By Jeffrey Blehar
Saturday, January 17, 2026
This week the president of the United States finally
achieved a lifelong dream, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. No, not from
the Nobel Committee — they will never give anything to Donald Trump. Instead,
Trump did what he is naturally best at: He extorted it from its rightful
owner, and then posed with it as a trophy.
Recall that even before the Nobel Peace Prize was announced in October of last year, Trump was notably and
publicly peeved at the idea that it might go to someone less deserving than
him, namely the anti-Maduro Venezuelan politician and activist Maria Machado.
How outrageous an attempt to deny the president his preeminence, when he was
the one who bombed Iran’s nuclear sites, moved battleships into the Caribbean,
threatened to annex Greenland, pondered the dissolution of the Western
alliance, and visibly failed to secure peace in the Russo–Ukrainian War. The
positively European ingratitude of it all was undeniable: How many
penny-ante countries does a man need to use military force against to win a
peace prize, after all?
It might have been merely yet another revealing insight
into the funhouse world Donald Trump occupies. (Just the other day, in fact, I wrote about the essential tackiness and self-aggrandizing
insecurity of the man, as demonstrated by his visual transformation of the
White House into a reflection of his peculiar tastes and obsessions.) But then
Trump had U.S. Special Operations swoop down and capture Nicolás Maduro, in
what has proven to be a case of not-at-all regime change.
Trump, still smarting from his Nobel rebuke, declared in his post-operation press conference that
Machado didn’t “have the support” of her country to lead, and instead stated
that he himself would run Venezuela until such time as he saw fit to hold
elections. (Later he described Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez,
current head of the regime and longstanding Chávista, as a “wonderful woman.”)
That leads us to Thursday, when Machado arrived with a
gift for America’s (and, apparently, Venezuela’s) benevolent leader: her Nobel
Peace Prize, which she of course insists properly belongs to him. Trump
was happy to agree, posing
with a broad grin next to his newest framed trinket. As far as people
celebrating trophies they didn’t and never could win goes, it’s not quite like
that time when Vladimir Putin stole Bob Kraft’s Super Bowl XXXIX ring — but it has that
stench regardless. (Machado, clearly, knows how to “take one for the team.”)
Once again, there is nothing to be done about it except
lament the unspeakably small-souled trashiness of our president, a man who
needs to be bribed and publicly flattered to maybe do the right thing.
Spare me your defense of “She gave it to him! She even said he earned
it!” Nobody is fooled by the pretense. Donald Trump took office in 2025;
Machado has devoted her entire adult life to opposition to Chávez and Maduro,
and her party won an overwhelming election long before he retook power. Trump
earned this prize in the same way that he earned the addition of his name to
the Kennedy Center: by being vain enough to demand it beyond all reason.
Machado should not have had to debase herself — but that
is the price of international politics in the Trump era. (Middle Eastern oil
magnates instead bribe him with resort concessions and airplanes.) I refuse to
judge her for bending to the obscenely vainglorious pretenses of a man who
holds all the military and diplomatic cards, and is happy to show his hand to
the world.
I instead judge the man himself. Even if Machado saw fit
to “give” her prize to the president, any president worthy of the name would
have been the big enough man — to say nothing of international diplomat — to
politely reject the offer, and in so doing bank goodwill from the gesture. Not
our president. Trump doesn’t care about diplomatic goodwill; he wants things.
So instead, his administration has announced that Trump will keep the Nobel
Peace Prize — eagerly pocketing another shiny bauble to add to his trophy case.
Don’t be surprised if he breaks the medal out from behind its framed protective
glass to wear to next month’s State of the Union.
This is a low.
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