Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has presented her gold Nobel peace prize medal to Donald Trump nearly two weeks after the US president ordered the abduction of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro.
Machado, who received the award last year for her struggle against what the Nobel committee called Maduro’s “brutal, authoritarian state”, met Trump at the White House on Thursday. She told reporters she presented the medal “in recognition [of] his unique commitment [to] our freedom”.
Trump wrote on Truth Social hours later that Machado “presented me with her Nobel peace prize for the work I have done. Such a wonderful gesture of mutual respect.”
A White House photograph shows Trump displaying the gift in a large gold frame. Text beneath the medal reads: “Presented as a personal symbol of gratitude on behalf of the Venezuelan people in recognition of President Trump’s principled and decisive action to secure a free Venezuela.”
The Nobel organisers responded by posting on X: “A medal can change owners, but the title of a Nobel peace prize laureate cannot.”
Machado’s movement is widely believed to have won Venezuela’s 2024 election against Maduro. But the 58-year-old conservative politician was sidelined after US special forces captured her political rival in the early hours of 3 January.
Opposition supporters had hoped Trump would recognise Machado as Venezuela’s new leader following Maduro’s downfall. Instead, he backed the former dictator’s second-in-command, vice-president Delcy Rodríguez, who was sworn in as acting president.
The medal presentation appeared to be an attempt to win back Trump’s favour. Earlier this week, Nobel organisers announced the award cannot be “shared or transferred” after Machado told Fox News she wished to share it with Trump. “The decision is final and stands for all time,” they said.
Machado went ahead with the gesture anyway. Speaking to reporters, she compared it to how the Marquis de Lafayette sent a gold medal featuring George Washington’s image to South American independence hero Simón Bolívar in 1825, calling Lafayette’s gift “a sign of the brotherhood between the people of the US and the people of Venezuela in their fight for freedom against tyranny”.
Trump’s decision not to back Machado after removing Maduro reportedly stemmed from deteriorating relations between her and members of Trump’s team, as well as concerns her movement could not control Venezuela’s security situation.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Thursday: “The president’s assessment was based on realities on the ground. It was a realistic assessment based on what the president was reading and hearing from his national security team. At this moment in time his opinion on that matter has not changed.”
Machado is not the first Nobel laureate to part with the award. Ernest Hemingway entrusted his 1954 literature medal to the Catholic Church in Cuba, where it was briefly stolen in 1986 before Raúl Castro ordered its return. Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov auctioned his medal in 2022 to raise money for Ukrainian child refugees. Leon Lederman sold his 1988 physics prize after it had spent 20 years “sitting on a shelf somewhere”.
But Machado appears to be the first person to give away her medal for such explicitly political reasons.
Hours after announcing Maduro’s capture, Trump threw cold water on opposition hopes by calling Machado “a very nice woman [who] … doesn’t have the support or the respect within the country” to take power. He had warmer words for Rodríguez, declaring: “She’s essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again.”
Trump subsequently lowered expectations for fresh elections. “We have to fix the country first. You can’t have an election. There’s no way the people could even vote,” he told NBC News two days after Maduro’s capture.
Before Thursday’s meeting, Leavitt called Machado “a remarkable and brave voice for many of the people of Venezuela”. She said Rodríguez’s “interim administration” was being “extremely cooperative” and had “met all the demands and the requests of the United States”, pointing to the release of five US citizens from Venezuelan jails this week.
Leavitt said Trump was committed to “hopefully” seeing fresh elections in Venezuela “one day” but added: “I don’t have an updated timetable for you today.”
Rodríguez signalled interest in repairing US-Venezuela ties on Thursday during the annual state of the union address in Caracas, which she delivered on Maduro’s behalf.
Addressing an audience including Maduro’s son and three sisters, Rodríguez called Trump’s invasion “the greatest ever stain on US-Venezuela relations” and said Washington had “crossed a red line” by invading the South American country, killing Venezuelans and “kidnapping” the president.
However, Rodríguez said she was prepared to travel to Washington to engage in a “diplomatic battle” with the US. “Venezuela has the right to relations with China, with Russia, with Cuba, with Iran … and with the United States too,” she told lawmakers and military chiefs gathered in the national assembly.
“If it one days falls to me, as acting president, to go to Washington, I’ll do it standing tall, not crawling,” Rodríguez added.
(information from The Guardian)
