Venezuela’s opposition leader has volunteered to give President Donald Trump her Nobel Peace Prize after he reportedly refused to install her to run the country because she didn’t turn down the coveted honor.
Following Saturday’s shock invasion, Trump, 79, reportedly ruled out the idea of María Corina Machado replacing deposed President Nicolás Maduro because she committed the “ultimate sin” of offending the president’s pride, sources told The Washington Post.
“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,” one source told the newspaper.
During an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Machado confirmed that Trump hasn’t spoken to her since Oct. 10, the day the prize was announced. Asked whether she had offered to “give” the president her prize, Machado said she hadn’t had a chance—yet.
“It has not happened yet,” she said. “I would love to be able to personally tell him—certainly [the] Venezuelan people want to give it to him. What he has done in his work, it is a huge step towards a democratic country.”
Notably, she chose to appear on a TV network the president watches religiously, to declare that he “deserved” the award, for which he spent much of last year publicly lobbying.
“As soon as I learned about the Nobel Peace Prize, I dedicated [it] to Trump because I knew at that point, he deserved it,” she said. “Most people said it was impossible to achieve what he has just done on Saturday, Jan. 3. And so, I believe he deserved it.”
During an interview Monday with NBC News, Trump said that Machado shouldn’t have won the Nobel Prize, but that the award had “nothing to do” with his decision about who will run Venezuela.
Although Maduro’s vice president has been sworn in as the interim president, Trump has said repeatedly that it is the U.S. that is calling the shots—and will be for the foreseeable future.
When asked by NBC who is in charge, Trump replied, “Me.”
He had previously dismissed the idea of handing Machado the reins.
“It’d be very tough for her to be the leader [because she] doesn’t have the support or the respect within the country,” he said Saturday.
Machado was caught off guard by the rejection, according to the Post. Her stand-in candidate, Edmundo González, won more than two-thirds of the vote in last year’s presidential elections, though the results were thwarted when Maduro refused to leave office.
In December, the 58-year-old activist and former engineer emerged from months of hiding to accept the peace prize, though she was forced to walk a diplomatic tightrope after Trump’s team spent months trying to brand him the “peace president” and claiming he had ended or prevented eight wars and counting.
It’s not clear what it would mean for Machado to give Trump her award, which comes with SEK 11 million, or about $1 million, in prize money.
Winners can give away the prize money, but it’s not possible to revoke an award, and the Nobel Committee’s decision can’t be appealed, according to the Nobel Foundation, which administers the prize.
Speaking to Hannity, Machado glossed over criticisms that Trump’s mission to depose Maduro, who was captured and taken to New York to face narco-terrorism charges, was almost certainly illegal as well as an all-out assault on the international rules-based order.
“I do want to say today, how grateful we are on his courageous mission, the historical actions he has taken against these narco-terrorists, to start dismantling the structure and bringing Maduro to justice,” Machado said.
But according to The New York Times, all of that groveling could be for naught.
The administration is interested in oil, not promoting democracy, and the CIA concluded that backing the Venezuelan opposition would further destabilize the country and require a greater U.S. military presence.
It also didn’t help that Machado snubbed the president’s envoy Richard Grenell, who repeatedly asked for an in-person meeting that never materialized.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
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