Of all the jaw-dropping spectacles at White House, this was one of the most bizarre
The gift plan didn’t seem to work for Machado either, at least not right away. While he and Trump were meeting, CIA director John Ratcliffe was meeting in Caracas with Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez. He was Maduro’s vice president and was part of the forces that prevented Machado from running in the elections; It was one of many steps the Maduro government took to rectify the outcome.
In short, Trump chose to rule Venezuela through the people Machado was fighting. The award, which Trump claims is his, was actually given to mark the courage of those who stood up to the forces Trump has embraced, betting that Rodríguez would do his bidding and give US companies access to the world’s largest oil reserves. And Trump believes that the old regime, not Machado, will most likely allow the United States to run Venezuela’s affairs by remote control.
Delcy Rodríguez (center) in Caracas on Thursday.Credit: Getty Images
In short, this is realpolitik in its rawest form; It’s something Henry Kissinger would admire. If this means embracing the political power structure established by Hugo Chavez and Maduro and rejected by the vast majority of Venezuelans, that is the price Trump appears ready to pay.
Machado looked like he was cornered to give his gift. He originally “dedicated” the Nobel to Trump. But Sean Hannity, a Fox News commentator and one of Trump’s supporters and informal advisers, asked the opposition leader in a Jan. 5 interview: “Did you at any point offer to give him the Nobel Peace Prize?”
Machado said that “it hasn’t happened yet, but I would definitely love to be able to tell him personally” that he and the Venezuelan people share that.
That has changed and now Machado appears to be playing the long game. He’s betting that the survivors of the Maduro regime will eventually be overthrown, and so giving Trump what he wants—that gold Nobel medallion—is a worthwhile investment.
Maria Corina Machado greets the crowd in Oslo after coming out of hiding to receive the Nobel Prize in December.Credit: access point
“I have no doubt that President Trump, his administration, and the people of the United States support democracy, justice, freedom, and a mandate for the Venezuelan people,” he told the Heritage Foundation on Friday, ticking off four values that Trump barely mentions when describing his plans to bring American businesses, especially oil companies, back to the country.
He insisted, “Once the regime is over and the transition is complete, the United States will not only be a more secure nation, but will also have greater prosperity and power in our hemisphere.”
The bigger mystery is how Trump views the transfer of the award. He was clearly interested in possessing it, perhaps because possession was “psychologically important,” as he said of Greenland. Of course, there’s already a Nobel Peace Prize medallion just steps away from the Oval Office: the award given to Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 and kept in the Roosevelt Room.
Roosevelt won the award for ending the Russo-Japanese War, and some of Trump’s critics even said he would be a natural candidate for the next award if he did the same for the war between Russia and Ukraine. But this is a disappointingly elusive situation, as Trump has often admitted, even as he claims responsibility for ending other conflicts (India-Pakistan, Thailand-Cambodia, Israel-Hamas and Egypt-Ethiopia, etc.).
US President Donald Trump has made it clear that he wants to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.Credit: access point
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Friday that Trump intends to keep the award but that his “final home in the White House has not yet been determined.”
However, he claimed that the matter was not over for Trump and that the mistake he believed the Nobel committee committed against him had not yet been resolved.
