Why does Maria Corina Machado say Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize?

World affairs take on some strange symmetries, especially when it comes to the United States and Venezuela. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump made the South American country his favorite scapegoat to push his anti-immigrant policies, by describing illegal immigrants in the United States as members of a feared transnational gang, called the Tren de Aragua. Then, once in office, he deported hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to detention in El Salvador’s notorious detention camps. Sekot prison. Most recently, the Pentagon, led by Pete Hegseth, attacked alleged drug boats in the Caribbean that reportedly left Venezuela with the United States as their final destination. So far, four boats have been destroyed, killing 21 people. Even when the Pentagon released footage of the strikes, it provided no evidence that the boats were carrying drugs. Just one month before these attacks began, Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered a reward of up to fifty million dollars “for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction” of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro “for violating U.S. drug laws.” According to the administration, Maduro does not head a government, but rather heads a narco-terrorist group that has hijacked power and held its citizens for ransom.

In a parallel and equally surreal campaign, Trump lobbied for months for the Nobel Peace Prize to be awarded. He did so shamelessly, despite launching air strikes against Iranian nuclear sites in June, likening them to the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and warning Tehran to choose between “peace” or “tragedy,” with more US strikes if it dared to retaliate. In August, Trump announced that he had “solved” seven wars. However, this claim was largely specious, since some of the countries he referred to were not actually at war. Meanwhile, his claims to end the brief but intense border conflict in May between India and Pakistan appear to have seriously backfired with reports that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is angry at Trump’s boasts. In June, at the instigation of Trump’s envoys, representatives of the governments of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, long engaged in a proxy war, met to sign a document pledging good faith steps toward “peace and security,” but that détente has already collapsed.

However, as last week ended, and with hopes growing that Israel’s brutal campaign in Gaza, after two years, might end with a deal reached through Trump’s cabinet, speculation spread that the US president might actually win the peace prize, which was scheduled to be announced on Saturday. Instead, the money went to Maria Corina Machado, Venezuela’s main opposition leader, who has been in hiding in Venezuela since last year’s disputed presidential election. Machado, a popular conservative politician in her 50s, was barred from participating in the elections, so she appointed an elderly diplomat, Edmundo Gonzalez, to replace her. After the votes were cast, Machado’s supporters presented electoral statistics showing that Gonzalez had won by a landslide, but Venezuela’s official electoral tribunal, without providing any evidence, declared Maduro the winner. In the protests and chaos that followed, about two dozen people were killed, and both Machado and Gonzalez went into hiding. Eventually, one step ahead of the prosecutor’s arrest warrant, Gonzalez requested diplomatic asylum at the Spanish Embassy in Caracas and was allowed to leave the country.

On Saturday, Trump loudly acknowledged Machado’s win, saying that “the person who actually won the Nobel Prize called me today and said, ‘I accept this in your honor, because you really deserve it.'” Trump added that the gesture was “a nice thing to do,” and then made some selfish remarks about how he had helped Machado — whose name he may have forgotten because he didn’t mention it — and how Venezuela “needs help” because “Disaster.” Shortly after, White House communications director Stephen Cheung, a former United Fighting Championship spokesman, appeared to voice the president’s true sentiments: “The Nobel Committee has proven that it puts politics over peace.” In subsequent statements, several prominent Trump loyalists made it clear that his quest for the Nobel Prize would not disappear, including Jason Miller, a former Trump campaign advisor, who said: “His legacy will be damaged.” “The Nobel Peace Prize is irreparably damaged if it is not awarded to President Trump in 2026.”

However, Machado is considered an odd choice for the Nobel committee, given that she has said she supports Trump’s pressure campaign against Maduro as well as US military attacks on Venezuelan boats. In addition to one of its senior advisors L said times Last month, the Venezuelan opposition was in discussions with the Trump administration, drawing up an action plan for the first 100 hours after Maduro’s eventual ouster. In other words, publicly at least, Machado and her colleagues seem to agree with Trump’s revival of the Monroe Doctrine and with old-fashioned American gunboat diplomacy in a region where political leaders of all stripes have, for many decades, sought to present themselves as defenders of Latin America’s economic and political sovereignty.

I spoke on a Zoom call with Machado, a little over a year ago, about two months after the election. A slim woman with long brown hair, sitting in a room in a secret location, sunlight coming through a partially covered window behind her, was witty and resolute. She wanted to know everything about the conversation before moving forward: what topics it would focus on, how long it might last, when it would be posted, and finally, whether I was actually recording. But she quickly established an intimate tone, calling me by my first name, and she was very determined to do so Understands Her point. She told me that Maduro and his cronies were not just corrupt and cynical; “Desalmados“—so soulless. They were criminals, homophobes, eco-terrorists, and racists. She added that she was center-right—”a liberal in the classical sense,” meaning she favored private property, individual initiative, and a diminished role of the state, which over the years in Venezuela had generated a system of corrupt patronage.