Far Left Agenda wins over Common Sense and Real Deeds: María Machado gets devaluated Nobel Prize over President Trump
Trump’s quest for the Nobel Peace Prize falls short again despite high-profile nominations
President Donald Trump was passed over for the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday despite jockeying from his fellow Republicans, various world leaders and — most vocally — himself.
Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado was awarded the prize, after she was nominated last year by a group that included then-Sen. Marco Rubio, who is now Trump’s secretary of state. The Norwegian Nobel Committee said it was honoring Machado “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”
Machado, however, said she wanted to dedicate the win to Trump, along with the people of her country, as she praised the president for support of her cause.
Her campaign manager Magalli Meda confirmed that Trump congratulated Machado in a phone call Friday.
AP Washington correspondent Sagar Meghani reports Donald Trump has long talked about winning a Nobel Peace Prize, although he did not win this year.
At the White House later, Trump listed the peace efforts he’d made while in office this year —something that’s become a frequent habit as he appears before the media — and was wistful as he spoke about Machado winning.
“The person who actually got the Nobel Prize called me and said, ‘I’m accepting this in honor of you because you really deserved it.’” he said.
“You could also say it was given out for ’24, and I was running for office in ’24,” Trump said.
The tone from the White House was much sourer early Friday, shortly after the award was announced. White House communications director Steven Cheung said members of “the Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace” because they didn’t recognize Trump, especially after the Gaza ceasefire deal his administration helped strike this week.
Machado’s opposition to President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela aligns with the Trump administration’s own stance on Venezuela, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio previously praised her as “the personification of resilience, tenacity, and patriotism.”
Trump, who has long coveted the prestigious prize, has been outspoken about his desire for the honor during both of his presidential terms, particularly lately as he takes credit for ending conflicts around the world. The Republican president has also expressed doubts that the Nobel committee would ever grant him the award.
Although Trump received nominations for the prize, many of them occurred after the February deadline for the 2025 award, which fell just a week and a half into his second term. His name was, however, put forward in December by Republican Rep. Claudia Tenney of New York, her office said in a statement, for his brokering of the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states in 2020.
A long history of lobbying for the prize
Jørgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said the committee has seen various campaigns in its long history of awarding the peace prize.
“We receive thousands and thousands of letters every year of people wanting to say what for them leads to peace,” he said. “This committee sits in a room filled with the portraits of all laureates, and that room is filled with both courage and integrity. So we base only our decision on the work and the will of Alfred Nobel.”
The peace prize, first awarded in 1901, was created partly to encourage ongoing peace efforts. Alfred Nobel stipulated in his will that the prize should go to someone “who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
Three sitting U.S. presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize: Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, Woodrow Wilson in 1919 and Barack Obama in 2009. Jimmy Carter won the prize in 2002, a full two decades after leaving office. Former Vice President Al Gore received the prize in 2007.
Obama, a Democrat who was a focus of Trump’s attacks well before the Republican was elected, won the prize early in his tenure as president.
“They gave it to Obama for doing absolutely nothing but destroying our country,” Trump said Thursday.
Wars in Gaza and elsewhere
As one of his reasons for deserving the award, Trump often says he has ended seven wars, though some of the conflicts the president claims to have resolved were merely tensions and his role in easing them is disputed.
But while there is hope for the end to Israel and Hamas’ war, with Israel saying a ceasefire agreement with Hamas came into effect Friday, much remains uncertain about the aspects of the broader plan, including whether and how Hamas will disarm and who will govern Gaza. And little progress seems to have been made in the Russia-Ukraine war, a conflict Trump claimed during the 2024 campaign that he could end in one day.
As Trump pushes for peaceful resolutions to some conflicts abroad, the country he governs remains deeply divided and politically fraught. Trump has kicked off what he hopes to be the largest deportation program in American history to remove immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. He is using the levers of government, including the Justice Department, to go after his perceived political enemies. He has sent the military into U.S. cities over local opposition to stop crime and crack down on immigration enforcement.
Internationally, he also touched off global trade wars with his on-again, off-again tariffs, which he wields as a threat to bend other countries and companies to his will. He asserted presidential war powers by declaring cartels to be unlawful combatants and launching lethal strikes on boats in the Caribbean that he alleged were carrying drugs.
The full list of people nominated is secret, but anyone who submits a nomination is free to talk about it. Trump’s detractors say supporters, foreign leaders and others are submitting Trump’s name for nomination for the prize — and announcing it publicly — not because he deserves it but because they see it as a way to manipulate him and stay in his good graces.
Global reaction
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who this summer said he was nominating Trump for the prize, on Friday reposted Cheung’s response with the comment: “The Nobel Committee talks about peace. President @realDonaldTrump makes it happen.”
“The facts speak for themselves,” Netanyahu’s office said on X. “President #Trump deserves it.”
The authoritarian president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, said Trump deserved the prize and said it was “sheer stupidity” for him not to receive it.
Lukashenko, whose government has faced sweeping Western sanctions for its brutal crackdown on critics after a contested 2020 election, had a phone call with Trump in August that sparked speculation of a possible thaw in relations.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who sent troops to Ukraine in 2022 and has sought to show alignment with Trump, told reporters in Taijikistan on Friday that it’s not up to him to judge whether Trump should have received the prize, but he praised the ceasefire deal for Gaza.
He also criticized the Nobel Committee’s prior decisions, saying it has in the past awarded the prize to those who have done little to advance global peace.
Putin’s remarks nearly echoed the comments Trump made about Obama, and the U.S. leader responded to his Russian counterpart’s praise by posting on social media, “Thank you to President Putin!”
