Ever since President Trump first took office in 2017, he has been obsessed with the Nobel Peace Prize, and has made no effort to hide his deep sense of injustice that President Barack Obama won it in 2009 for, in the eyes of the Nobel committee, his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
Mr. Trump has a different view, which he offered in an interview with The New York Times last week: Mr. Obama “was there for a few weeks, and he got it. He didn’t even know why he got it.” Mr. Trump then recited the now-familiar list of “eight wars” he claims to have stopped.
All this culminated on Thursday afternoon in a bizarre scene in a White House that has had its share of jaw-dropping events. The president took possession of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, which its true recipient, María Corina Machado, had turned over, framed in gold.
It was a window into the president’s psyche, including his deep need for affirmation of his role as a “peacemaker,” even after a year of ordering military strikes on several continents. It was also revealing of Ms. Machado’s political calculations. Her party overwhelmingly won the 2024 presidential election in Venezuela but has been barred by Mr. Trump from any role in governing the nation after the capture of Nicolás Maduro.
Mr. Trump said he was “honored” to finally receive the prize, and he grinned broadly as he posed with Ms. Machado in the Oval Office, holding the oversized frame. Shortly after, Ms. Machado left. The medal stayed.
“Maria presented me with her Nobel Peace Prize for the work I have done,” Mr. Trump later effused on social media. “Such a wonderful gesture of mutual respect. Thank you Maria!”
In truth, it was a pretty hollow event for both of them. Mr. Trump can hang the medal on the wall, but to the rest of the world — and in the records of the Nobel committee — he cannot legitimately call himself a Nobel laureate.
That was made clear a few hours later by Kristian Berg Harpviken, the director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, who archly noted that “receiving the symbols of the Peace Prize does not make anyone a Peace Prize laureate.” This has been tried before, he noted, including once in 1943 when Knut Hamsun, who won the Nobel literature prize in 1920, sent it to the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. (Mr. Hamsun, who often espoused admiration for Hitler, mailed the medallion to Goebbels. But it was lost after Goebbels committed suicide in 1945.)
The gifting plan also did not seem to work for Ms. Machado, at least immediately. As she and Mr. Trump were meeting, the C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, was in Caracas meeting with Delcy Rodríguez, the interim president of Venezuela. She had been Mr. Maduro’s vice president, and was part of the forces that barred Ms. Machado from running in the election — one of many steps the Maduro government took to fix the outcome.
In short, Mr. Trump has chosen to operate Venezuela through the very people Ms. Machado fought. The prize — the one Mr. Trump claimed as his own — was essentially given to mark the bravery of those who stood up to the forces Mr. Trump has now embraced, betting that Ms. Rodríguez will do his bidding and grant U.S. companies access to the world’s largest oil reserve. And Mr. Trump believes the old regime — not Ms. Machado — is most likely to enable the United States to run Venezuela’s affairs by remote control.
It is, in short, realpolitik in its rawest form, something Henry A. Kissinger would have admired. If that means embracing the political power structure set up by Hugo Chávez and Mr. Maduro — and rejected by a strong majority of Venezuelans — that is the price that Mr. Trump appears willing to pay.
It seemed like Ms. Machado had been cornered into making her gift. At first, she had “dedicated” the Nobel to Mr. Trump. But in an interview last week, Sean Hannity, the Fox News commentator and one of Mr. Trump’s supporters and informal advisers, asked the opposition leader, “Did you at any point offer to give him the Nobel Peace Prize?”
Ms. Machado said that “it hasn’t happened yet, but I certainly would love to be able to personally tell him” that he, and the Venezuelan people, shared in it.
That changed, and now Ms. Machado appears to be playing the long game. She is betting that sooner or later, the survivors of the Maduro regime will be ousted, and so giving Mr. Trump what he wants — that golden Nobel medallion — is a worthwhile investment.
“I have no doubt that President Trump, his administration and the people of the United States support democracy, justice, freedom and the mandate of the people of Venezuela,” she said on Friday in a speech to the Heritage Foundation, ticking off four values that Mr. Trump has spoken about very little as he has described his plans to bring American enterprises, especially oil companies, back to the country.
She insisted that “once the regime is out and the transition is accomplished, the United States will not only be a safer nation, but one that will have more prosperity and strength in our hemisphere.”
The bigger mystery is how Mr. Trump regards the handover of the prize.
He clearly was interested in possessing it, perhaps because possession, as he has said of Greenland, is “psychologically important.” Of course, he already has one Nobel Peace Prize medallion just steps from the Oval Office: the 1906 award given to Theodore Roosevelt, which is kept in the Roosevelt Room.
Roosevelt won the prize for bringing an end to the Russo-Japanese War, and even some of Mr. Trump’s critics have said that, if Mr. Trump could do the same for the war between Russia and Ukraine, he would be the natural candidate for the next award. But that has been frustratingly elusive, as Mr. Trump himself often admits, even while ticking off other conflicts — India vs. Pakistan, Thailand vs. Cambodia, Israel vs. Hamas and Egypt vs. Ethiopia, among others — that he claims credit for ending.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said on Friday that Mr. Trump intended to keep the prize, but noted that “its final home in the White House is still yet to be decided.”
But she suggested that the issue was not over for Mr. Trump, that the wrong he believes was committed against him by the Nobel committee has not been resolved.
“It does not solve the problem,” she said, “and he’s still worthy of actually being the recipient of the reward.”
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
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