Speaking to the press after her White House meeting with President Trump on Thursday, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado said she had “presented” Trump with her 2025 Nobel Peace Prize medal as “a recognition for his unique commitment with our freedom.”
“Is it his now?” one reporter asked. Machado did not answer.
Hours later, Trump took to social media to confirm the news. “María presented me with her Nobel Peace Prize for the work I have done,” he wrote. “Such a wonderful gesture of mutual respect. Thank you María!”
Before the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded Machado the prize last October, Trump made no secret of his desire to win it himself, saying he just wanted “to be treated fairly” for “stopp[ing] seven wars.”
“They’re big ones too,” Trump told the Daily Caller.
Since then, Trump has not let the issue rest, adding another war to his list (Israel and Hamas) and saying it would be “a great honor” to share the prize with Machado, who indicated ahead of her visit that she would offer it to Trump. The Venezuelan activist previously dedicated her award to Trump.
“I single-handedly ENDED 8 WARS, and Norway, a NATO Member, foolishly chose not to give me the Noble Peace Prize,” the president wrote on social media last week.
It’s unclear whether Trump actually took possession of Machado’s physical medal after she “presented” it to him. Either way, speculation about both leaders’ intentions recently forced the Nobel Committee to clarify that “a Nobel Prize can neither be revoked, shared, nor transferred to others.”
“Once the announcement has been made,” the committee declared on Jan. 10, “the decision stands for all time.”
In other words, Machado remains the 2025 Peace Prize laureate — regardless of who has her medal.
On Thursday, Machado framed her decision as a symbolic gesture in keeping with Revolutionary War Gen. Marquis de Lafayette giving a “medal with George Washington’s face on it” to Venezuelan military officer and statesman Simón Bolívar “200 years ago.”
But there may also be a political motivation behind Machado’s maneuver. After toppling Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro earlier this month, Trump dismissed the idea that Machado could take over in Maduro’s wake, saying that “she doesn’t have the support within, or the respect within the country.” Instead, Trump decided to leave Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, in charge along with the rest of his regime — even though independently verified vote counts in Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election showed that Machado’s party had defeated Maduro by a wide margin.
Citing two sources close to the White House, the Washington Post reported on Jan. 4 that “the president’s lack of interest in boosting Machado, despite her recent efforts to flatter Trump, stemmed from her decision to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.”
One source called that decision “the ultimate sin,” claiming that “if she had turned it down and said, ‘I can’t accept it because it’s Donald Trump’s,’ she’d be the president of Venezuela today.”
In September, a White House official provided CBS News with a list of the seven conflicts that Trump then claimed to have “stopped”: Israel and Iran, Rwanda and Democratic Republic of the Congo, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Thailand and Cambodia, India and Pakistan, Egypt and Ethiopia, and Serbia and Kosovo.
“There has been more progress towards peace than ever before because of this President’s leadership,” the official wrote.
But a CBS News review of Trump’s record found that while the president “has helped broker ceasefires, including one between Israel and Iran, several of the foreign conflicts cited by the administration were not full-scale wars — and many remain unresolved.”
“Some of these peace efforts involved limited U.S. involvement,” CBS News added, “and in other instances, it remains unclear whether Mr. Trump’s role was decisive.”
A Yahoo/YouGov poll conducted around the same time found that a majority of Americans (56%) opposed the idea of Trump winning the award. Just 29% favored it.
Respondents were also asked which of two possible explanations would “come closest to the truth” if Trump didn’t end up winning the prize.
About 58% said the reason Trump would not win was because “he doesn’t deserve it”; 24% said he would not win because “the Nobel Committee is biased against him.”
The latter seems to align with the president’s own opinion on the matter. “They will never give me a Nobel Peace Prize,” Trump predicted during an August meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office. “It’s too bad. I deserve it, but they will never give it to me.”
“If I were named Obama, I would have had the Nobel Prize given to me in 10 seconds,” Trump said in October, implying that the Nobel Committee would not recognize his peacemaking efforts for political reasons.
The 2009 Peace Prize was awarded to then-President Barack Obama for what the Nobel Committee described as his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