Others who formally submitted a nomination for Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize — but after this year’s deadline — include Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet and Pakistan’s government, all citing his work in helping end conflicts in their regions.
___
Associated Press writers Chris Megerian in Washington, Geir Moulson in Berlin, Regina Garcia Cano in Mexico City and Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed to this report.
María Corina Machado has long been the face of resistance to Venezuela’s 26-year ruling party. Now, she may become a symbol of peace, too.
Machado, the Venezuelan opposition powerhouse who prompted millions of Venezuelans to reject President Nicolás Maduro in last year’s election, on Friday was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work “to achieve a just and peaceful transition” of power in the South American country. The award also recognized the seasoned politician for being a “unifying figure” in the fractured opposition.
The award, however, is being granted at a time when opposition supporters are questioning her leadership, including her embrace of U.S. President Donald Trump’s Venezuela policy, which has seen Venezuelan migrants sent to an infamous prison in Central America and deadly U.S. military strikes in the Caribbean.
Sandra Martínez, 32, called Machado a “great woman” as she waited at a bus stop in Caracas, but said she’s not sure if the prize will have any effect on her country. “I don’t know what can be done with that to improve the situation, but she deserves it,” Martínez said.
Engineer-turned-politician
Machado, an industrial engineer and daughter of a steel magnate, began challenging the ruling party in 2004, when the non-governmental organization she co-founded, Súmate, promoted a referendum to recall then-President Hugo Chávez. The initiative failed, and Machado and other Súmate executives were charged with conspiracy.
She drew the anger of Chávez and his allies the following year for her Oval Office meeting with then-U.S. President George W. Bush. Chávez considered Bush an adversary.
Her full transformation into a politician would come in 2010, when she was elected to a seat in the National Assembly, receiving more votes than any aspiring lawmaker ever. It was from this position that she boldly interrupted Chávez as he addressed the legislature and called his expropriation of businesses theft.
“An eagle does not hunt a fly,” he responded. The exchange is seared in voters’ memories.
Presidential aspirations
Machado, 58, sought Venezuela’s presidency for the first time in 2012, but she finished third in the primary race to be the presidential candidate for the Democratic Unity Roundtable.
The ruling party-controlled National Assembly ousted Machado in 2014 and, months later, the Comptroller General’s Office barred her from public office for a year, citing an alleged omission on her asset declaration form. That same year, the government accused her of being involved in an alleged plot to kill Maduro, who succeeded Chávez after his 2013 death.
Machado, a free-market firebrand, denied the charge, calling it an attempt to silence her and opposition members who had called tens of thousands of people to the streets in anti-government protests that at times turned violent.
She kept a low profile for the next nine years, supporting some anti-Maduro initiatives and election boycotts and criticizing opposition efforts to negotiate with the government. By the time she announced a new bid for the presidency in 2023, her careful messaging had softened her image as an elitist hard-liner, allowing her to connect with skeptics on both sides.
She won the opposition’s presidential primary with more than 90% of the vote, unifying the faction — as noted by the Nobel Prize committee. But ruling-party loyalists who control the country’s judiciary kept her from appearing on the ballot, which forced her to throw her support behind former diplomat Edmundo González.
She hiked overpasses, walked highways, rode motorcycles, sought shelter in supporters’ homes and saw her closest collaborators be arrested as she kept campaigning across Venezuela. She repeatedly joined thousands of supporters chanting in unison “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” in rallies and asked them to vote for González, a virtual unknown who had never run for office.
Brutal repression
González crushed Maduro by a more than two-to-one margin, according to voting machine records collected by the opposition and validated by international observers. Still, Venezuela’s National Electoral Council, loyal to the ruling party, declared Maduro the winner of the July 28, 2024, contest.
People protested the results across the country, and the government responded with full force, arresting more than 2,000 people and accusing them of plotting to oust Maduro and sow chaos. Most were released over the following months, but the government simultaneously arrested dozens of people who actively participated in Machado’s efforts last year.
Some of Machado’s closest collaborators, including her campaign manager, avoided prison by sheltering for more than a year at a diplomatic compound in Caracas, where they remained until May, when they fled to the U.S.
González went into exile in Spain after he became the subject of an arrest warrant, and Machado has not been seen in public since January, when she joined people protesting Maduro’s planned swearing-in ceremony. Her and González’s inability to stop Maduro from taking the oath of office again led to a decline in support.
People’s trust has eroded since then, primarily over Machado’s unquestionable support for Trump, including the large U.S. maritime deployment in the Caribbean that has carried out deadly strikes off the coast of Venezuela. This has led to fresh divisions within the opposition, but she remains undeterred.
“I believe that we are very close to achieving, finally, freedom for our country and peace for the region,” Machado said in a call with the Norwegian Nobel Institute, adding that “even though we face the most brutal violence, our society has resisted.”
“I believe that the world will now understand how urgent it is to finally, you know, succeed,” she said.
___
Garcia Cano reported from Mexico City.
- Previous “Mahatma Ghandi, Mandella and Mother Teresa of Modernity ” – the Karim Khan from ICC, in Full Display of Hypocrisy, decided: aging Duterte to Die in Jail
- Next Afghanistan Returns to “Normal” Role in regional Geopolitics: India restores full embassy in Kabul
You may also like...
Random news
About us
Our Newly established Center for study of Asian Affairs has
branches in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, as well as freelances in some other countries.
For inquires, please contact: newsofasia.info@yahoo.com Mr.Mohd Zarif - Secretary of the Center and administer of the web-site www.newsofasia.net
Polls
Loading ...