WASHINGTON — Before Venezuela’s opposition leader María Corina Machado came to the White House, President Donald Trump didn’t seem to think much of her political bona fides.
He said she lacked the “respect” needed to govern Venezuela following the U.S. military strike that deposed the country’s repressive leader, Nicolás Maduro.
In a private meeting on Thursday, Machado gifted him her 2025 Nobel Peace Prize medal. Since then, Trump’s view of Machado appears to have warmed.
Trump didn’t win the prize on his own last year — a snub that rankles him — but he said he greatly appreciated Machado’s gesture. He is keeping the 18-karat gold medal, which Machado presented in a gilded frame captioned, “To Donald J. Trump.”
Speaking to reporters Friday before leaving for his home in Palm Beach, Trump heaped praise on Machado. Gone was any talk of disrespect.
“I had a great meeting yesterday by a person who I have a lot of respect for — and she has respect, obviously, for me and our country — and she gave me her Nobel Prize,” Trump said. “But I’ll tell you what: I got to know her. I never met her before, and I was very, very impressed. She’s a really — this is a fine woman.”
He made no promises about Machado's political future or a commitment to swapping her in for the Maduro holdovers now running Venezuela day to day. Indeed, CIA Director John Ratcliffe met with the interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, in Caracas on Thursday to discuss the “working relationship” between the U.S. and Venezuela, a U.S. official said.
But Trump did suggest that when it comes to Venezuela’s leadership, Machado is part of his calculus.
“I think she’s a very fine woman and we’ll be talking again,” he said.
Asked if Machado made enough of an impression on Trump that he’ll set a quicker timetable for elections in Venezuela, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a Trump confidant, wrote in a text message: “Stay tuned.”
Machado has proved deft at appealing to Trump since the president ordered the raid on Jan. 3 that plucked Maduro from his fortified compound. She has made multiple appearances on Trump’s go-to network, Fox News, while issuing statements bound to pique Trump’s interest.
In presenting Trump with the medal, she invoked one of his favorite talking points: the wars he’s said he ended since taking office a year ago.
“She said, ‘You know, you’ve ended eight wars and nobody deserves this prize more than — in history — than you do,” Trump recalled.
Machado held a news conference Friday at the Heritage Foundation in Washington and made reference to the 2020 U.S. election that Trump claims robbed him of victory. (No evidence has emerged of election fraud on a scale that would have made Trump the winner.)
She mentioned that Maduro’s regime stole the 2024 election in Venezuela from her opposition movement. “And I think he can certainly relate to that,” she said of Trump.
Where she and Trump differ is their assessment of the remnants of the Maduro regime. On Wednesday, Trump said he had a “very good” phone conversation with Rodríguez.
“This partnership between the United States of America and Venezuela will be a spectacular one FOR ALL,” he wrote on his social media platform.
Machado, though, gave a withering evaluation of the Maduro regime leaders who remain atop the government. In her remarks at Heritage, she called Rodríguez “a communist” and an ally of Russia, China and Iran.
Trump defended his decision to retain Maduro’s cohorts as a lesson gleaned from the ill-fated U.S. invasion of Iraq in the 2000s.
After the U.S. toppled the Iraqi regime, American officials ousted government employees who later became terrorists, he said.
“I remember that,” Trump said.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee on Friday weighed in on the transfer of what is arguably humanity's most prestigious medal from the winner to someone who didn’t win. The prize cannot be shared, transferred or “revoked,” the committee said. “The decision is final and applies for all time.”
Still, it isn’t all that uncommon for winners to part with the hardware.
In the 125 years since the first Nobel laureate was named, the medal has been sold, given away or sent to museums for display. Nothing in the rules prevents that.
Nor does the Nobel committee take a stance on what the winners choose to do with their medals.
In its statement, the committee cited several cases, concluding with that of Knut Hamsun, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. In 1943, Hamsun traveled to Germany and met the Third Reich’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Hamsun later sent Goebbels his medal to thank him for the meeting.
“The present whereabouts of the medal are unknown,” the committee wrote.
