'Thank you Maria': Trump says Machado presented him with her Nobel Peace Prize

Venezuela’s opposition leader María Corina Machado said on Thursday that she presented her Nobel Peace Prize to US President Donald Trump as she arrived at the White House. The meeting between the two world leaders took place just a fortnight after US forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro after striking Caracas.

Machado received the Nobel Peace Prize last year for her struggle against Maduro’s “brutal, authoritarian state”. While speaking to the reporters after she met with Trump, the Venezuelan opposition leader said that she had done so “in recognition [of] his unique commitment [to] our freedom”. However, it is unclear if Trump has accepted the award or not.

Machado’s gesture came just hours after the Nobel organisers posted on X: “A medal can change owners, but the title of a Nobel peace prize laureate cannot.” Machado, whose movement is widely believed to have beaten Maduro in Venezuela’s 2024 election, was unexpectedly sidelined by Trump after US special forces troops captured her political rival in the early hours of 3 January.

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Following the ousting of Maduro, opposition supporters in Venezuela hoped that Trump would recognise the 58-year-old conservative politician as the leader of the Latin American nation. Instead, he gave a nod to the dictator’s second-in-command, the vice-president Delcy Rodríguez, who was subsequently sworn in as acting president.

On Thursday, in an attempt to appease Trump, Machado arrived in the US and told reporters that she had “presented” her Norwegian medal to the US president during a private meeting. Earlier this week, the organisers of the Nobel Peace Prize announced the award could not 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.

Despite this, Machado went ahead with her symbolic gesture, a move analysts believed was an attempt to salvage her movement’s waning hopes of taking power. Speaking to reporters, Machado compared handing her medal to Trump to how, in 1825, the Marquis de Lafayette sent a gold medal featuring an image of George Washington to the South American independence hero Simón Bolívar.

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She went on to call 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, however, has been sceptical of Machado and has expressed concerns that her movement would be unable to control the security situation in Venezuela.

In light of this, on Thursday, the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters: “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.”

It is pertinent to note that Machado is not the only Nobel laureate to divest themselves of the award. After winning the 1954 Nobel prize in literature, Ernest Hemingway entrusted his medal to the Catholic Church in Cuba, where it was briefly stolen from a sanctuary in 1986 before Raúl Castro ordered its return.

With inputs from agencies.