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Marco Rubio appeared this Tuesday aboard Air Force One wearing the same gray Nike Tech Fleece sports outfit that Nicolás Maduro wore on the day of his capture, in a gesture that did not go unnoticed on social media.
The image could be interpreted as a direct message to the dictator Miguel Díaz-Canel: "Your moment is approaching"
It was Steven Cheung, the White House Communications Director, who shared the photograph on X with the message: "Secretary Rubio showcasing the Nike Tech 'Venezuela' on Air Force One!", explicitly tagging the garment with the name of the country where the military operation took place that overthrew the Venezuelan dictator.
The image shows the Secretary of State posing standing, with his hands in his pockets, wearing the heather gray hoodie and jogger pants from the Nike Tech Fleece model, the same garment that turned Maduro into a viral fashion phenomenon following his arrest on January 3, 2026.
That night, Trump posted on Truth Social a photo of Maduro handcuffed, with blindfolded eyes and noise-canceling headphones, aboard the USS Iwo Jima, wearing that gray tracksuit.
The image sparked a global viral phenomenon: searches for “Nike Tech” on Google peaked at 100 points on January 4, according to Google Trends, and the garment was mentioned in over 5,000 daily posts on X between the third and fifth of that month, compared to an average of 325 daily posts in the two months prior.
The gray model —renamed "Maduro grey"— sold out in almost all sizes on Nike's website in the United States, and social media was flooded with memes featuring the slogan "Just Coup It", a parody of the brand's famous "Just Do It".
Nike did not issue any official comment.
Rubio is a central figure in the entire Venezuelan operation: he was the political architect of the capture of Maduro and confirmed on January 3 that the former dictator would be tried in the United States for narcoterrorism.
He also designed the three-phase plan for Venezuela: stabilization, economic recovery, and supervised free elections before the end of 2026.
No official has explicitly explained the intention behind the photo, but the gesture is widely interpreted as a symbolic reminder of the operation's success, deliberately disseminated from the presidential plane by the White House's communications director himself.
The timing adds another layer of meaning: the image was published on the same day that Trump announced on Truth Social that Cuba "is asking for help" and that "we are going to talk," just hours before departing for China on a state visit.
This same context of maximum pressure on the regimes in the region includes more than 240 new sanctions against Cuba since January 2026 and the message that Rubio himself delivered to the Cuban regime just last week: "Things are going to change."
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