Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado heaped praise on President Donald Trump during a Fox News interview as she promised to return to her country and called for elections to replace deposed president Nicolás Maduro — saying she would win in a landslide despite Trump’s repeated dismissals of her ability to lead.
Speaking to host Sean Hannity on Monday, Machado said she had not spoken to Trump since October, when she was announced as the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize — an award the president has vocally coveted.
“But I do want to say today, on behalf of the Venezuelan people, how grateful we are for his courageous mission,” Machado said, adding that she and the Venezuelan people want to “share” the prize with Trump after the U.S. military seized Maduro and his wife and brought them to New York to stand trial on narco-terrorism charges.
Following the U.S. operation on Saturday, Trump told reporters it would be “very tough” for Machado to become the leader of Venezuela. “She doesn’t have the support within, or the respect within, the country,” he said. “She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect.”
The same day, Trump said the United States would “run” Venezuela with the cooperation of Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president who has become the country’s acting leader. After defiant statements from Rodríguez, however, Trump warned that “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.” By Sunday, Rodríguez’s position appeared more conciliatory, calling for “peace and dialogue, not war.”
Recent classified C.I.A. intelligence analysis also suggested that keeping top figures inside the Venezuelan regime, rather than promoting the opposition, would be the best option for securing the country’s stability after Maduro, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have reported.
That position was echoed Sunday by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who told NBC’s Meet the Press: “We are dealing with the immediate reality. The immediate reality is that, unfortunately and sadly, but unfortunately the vast majority of the opposition is no longer present inside of Venezuela. We have short-term things that have to be addressed right away.”
Machado did not disclose her location during the Fox interview. She escaped Venezuela last month and then appeared in Oslo after her daughter accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on her behalf. The award may pose another problem for Machado’s standing with Trump, given the president’s desire for the prize.
He claims to have “solved” a number of international conflicts and was backed in his bid for the 2025 award by various world leaders. Machado dedicated her prize in part to Trump “for his decisive support of our cause,” but White House communications director Steven Cheung accused the Nobel Committee of placing “politics over peace” by not awarding it to the U.S. president.
Two people close to the White House told The Washington Post that Trump was unwilling to support Machado because she accepted the prize. “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 of the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation.
Trump told NBC on Monday that Machado “should not have won it,” but he insisted her receipt of the award had “nothing to do with my decision” to back Rodríguez as acting leader.
In her Fox interview, Machado called Rodríguez “one of the main architects of torture, persecution, corruption, narcotrafficking” and a key ally of Russia, China and Iran who could not be trusted by investors or Venezuelans.
Machado said she planned to return to Venezuela “as soon as possible” and sought to emphasize the support for the opposition inside Venezuela.
“We won an election by a landslide under fraudulent conditions,” she said. “In free and fair elections, we will win by over 90 percent of the votes, I have no doubt about it.”
Ballot audits by The Washington Post and independent monitors showed Edmundo González, the stand-in for Machado after Maduro’s government barred her from running, won more than two-thirds of the 2024 vote. But Maduro, the authoritarian socialist who had been in power since the 2013 death of Hugo Chávez, claimed reelection.
Machado pledged that a “free Venezuela” would become the “energy powerhouse of the Americas,” bring back the millions of Venezuelans who had fled the country and would become “the main ally of the United States in Latin America.”
But following the capture of Maduro, the U.S. plan for Venezuela remains unclear.
A former Senate staffer who remains in touch with Rubio told The Post that they did not think U.S. officials will carry out a formal occupation. Instead, the staffer said, “We’re going to tell them: ‘Hey, this is what you have to do in order for there not to be another strike.’ That’s what [Trump] sees as running the country.”
On Sunday, Rubio told ABC that the U.S. would use its leverage over Venezuela until “the people who have control over the levers of power in that country make changes that are not just in the interest of the people of Venezuela, but are in the interest of the United States.”
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