Visiting Trump presented something of a physical risk for Machado, whose whereabouts have been largely unknown since she left her country last year after being briefly detained in Caracas. Nevertheless, after a closed-door discussion with Trump, she greeted dozens of cheering supporters waiting for her near the gates —stopping to hug many.

“We can count on President Trump,” she told them, prompting some to briefly chant “Thank you, Trump,” but she didn’t elaborate.

The jubilant scene stood in contrast to Trump having repeatedly raised doubts about Machado and his stated commitment to backing democratic rule in Venezuela. He has signaled his willingness to work with acting President Delcy Rodríguez, who was Maduro’s No. 2.

Along with others in the deposed leader’s inner circle, Rodríguez remains in charge of day-to-day government operations and was delivering her first state of the union speech during Machado’s Washington trip.

In endorsing Rodríguez so far, Trump sidelined Machado, who has long been a face of resistance in Venezuela. That’s despite Machado seeking to cultivate relationships with the president and key administration voices like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a gamble to ally herself with the U.S. government and some of its top conservatives.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called Machado “a remarkable and brave voice” for the people of Venezuela, but also said that the meeting didn’t mean Trump’s opinion of her changed, calling it “a realistic assessment.”

Trump has said it would be difficult for Machado to lead because she “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country.” Her party is widely believed to have won 2024 elections rejected by Maduro.

Leavitt went on to say that Trump supported new Venezuelan elections “when the time is right” but did not say when he thought that might be.

Trump administration plays down meeting expectations

Leavitt said Machado sought the face-to-face meeting without setting expectations for what would occur. Machado previously offered to share with Trump the Nobel Peace Prize she won last year, an honor he has coveted.

“I don’t think he needs to hear anything from Ms. Machado,” the press secretary said, other than to have a ”frank and positive discussion about what’s taking place in Venezuela.”

All told, Machado spent about two and a half hours at the White House but left without answering questions on whether she’d offered to give her Nobel prize to Trump, saying only “gracias.” It wasn’t clear she’d heard the question as she hugged and her waiting supporters.

Machado was next appearing on Capitol Hill, for a meeting in the Senate before planning to speak to reporters.

Her Washington stop began after U.S. forces in the Caribbean Sea seized another sanctioned oil tanker that the Trump administration says had ties to Venezuela.

It is part of a broader U.S. effort to take control of the South American country’s oil after U.S. forces seized Maduro and his wife at a heavily guarded compound in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas and brought them to New York to stand trial on drug trafficking charges.

Leavitt said Venezuela’s interim authorities have been fully cooperating with the Trump administration and that Rodríguez’s government said it planned to release more prisoners detained under Maduro. Among those released were five Americans this week.

Rodríguez has adopted a less strident position toward Trump then she did immediately after Maduro’s ouster, suggesting that she can make the Republican administration’s “America First” policies toward the Western Hemisphere, work for Venezuela — at least for now.

Trump said Wednesday that he had a “great conversation” with Rodríguez, their first since Maduro was ousted.

“We had a call, a long call. We discussed a lot of things,” Trump said during an Oval Office bill signing. “And I think we’re getting along very well with Venezuela.”

Machado doesn’t get the nod from Trump

Even before indicating the willingness to work with Venezuela’s interim government, Trump was quick to snub Machado. Just hours after Maduro’s capture, Trump said of Machado that “it would be very tough for her to be the leader.”

Machado has steered a careful course to avoid offending Trump, notably after winning the peace prize. She has since thanked Trump, though her offer to share the honor with him was rejected by the Nobel Institute.

Machado remained in hiding even after winning the Nobel Peace Prize. She missed the ceremony but briefly reappeared in Oslo, Norway, in December after her daughter received the award on her behalf.

The industrial engineer and daughter of a steel magnate, Machado began challenging the ruling party in 2004, when the nongovernmental organization she co-founded, Súmate, promoted a referendum to recall then-President Hugo Chávez. The initiative failed, and Machado and other Súmate executives were charged with conspiracy.

