{"id":418553,"date":"2026-01-17T06:45:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-17T06:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/418553\/"},"modified":"2026-01-17T06:45:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T06:45:09","slug":"machados-peace-prize-gift-shows-shes-betting-on-a-future-with-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/418553\/","title":{"rendered":"Machado’s peace prize gift shows she’s betting on a future with Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

For Mar\u00eda Corina Machado, everything was riding on this meeting with Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

As Venezuela’s main opposition figure \u2014 and the woman whose party is widely accepted to have won its 2024 election \u2014 she might have expected the US president to pick up the phone after the capture of Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, and tell her she was on her way to the presidential palace.<\/p>\n

Instead, Trump brushed her aside.<\/p>\n

“I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader,” he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“She doesn’t have the support or the respect within the country. She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect.”<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Donald Trump has not been shy about this desire to have the Nobel Peace Prize. (Reuters Photo: Daniel Torok\/The White House)<\/p>\n

And in the days that have followed, he appears to be growing ever more comfortable with the status quo in Venezuela.<\/p>\n

The Maduro regime remains in charge \u2014 minus Maduro \u2014 with his former deputy Delcy Rodr\u00edguez in power.<\/p>\n

The day before his meeting with Machado, Trump spoke glowingly of a phone call with the interim Venezuelan president.<\/p>\n

“We just had a great conversation today, and she’s a terrific person,” he said.<\/p>\n

As White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt put it on Thursday, local time, her government has been “extremely cooperative”.<\/p>\n

“They have thus far met all of the demands and requests of the United States and of the president,” she said.<\/p>\n

“We obviously had a $500 million energy deal that was struck in large part because of the cooperation from Miss Rodr\u00edguez.”<\/p>\n

The woman Trump chose to run Venezuela <\/a><\/p>\n

Venezuela is in the hands of both President Trump and a regime loyal to its ousted leader. The country’s future, including the well-being of its people, is likely to depend on how well Delcy Rodr\u00edguez can walk a tightrope between Washington’s demands and her coalition’s hardliners.<\/p>\n

While there have been promises from the interim government to release political prisoners, so far only a fraction of those held in Venezuela’s notorious prisons have been freed.<\/p>\n

And for now, there seems to be very little appetite from the White House to push ahead with a transition to democracy.<\/p>\n

“[The President] is \u2026 committed to hopefully seeing elections in Venezuela one day. But I don’t have an updated timetable for you today,” Leavitt said.<\/p>\n

The meeting with Trump<\/a> was Machado’s one shot to shift the balance.<\/p>\n

Fortunately for her, Trump had made it clear what he wanted out of it.<\/p>\n

For much of his first term, he publicly coveted \u2014 and actively campaigned for \u2014 the Nobel Peace Prize, won by president Barack Obama in 2009.<\/p>\n

When Machado won it in October, she was quick to dedicate the award to Trump for “his decisive support of our cause”.<\/p>\n

Trump told Fox News it would be “a great honour” if she presented him with her medal.<\/p>\n

This week, he said: “I can’t think of anybody in history that should get the Nobel Prize more than me.”<\/p>\n

And so, behind closed doors, it happened.<\/p>\n

Afterwards, Machado confirmed it, making a historical connection going back to the American Revolution and the Venezuelan revolutionary Simon Bolivar \u2014 who liberated Venezuela and other Latin American countries from Spanish rule in the 1800s.<\/p>\n

“Two hundred years ago, General Lafayette gave Simon Bolivar a medal with George Washington’s face on it. Bolivar, since then, kept that medal for the rest of his life,” she told reporters.<\/p>\n

“It was given by General Lafayette as a sign of the brotherhood between the \u2026 people of the United States, and the people of Venezuela in their fight for freedom against tyranny.”<\/p>\n

She called Trump “the heir to George Washington”.<\/p>\n

Hours later, Trump posted his acceptance.<\/p>\n

“It was my Great Honor to meet Mar\u00eda Corina Machado, of Venezuela, today. She is a wonderful woman who has been through so much. Mar\u00eda presented me with her Nobel Peace Prize for the work I have done. Such a wonderful gesture of mutual respect. Thank you Mar\u00eda!” he posted on Truth Social.<\/p>\n

What does this change? Well, nothing, at least as far as the Nobel Committee is concerned.<\/p>\n

“Once a Nobel Prize is announced, it cannot be revoked, shared, or transferred to others,” the committee said in a statement last week.<\/p>\n

“The decision is final and stands for all time.”<\/p>\n

But the bigger question is whether Machado’s flattery has achieved her aim of swinging Trump back into her corner.<\/p>\n

She may well not know the answer to that herself yet.<\/p>\n

But in one of her few comments after the meeting, she struck a note of hope: “We are counting on Donald Trump to save Venezuela.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For Mar\u00eda Corina Machado, everything was riding on this meeting with Donald Trump. As Venezuela’s main opposition figure…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":418554,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[64,63,209190,2490,134,191203,103842,126402,427,220602,22474],"class_list":["post-418553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-delcy-rodriguez","tag-donald-trump","tag-entertainment","tag-maria-corina-machado","tag-nicolas-maduro","tag-nobel-peace-prize","tag-tv","tag-venezeula","tag-venezuela"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=418553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418553\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/418554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=418553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=418553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=418553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}