Maria Corina Machado, who has announced that she must become Venezuela’s next President, met with Donald Trump at the White House on Jan. 15 to hand him the Nobel Peace Prize she was awarded in November. He “deserved it,” she proclaimed, because, by invading and bombing Caracas and kidnapping President Nicolas Maduro, he has “liberated” the country. Trump, who had lobbied to be awarded the prize, and was furious that Machado got it instead, declared it a “great honor” to meet her and said that receiving the medal from her “for what I’ve done” was a “gesture of mutual respect.” Machado said she gave her prize to Trump in recognition of his “principled and decisive action to secure a free Venezuela.”
Would you expect anything else from a woman who for two decades has been cultivated by the political and financial networks of the Anglo-American intelligence apparatus, chief among them the Atlantic Council and the National Endowment for Democracy?
Of course, in his rage over not receiving the prize, Trump hadn’t spoken to Machado since mid-October, when her award was first announced. Following the Jan. 3 kidnapping of Maduro, Trump made a point of announcing that he wouldn’t name Machado as Maduro’s successor, because she “lacked the trust of the Venezuelan people”—quite true. At least for the time being, he is working instead with interim President Delcy Rodriguez. Machado relied on her close friend, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, for communication with the White House. Upon leaving the White House on Jan. 15, she made a point of telling Fox News that she will be president of Venezuela “at the appropriate time.”