A year later, she drew the anger of Chávez and his allies again for traveling to Washington to meet President George W. Bush. A photo showing her shaking hands with Bush in the Oval Office lives in the collective memory. Chávez considered Bush an adversary.

Almost two decades later, she marshaled millions of Venezuelans to reject Chávez’s successor, Maduro, for another term in the 2024 election. But ruling party-loyal electoral authorities declared him the winner despite ample credible evidence to the contrary. Ensuing anti-government protests ended in a brutal crackdown by state security forces.

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Garcia Cano reported from Caracas, Venezuela, and Janetsky from Mexico City. AP Diplomatic Writer Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this report.

Since that survey’s release, the picture’s deteriorated at a far faster pace than the Congressional Budget Office and private forecasters anticipated, due in part to the coming tax rate reductions and spending increases embodied in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. The single major line item that’s now growing fastest, and that has added the most to the budget shortfall since start of the pandemic, is a dark horse: interest expense. This burgeoning cost that contributes nothing toward supporting national defense, funding the nation’s promises on delivering health care for seniors, and funding border control, is the one budget feature most likely to increasingly outrage the folks. Recall that in the 1992 presidential race, independent candidate and political unknown Ross Perot made the exploding interest on the national debt a centerpiece of his maverick campaign and captured nearly 20% of the popular vote, thanks in large part to hammering home the looming danger ahead.

Since 2019, interest on the debt has exploded

In the 2019 fiscal year, net interest expense was still no big deal. It totaled just $375 billion, accounting for a modest 1.7% of GDP. By FY 2025 (ended in September), the figure had jumped to $952 billion, a rise of 153%, or 17% a year. In that same six-year period, its trajectory far outstripped the still alarming surges in Medicare (25%) and Medicaid (32%), not to mention national defense (7%). In FY 2025, interest ranked as the third-largest spending area after Social Security, and nearly caught Medicare, which at $997 billion was less than 5% ahead of debt service. Interest gobbled 3.2% of national income, almost twice its share pre-COVID.

From FY ’19 to FY ’25, interest soared from under one dollar in 10 to more than one dollar in six-and-a-half of all U.S. spending.

The ramp only accelerated from October through December, the first quarter of FY 2026. Interest expense hit $179 billion, versus $160 billion in the first three months of FY 2025. For that period at the close of last year, it towered as the nation’s second-largest expenditure, narrowly beating both Medicare and national defense. In its most recent long-term budget projections, the CBO estimates that interest will keep gobbling more and more of national income, going from today’s 3.2% by 4.0% by 2034. At that level, interest costs would reach $1.6 trillion—almost 70% more than today—and replace Medicare by a hair as the budget’s second-highest cost. At that point, interest would be absorbing the equivalent of one in four dollars collected in all individual income taxes.

It’s the basic, “primary” deficit that’s causing the jump in interest costs

The interest takeoff arises from a fundamental problem. The underlying source is the “primary” deficit, the structural gap between revenues and outlays that that creates big shortfalls before counting interest expense. As the primary deficit grows, the U.S. must borrow the expanding difference, and that’s been the story. Adding to the pain: As the principal amount owed has kept expanding, so too has the cost of financing each new billion dollars added to the tab. Since 2019, the average rate on U.S. debt has risen substantially, from a super-bargain 2.49% seven years ago, to 3.35% in FY 2025. And it’s only at its current range in the mid-3’s because the U.S. is relying heavily on short-term borrowings to hold down the overall expense, meaning that if the Treasury wants to reduce risk by refinancing that debt with 10-year or even longer-duration bonds, the rates it pays to rise well beyond the current numbers, hiking total interest expense even more.

As the gulf between what the U.S. spent and collected kept waxing, interest became a bigger and bigger contributor to the deficits that now raise such dread. The shortfall between revenues and expenses vaulted from $998 billion in 2019 to $1.8 trillion in FY 2025. That’s a leap of $800 billion, or 80%. In that span, interest added $577 billion to the federal budget, accounting for roughly 70% of the notorious deficit. The CBO projects that under current law, the gap will zoom to $1 trillion in FY 2025, a staggering 6% of GDP, to 117% in 2034. The agency forecasts that interest will join Medicare as the top drivers of that 17-point advance.

