White House insiders say President Donald Trump chose not to install a nominal ally as leader of Venezuela following his lightning invasion this weekend because she bruised his ego.
Many expected that after the MAGA administration’s shocking capture of Nicolas Maduro in the early hours of Saturday, Trump might have sought to appoint opposition figurehead María Corina Machado as the oil-rich nation’s new head of state.
Two people “close to the White House” told The Washington Post on Monday the president declined to do so because Machado had committed the “ultimate sin” of offending his pride.
They cited the opposition leader’s decision in November to accept the Nobel Peace Prize rather than turning it down to protest the committee’s decision not to give it to Trump.
“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,” the newspaper’s sources said.
Trump and his allies had otherwise engaged in a concerted campaign, both in public and behind closed doors, to secure him perhaps the most coveted prize on the planet by modeling him as a “peace president” who’d solved a highly contested and often shifting number of conflicts around the world.
The MAGA leader’s capture of Maduro, slammed by critics as almost certainly illegal as well as an all-out assault against the rules-based international order, followed Christmas Day airstrikes against extremist insurgents in Nigeria—a key U.S. ally in West Africa.
He’s since followed up with warnings of possible further action against Colombia, another U.S. ally, while his allies rekindle prior threats of annexing both Panama, also a U.S. ally, and Greenland, a territory of Denmark, yet another U.S. ally.
Asked whether he’d be installing Machado as Venezuela’s new president Saturday, Trump told reporters, “It’d be very tough for her to be the leader [because she] doesn’t have the support or the respect within the country.”
The opposition leader’s stand-in candidate, Edmundo González, secured a more-than-two-thirds majority in last year’s presidential elections, with that result thwarted only because Maduro refused to leave office.
Machado and her team, for their part, had sought to tread a razor thin line of diplomacy following last November’s announcement of her selection as Nobel Laureate.
She accepted the award but chose to explicitly dedicate it to Trump as a perceived supporter of Venezuela’s beleaguered political opposition.
The Post reports she was caught completely off-guard by Trump’s refusal to consider her as a prospective candidate to guide Venezuela through a transition period. His administration has thus far provided only scant details of how exactly it plans to orchestrate this transition.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on this story.
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