The Nobel Prize Trump Didn’t Earn

Vanity made the Revolution; liberty was only a pretext,” is a quote widely attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte—and germane to President Trump’s continued fixation with the Nobel Peace Prize and the political consequences for Venezuela.

As is well known, the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to María Corina Machado, the leader of Venezuela’s freedom movement. Her merits? She has fought the Chavista dictatorship ever since Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999 and started dismantling the country’s institutions. At first, she did so through an NGO focused on monitoring electoral processes, then through political participation. Rather than go into exile, this woman, who comes from a well-known family and was trained as an industrial engineer, chose to risk everything for the pursuit of liberty.

She was beaten up, harassed, kidnapped, prosecuted in Chavez’s and Nicolás Maduro’s (his equally despicable successor) kangaroo courts, barred from leaving the country, and prevented from seeing her children—who had to settle abroad, graduate, launch their own careers, get married and have children—and was disqualified from holding public office—first by being expelled from the National Assembly and subsequently by being prevented from participating in any election. Because she was a woman, because she was uncompromising, and because she had classical liberal convictions, she was poo-pooed even by the opposition, who did not take her seriously. Gradually, at an ant-like pace, she earned the respect of the voters. A quarter of a century later, she became a widely admired national figure and her country’s only hope.

In the 2023 primaries organized without the participation of the authorities, she obtained 92 percent of the vote to represent the united opposition in the following year’s presidential elections, in which dictator Nicolás Maduro would seek his third mandate. Of course, she was disqualified. But she found a replacement in Edmundo González, a mild-mannered diplomat in his mid-seventies whom very few Venezuelans had heard about, but who had the courage to accept the challenge.

María Corina’s endorsement made it possible for him to win the July 2024 election with almost 70 percent of the vote. How do we know? Because Machado mounted one of the most brilliant operations ever organized by a freedom movement under a brutal totalitarian regime. With the help, or the passive acceptance, of government security forces guarding many of the polling stations and thousands of well-trained independent voters, she obtained tally sheets reflecting the real vote and relayed them electronically to the outside world.

Despite a repression that reached horrendous levels (thousands were imprisoned, many were killed), González and Machado held several protest rallies. Eventually, González went into exile; his son-in-law was kidnapped by the regime in an attempt to keep the winner quiet. Machado stayed in the country, went into hiding, and continued to agitate for recognition of the election results and to call for the fall of the regime, appealing to the military to turn their backs on Maduro. She promised a peaceful transition and an amnesty for the men and women in uniform, as well as the government’s civilians, except those personally guilty of heinous crimes.

This is the heroic woman who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025—a symbol of her people’s endurance in the face of one of the most tragic stories of the 21st century. She said it belonged to the Venezuelan people and promised to bring the medal to them.

Until Trump stepped in—and practically forced her to “share” it with him, as she did recently during her visit to the White House. Forget that the Nobel Prize cannot be transferred or shared, as the Norwegian Nobel Committee recently said. What kind of leader would take away from a woman like Machado and the Venezuelan people the Nobel Prize? The Donald Trump kind.

The U.S. president has held a gun to Machado’s head since the day she got it by using all sorts of tactics—diminishing her role, ignoring her, then insulting her, and finally leaving her out of the transition process underway in Venezuela under the leadership of the entire Chavista apparatus except Maduro, who was captured and transferred to a U.S. prison. A man who presides over a $1 trillion military budget, controls more than three thousand nuclear warheads, has declared himself the ruler of Venezuela and the owner of its oil, and has twelve warships and the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier group in the Caribbean, put Machado in an impossible position. Either she “shared” the prize with him, or she and the overwhelming majority of Venezuelans who see her as the country’s true leader would be indefinitely bypassed until such time as Trump decides that elections should be held with other “more palatable” candidates.

Meanwhile, she swallowed her pride, kept her eyes on the endgame, cajoled him, and played into his ego by “sharing” the Nobel Prize with him despite criticism from many Venezuelans and others, in the hope that by massaging the U.S. president’s vanity, she would achieve her lifelong pursuit—the liberation of the Venezuelan people. Because, in the end, these small humiliations are nothing compared to the ones she has suffered in Venezuela for the cause of freedom.