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Appearing on Fox News Monday night, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado expressed a willingness to share her recently won Nobel Peace Prize with President Donald Trump, days after a report indicated he didn’t want to install her as leader of the country because she accepted the prize he wanted.
Machado had dedicated the award to Trump when she accepted it late last year. However, according to sources speaking with The Washington Post, her acceptance of the award was the “ultimate sin” against the president, as he had wanted her to refuse it altogether.
“If she had turned it down and said, ‘I can’t accept it because it’s Donald Trump’s,’ she’d be the president of Venezuela today,” one of the sources said, the day after the military carried out Trump’s order to attack Venezuela and abduct President Nicolás Maduro.
In Machado’s interview with host Sean Hannity after that report was published, she said she’d be willing to give or share the prize with Trump.
“I certainly would love to be able to personally tell him that we believe, the Venezuelan people, because this is a prize of the Venezuelan people, certainly want to give it to him, and share it with him,” Machado said in her comments.
Machado also said that, when she had won the Nobel Peace Prize, she made her dedication to Trump because she “believed at that point he deserved it.” (During her official acceptance speech last month, however, Machado never mentioned Trump by name or title.)
In the lead-up to the announcement of the winner of the prize, Trump had complained that he would probably not receive it, and claimed he deserved it for helping to end multiple wars, an assertion that multiple fact-checks have said is highly misleading, at best.
Machado has been living in hiding outside of Venezuela, due to her stated concerns of security fears, after she was denied the ability to run for president of the country against Maduro last year.
Machado’s selection as the Nobel Peace Prize winner was itself controversial, as she has aligned herself “with the most militarist and darkest face of U.S. imperialism,” Latin America historian Greg Grandin said.
Immediately after the U.S. military operation to remove Maduro, Trump expressed doubts that Maduro could lead the country.
“I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country. She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect,” Trump told reporters on Saturday, shortly after the attack.
Although Vice President Delcy Rodríguez has taken over as interim president of Venezuela, Trump has also asserted that his administration will “run the country,” and has issued a list of pro-U.S. demands for Rodríguez to follow in order to not be removed herself.
Meanwhile, administration officials briefed a bipartisan group of lawmakers in Washington on Monday about the operation in Venezuela and the future of the country. Members of both parties suggested the administration was vague in its goals or next steps, but Republicans seemed more eager to defend that vagueness.
“This is still developing, this has all just happened within the last couple of days…. There’s more questions, ultimately about how it resolves, probably, than answers at the moment, but that’s to be expected,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) said after the meeting.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) was less enthused, describing the briefing as “extensive and long,” and agreeing that it ended with “far more questions” than answers, which he described as being problematic.
The administration’s plans for Venezuela are “based on wishful thinking and [are] unsatisfying,” Schumer added.
Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-New York), the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, also said the meeting provided “no clarity” on whether Trump would send U.S. troops to Venezuela.
“He’s not going to take anything off the table,” Meeks said. “This is what the president has said. So I don’t think that there was anything that was said differently.”
Meeks also left the meeting questioning the administration’s rationale for the attack on Venezuela and the abduction of Maduro.
“Clearly, it’s not about democracy,” Meeks said. “Clearly, it’s about — a lot about oil.”
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