It’s important to note that the additional tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, though a significant fundraiser, haven’t come close to slowing that growing “V” between receipts and spending. Interest is a big part of the story. In FY 2025, the U.S. raised around $200 billion from import duties and associated revenues, some $125 billion more than the previous fiscal year. In the same interval, interest expense grew from $881 billion to $952 billion. That extra $71 billion offsets almost 60% of the gains from tariffs.

All told, debt service is claiming an ever-greater share of the dollars America has promised to spend on benefits for future generations. Those payments hogging more and more of our tax dollars are the price we’re paying for years of overspending and under-taxing. If anything decisively gets American voters to focus on the damage from debt and deficits, it’s the ravages of Big Interest.

With 52% of U.S. workers now saying they are hybrid workers, according to a recent Gallup poll and real- estate dealmaking having slowed, experts say that the industry is facing a demand shift that landlords can’t afford to ignore. Chase Garbarino is CEO of HqO, a software company that works across more than one billion square feet of office space globally and tracks the effectiveness of office amenities. He told Fortune that the number one rule of real estate remains location, location, location, but there are new rules for offices.

“The fact that the genie is out of the bottle on hybrid means there’s going to be a lot of structural changes in how landlords need to operate their business models,” Garbarino told Fortune. “The whole industry is kind of predicated upon the 10-year-plus lease as the one product skew that they want. They’re going to have to think and act a lot more like hotels.”

The 10-year lease provides guaranteed long-term financial stability for landlords, handing them a predictable cash flow and minimized turnover costs. Yet that model, Garbarino says, has been upended by the rise of hybrid work because employers aren’t committing to 10-year leases as much as they used to. He says landlords must win tenants back, guaranteeing luxuries and services that can keep them long-term.

A K-Shaped Office Economy

A 2025 analysis by brokerage JLL and Commercial Observer found that lease length has diverged among sectors. The average lease term among financial services companies was 7.6 years, shrinking to 5.3 years for tech firms, and to just 3.5 years for AI startups. Even for Class A space, or the most prestigious real estate, leases were growing shorter.

“They have to earn the people back time and time again,” Garbarino said.

Amid return to work mandates, Manhattan’s luxury real estate market is on the rise among financial services, legal, and technology companies. The number of leases signed for Manhattan office space worth $100 per square foot reached an all-time high in 2025, according to reporting from the Financial Times. There were 313 leases signed at a price of at least $100 per square foot last year, up from 212 in 2024, nearly a 50% increase year over year, according to data from brokerages JLL and CBRE.

Companies like JPMorgan Chase have cashed in on luxury. In October, JPMorgan announced a move to 270 Park Ave. a $3 billion, 60-story office space—of which the company owns—equipped with all the furnishings of a luxury resort spa, from hot and cold plunges and meditation rooms, to 19 restaurants and an assortment of coffee shops. 

But that transformation is not limited to New York. Companies across the U.S. are going all in on luxurious amenities for its employees. Larry Ellison’s Oracle—which is slated to take over U.S. operations of TikTok—is constructing a 70-acre tech campus in Nashville that will function as a town of its own, and will include a high-end Nobu restaurant and a hotel.

While Garbarino notes that nap pods are currently the most booked amenity at a building adjacent to JPMorgan’s headquarters, he maintains that amenities alone aren’t enough to drive workers back to the office. “All we’re really seeing in commercial real estate is that frankly space is a commodity,” he said. “Location is still important. It’s not enough of a differentiator.”

Instead, he argues that their effectiveness often depends on the office policy, and that amenities help to create a healthy environment for those required to be in the office full-time, rather than acting as the primary draw themselves. “These things are going to be the balancing factor,” Garbarino said. “If you’re going to work all day and night and be here all the time, we want to balance it with a healthy work environment.”