Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
When Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize in October, she immediately dedicated the award to Donald Trump. The U.S. president can’t stop talking about how he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, and White House sources even claimed that Trump didn’t make Machado president after ousting Nicolás Maduro because she committed the “ultimate sin” of accepting recognition from the Nobel Committee (though there are other, less absurd reasons that might have been a factor).
In a Fox News interview this week, Sean Hannity seemed to nudge Machado into physically giving her award to Trump. In a separate interview days later, Trump told Hannity he’d accept, saying, “That would be a great honor.” So it seemed the Fox host/friend of Don had set the stage for Machado to dramatically present her award to Trump when she visited the White House on Thursday.
But that isn’t quite what happened.
Machado did meet with Trump on Thursday afternoon. But the press was never called into the Oval Office to watch Machado heap praise on Trump, then hand over her medal. In fact, the Washington Post reported that the meeting took place entirely off-camera:
Machado entered the West Wing around noon and left after 2½ hours to go to meetings with Congress. Her meeting with Trump took place without cameras — something of a rarity for the president, who typically enjoys broadcasting his encounters with foreign leaders to the world.
We only learned that Machado “presented” Trump with her Nobel Peace Prize when she broke the news to a gaggle of reporters after leaving the White House:
It’s unclear what, if anything, Machado achieved with this gesture. On Thursday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump’s assessment that she doesn’t have the support to lead Venezuela hasn’t changed.
As for Trump and his desperate quest for a Nobel, this is the saddest way he could have obtained a Peace Prize. The president’s general willingness to accept an award he didn’t actually win was always quite pathetic. (The Norwegian Nobel Institute reiterated on X today that physical possession is meaningless when it comes to the awards, as “a medal can change owners, but the title of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate cannot.”) And presumably the staging, or lack thereof, was the White House’s decision. The Post suggested that “the low-profile visit may have been a sign of [Trump’s] effort to bolster ties to the existing Venezuelan government rather than to give Machado a boost.”
But this can’t be the way Trump hoped things would go. He missed out on basking in Machado’s face-to-face praise before the press and the dramatic, made-for-TV moment in which he was handed the award. Machado didn’t even let him break the news himself in a Truth Social post.
This is very odd behavior for the president. As one observer put it, Trump “doesn’t want to live off-camera, much less talk. There’s nothing to say off-camera. Why would you say something if it’s off-camera? What point is there existing?”
Okay, that was actually something Warren Beatty said about Madonna in the documentary Truth or Dare. But it’s true of Trump too!
