(Zero Hedge)—President Donald Trump has reportedly rejected Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s request for broad amnesty during a newly disclosed phone conversation last week, telling Maduro and his top advisers to drop their demands and swiftly exit Venezuela as US military pressure intensifies, which has lately included an order to halt all flights in the country’s sovereign airspace.
According to people familiar with the exchange who spoke to The Wall Street Journal, Trump and Maduro discussed a sweeping amnesty plan, during which time Maduro is said to have sought blanket legal protection for himself, his senior officials, and their families. “Trump told Maduro that if he didn’t leave willingly, the US would consider other options including the use of force, according to people familiar with discussion,” WSJ wrote.
Many of those same officials are at this moment under US sanctions or face criminal charges related to corruption and narcotics trafficking.
President Trump is said to have dismissed the proposal while warning Maduro that the United States would ramp up military action if he refused to step down. This is consistent with prior Washington regime change operations in places like the Middle East, which has seen many longtime rulers overthrown – including Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, and Bashar al-Assad.
A number of top-ranking Maduro officials have been called out by the Trump administration, and urged to leave the country immediately – including Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino, Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, and National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez.
Trump while speaking at Mar-a-Lago during Thanksgiving, apparently days after the secretive Maduro phone call, hinted that US ground operations against Venezuela could begin soon. “The land is easier. That’s going to start very soon. We warned them, stop sending poison into our country.”
According to some of the details of the newly disclosed call via The New York Times:
The conversation took place late in the week, two of the people said. It included a discussion about a possible meeting between the two men in the United States, according to the people with knowledge of the matter, who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. There are no plans at the moment for such a meeting, one of the people said.
The phone call, which included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, came days before a State Department designation of Mr. Maduro as the leader of what the administration considers a foreign terrorist organization, the Cartel de los Soles, came into effect.
After this, Trump announced that the airspace over Venezuela should now be considered closed. “To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP,” Trump wrote on X.
Earlier this month, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) warned pilots to “exercise caution” near Venezuela’s airspace due to the “worsening security situation and heightened military activity.
?Alert: In Emergency Phone Conference between President Trump and Dictator Maduro, Trump tells Maduro the only way to stop an attack is to step down and leave the country NOW!! pic.twitter.com/IIgtKdC9fd
— US Homeland Security News (@defense_civil25) November 30, 2025
The Pentagon has been deploying warships and other military assets in the Caribbean this year. The deployment centers around bolstering Hemispheric Defense, and the Trump administration has formally characterized Nicolás Maduro as the head of a terrorist organization and considers his government illegitimate.
Quick response after the US orders what’s effectively a total airspace closure over the Latin American country:
0 planes over Venezuela after Trump shuts its airspace pic.twitter.com/wyUwzcTcjy
— RT (@RT_com) November 30, 2025
This policy hearkens back to the first Trump administration, during which time there appeared to be clandestine efforts to foment unrest or else a military coup. These activities didn’t amount to much, however, and Maduro had vehemently denounced external meddling and vowed to go after and punish collaborators.
Last year, on the Trump campaign trail, the would-be second term president didn’t mention anything in his policy platform about sweeping regime change action in Venezuela – which likely would have been met with a lot of opposition within the MAGA movement.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
