy of President Donald Trump’s second term. Trump first tapped him to serve as secretary of state, then added national archivist and interim national security adviser to his portfolio.
In the spotlight: Rubio has had key roles in other major foreign policy initiatives, any one of which is a heavy lift — from trying to maintain a peace agreement between Israel and Hamas to the administration’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine.
But inside Trump’s inner circle, Rubio has owned Venezuela. For him, it’s personal: As a Cuban American senator in Florida, Rubio was focused on the abuses in Venezuela for 15 years, first under Hugo Chávez and now Maduro. The effort is popular in his home state, where many Venezuelans and similarly displaced Cuban Americans, including Rubio’s own parents, sought sanctuary from repressive regimes.
“Now he is not just influencing, but directing, leading just a remarkable engagement in our hemisphere, and potentially, remaking a new order,” said Republican strategist Matthew Bartlett, a former senior State Department official in the first Trump administration. “How that plays out will truly be not just the president’s legacy, but certainly Secretary Rubio’s legacy, too.”
The challenges: As Maduro and his wife were making their first court appearance in New York on federal narco-terrorism and conspiracy charges, the challenges of a U.S.-led transition were coming into focus. Rubio was already softening the president’s pronouncements that the U.S. would “run” Venezuela for an unspecified period of time.
“It’s not running — it’s running policy, the policy with regards to this,” Rubio said during an interview on “Meet the Press,” contradicting Trump’s message. Rubio said the U.S. military forces that have been amassed near Venezuela would stay put for now, and a quarantine on sanctioned Venezuelan oil would remain to pressure the country’s new leader, Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, to fall in line.
New Trump interview: Venezuela will not have new elections in the next 30 days, Trump said in an interview today with “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker.
“We have to fix the country first. You can’t have an election. There’s no way the people could even vote,” Trump said about the possibility of a vote in the next month. “No, it’s going to take a period of time. We have — we have to nurse the country back to health.”
Moreover, he said, the U.S. may subsidize an effort by oil companies to rebuild the country’s energy infrastructure — a project he said could take less than 18 months.
“A tremendous amount of money will have to be spent and the oil companies will spend it, and then they’ll get reimbursed by us or through revenue,” Trump said.
He also insisted the U.S. is not at war with Venezuela.
“No, we’re not,” Trump said. “We’re at war with people that sell drugs. We’re at war with people that empty their prisons into our country and empty their drug addicts and, and empty their mental institutions into our country.”
Read more from the interview →
➡️ Related: U.S. allies fear Trump may target Greenland after Venezuela, by Alexander Smith
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz drops re-election bid
By Megan Lebowitz, Ben Kamisar, Adam Edelman and Frank Thorp V
It’s just the start of the first full week of 2026, and we already have a major election development: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz announced today he was dropping his bid for a third term.
Walz, the 2024 Democratic vice presidential nominee, cited heightened attention on fraud allegations in Minnesota, adding that “the political gamesmanship we’re seeing from Republicans is only making that fight harder to win.”
Fraud controversy: Late last month, a video from right-wing influencer Nick Shirley went viral, alleging fraud at child care facilities in Minnesota. After the video went viral, the Department of Health and Human Services announced it would freeze all federal child care payments to the state. Days later, Minnesota’s Department of Children, Youth, and Families said that investigators found that the child care facilities in question “were operating as expected.”
Dozens of suspects were indicted in 2022, during the Biden administration, as part of an alleged $250 million fraud scheme with the nonprofit Feeding Our Future.
A state audit report released in 2024 found that failures by the state’s Education Department led to the misuse of the Covid-era program. Some of the criminal cases related to the alleged scheme are ongoing, and several of the defendants are of Somali descent, which President Donald Trump latched onto in a slew of verbal attacks on Minnesota’s Somali community.
The Department of Homeland Security is also surging immigration agents to Minneapolis this week, Julia Ainsley reports.
Domino effect: Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., is now seriously considering a run for governor, a source close to her told NBC News. Klobuchar wouldn’t face re-election for her Senate seat until 2030, and the governor would appoint her replacement until a special election occurs if she won. If Klobuchar does try to succeed Walz, she would be the fourth sitting senator to run for governor this year, joining Sens. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., Michael Bennet, D-Colo., and Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala.
Republicans haven’t won the state’s governorship in almost two decades, but a crowded GOP primary had already developed prior to Walz’s announcement. That group of Republican hopefuls includes Scott Jensen, the former state senator whom Walz defeated in 2022, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, state House Speaker Lisa Demuth, Minneapolis attorney Chris Madel, state Rep. Kristin Robbins and businessman Kendall Qualls.
➡️ Related: Slain Minnesota lawmaker’s children call on Trump to remove social media video amplifying false claims about her death, by Raquel Coronell Uribe
🗞️ Today's other top stories
- 👋 Welcome back: With members of Congress returning to Washington this week, Sahil Kapur previews five big issues they will seek to tackle. Read more →
- ➡️ Retribution agenda: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the Pentagon is taking steps to downgrade Sen. Mark Kelly‘s military retirement rank and pay because of the Arizona Democrat’s “seditious statements.” Read more →
- 💉 The new Health Dept.: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced an unprecedented overhaul of the childhood vaccine schedule that recommends fewer shots for all children. Read more →
- 🚓 Crime blotter: A man was taken into custody overnight after allegedly damaging Vice President JD Vance’s home in Cincinnati. Read more →
- ⚖️ SCOTUS watch: The Supreme Court mostly avoided direct confrontations with Trump in 2025 while handing him a series of wins, but it pushed rulings on a series of contentious White House proposals into this year. Read more →
- 🗳️ Eye on 2028: Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has been dealing with one big thing that sets him apart from other potential Democratic presidential candidates: a divided state Legislature and all the tricky political compromises that come with it. Read more →
That’s all From the Politics Desk for now. Today’s newsletter was compiled by Adam Wollner.
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