The White House is going all in on celebrating President Donald Trump’s name appearing in sentences related to the Nobel Peace Prize award he didn’t win but desperately wants.
On Friday afternoon, the White House’s X account posted a graphic featuring the president and a headline from far-right news outlet The Daily Caller reading, “Nobel Peace Prize Winner Maria Corina Machado Dedicates Award To Donald Trump.”
Machado, 58, is a Venezuelan democracy advocate who leads the opposition to the country’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro. She dedicated her award to Trump on Friday on X.
“We are on the threshold of victory and today, more than ever, we count on President Trump, the people of the United States, the peoples of Latin America, and the democratic nations of the world as our principal allies to achieve Freedom and democracy,” she wrote.
“I dedicate this prize to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support of our cause!”
Though Trump’s supporters and White House spokespeople are slamming the Nobel committee for giving the award to Machado instead of the U.S. president, Trump has publicly supported Machado in her efforts to depose Maduro.
The Trump administration recognizes Maduro’s opponent, Edmundo González Urrutia, as the legitimate president-elect of Venezuela (Urrutia acted as Machado’s surrogate in Venezuela’s last election). Maduro, however, has refused to leave office, and Machado and Urrutia have been living in exile ever since.
In January, Trump, 79, posted on Truth Social that Machado and Urrutia were “freedom fighters” who were “expressing the voices and the WILL of the Venezuelan people.”
The BBC reports that Trump called Machado after she won the award to congratulate her and tell her she deserves it.
Like Machado, Trump is reportedly no fan of Maduro. High-ranking officials in Maduro’s government believe that Trump’s recent attacks on Venezuelan “drug boats” are a pretext to escalate toward an all-out military conflict with the goal of ousting the Venezuelan dictator.
Speaking to The New York Times last month, one of Machado’s advisers, Pedro Urruchurtu, said Machado had been coordinating with the Trump administration on a plan preparing for the first 100 hours after the fall of Maduro.
Despite Trump’s intense lobbying for the Nobel Prize, there was never a realistic possibility he would win this year’s award, as nominations for the prize are closed in January. This means that if Trump wants the prize for the seven or eight wars he claims to have ended since the start of his presidency, he’ll have to wait another year to make his case (again).
