On January 3, 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump launched an offensive in Venezuela that resulted in the capture of dictator Nicolás Maduro. Then, 56 days later, on February 28, he launched an attack on Iran that led to the killing of dictator Ali Khamenei.
While these nations are seemingly so distinct and distant from one another, there are some interesting media connections between them and Trump. We’ll explore them here.
Let’s start with Venezuela. In 1996, Trump was interested in purchasing the itinerant Miss Universe beauty pageant brand from the American company ITT. At the same time, Gustavo Cisneros Rendiles (1945-2023), then patriarch of the family that owns Venevision (the country’s main TV network), whose company already owned the Miss Venezuela brand, also wanted to purchase the Miss Universe brand from ITT. The story goes that in order to avoid inflating the price in a bidding war, Cisneros invited Trump to his apartment for breakfast and, unfortunately, received him in a bathrobe.
Offended by Cisneros’s attitude, Trump publicly declared that he would never let Cisneros purchase the Miss Universe brand, and indeed, the Miss Universe company went to Trump. (Today, the pageant is owned by the JKN group, which has offices in Thailand and New York.)
In 1999, Venezuela transitioned from a center-left government to the revolutionary government of Hugo Chávez, originally supported by Cisneros himself. However, in 2002, Chávez accused him of fomenting a coup. After that, Cisneros’s relations with the government further deteriorated with the arrival of Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s successor, even though his Venevision TV network continued to broadcast, albeit under severe restrictions. (At the same time, the country’s other network, Radio Caracas Television, refused to cave in to the governments’ dictates, and in 2007 lost its license to broadcast over the airwaves, forcing it to switch to Internet-only operations.)
Now on to the connection between Venezuela and Iran. One of Gustavo Cisneros Rendiles’s five brothers, Carlos Enrique Cisneros Rendiles (with Rendiles being his mother’s surname), was married to Iranian-born Shahla Mehbod, who was apparently related to the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi (although all genealogical references to Mehbod have been removed from public records).
Still on the subject of Iran, from 1998 to 2003, the Trump Organization leased offices in New York to Bank Melli, one of Iran’s largest state-owned banks. Despite the U.S. linking Bank Melli to terrorist groups and the Iranian nuclear program, Trump continued to receive rental payments from the bank for several years.
Returning to the Cisneros clan, Carlos Enrique drowned in 1983 at the age of 41 in the Amazon River while saving his 17-year-old son, Carlos Enrique Cisneros Mehbod, who later became Gustavo’s favorite nephew and, in 1995, CEO of the Cisneros Television Group, based in Caracas and Miami, Florida.
During that period, Trump’s interests reconnected with those of the Cisneros family. In fact, in 1998, Carlos Enrique purchased the international rights to Playboy for $100 million, a purchase that proved ill-fated, as Carlos Enrique resigned in 2002 and committed suicide in Los Angeles in 2004. Trump appeared on the cover of Playboy in March 1990 and gave an interview to the magazine in 1997. Trump also attended the magazine’s 40th anniversary celebration in 1993 and its 50th anniversary celebration in 2003, accompanied by his future wife, Melania. In 2000, Trump appeared in two Playboy video cameos that were reportedly sold internationally by Cisneros. (By Dom Serafini)
Pictured above: VideoAge‘s Dom Serafini with Venevision’s Gustavo Cisneros
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