On The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize

María Corina Machado, who won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for “promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela,” is literally the anti-trump.

As everyone in the world knows by now—because trump announces it every chance he gets, which is almost every day—he wants desperately to win the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s a pathological obsession. He thinks he can sell the Peace Prize Committee on giving it to him, as if it were one of his cheap ties or overpriced watches, by repeating the exaggerated lie that he has resolved seven conflicts around the world since coming into office (sometimes it’s as many as eleven).

Well, now we know what we’ve always known: the people in Norway are not as gullible as his merch-wearing MAGA yokel supporters.

You’ve likely never heard of María Corina Machado. She is Venezuela’s main opposition leader, and unlike trump she is relatively inconspicuous in international headlines, because she has been forced into hiding by the murderous Maduro regime. The Nobel Committee cited her decades-long “tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”

So while trump is ordering his military to blow up Venezuelan fishing boats and ratcheting up tensions by moving seven U.S. Navy warships and a nuclear-powered submarine off the coast of South America—giving Maduro an excuse to tighten his grip on power—Machado has been working to “mobilize both domestic and international support for a peaceful resolution to the ongoing electoral fraud crisis” and to “bring attention to the human rights abuses occurring under the current regime.”

Personally, I don’t much care about the Nobel Peace Prize. Ever since they gave it to Obama for no apparent reason—saying it was for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”—its meaning and prestige have been downgraded in my view. But of course, the fact that Obama got it makes it that much more desirable for trump. As the leader of a neo-Confederate, racist political movement, trump feels desperately that he must not be outshone in any way by his Black predecessor.

Still, I’m relieved the Nobel Committee didn’t fall for trump’s song-and-dance routine. Part of me feared they might give it to him anyway, as a way of reminding him that he’s not actually on Putin’s side and encouraging him to behave more like a Western leader.

But I don’t think the folks in Oslo have given up on using their platform to send a message. It’s as if awarding the Prize to Venezuela’s Machado was directed at trump. The message is: this is how you pursue peace—not with warships. And also: the Peace Prize is not about ceasefires, it’s about democracy. Because without democracy, there is no peace. No politician in U.S. history has done more to damage democratic principles and institutions, at home and abroad, than trump. Giving him the Prize would have been a travesty.

It’s why he will never deserve it. And all the talk lately by pundits and analysts that it may be merited for the Gaza 20-point plan misses the mark. There are plenty of reasons Netanyahu and Hamas have decided now is the time to cease hostilities—most of them having nothing to do with trump. The supposed “trump plan” is largely a rehash of the Biden plan that failed last January. Now, the timing worked out favorably: Hamas has essentially been defeated, and Netanyahu is thinking about his positioning as a “peacemaker” ahead of Israeli elections less than a year from now. 

We’ll see how much of the plan actually gets implemented. My guess is that phase one will go through, the hostages will be released, Israel will release prisoners and retreat to the agreed-upon line. Aid will start flooding in. After that, it's anyone's guess. I can't imagine that Hamas will de-militarize.   

Nonetheless, clearly trump’s recent push to bring the parties together was part of his campaign to win the Nobel Peace Prize. And if so, the prestige of the Prize worked in trump's narcissistic mind the way it had to. 

The rebuilding of Gaza will take a very long time and the sustained efforts and resources of the US. I hope trump remembers that for the Nobel Prize, like a trophy at his golf club that he's won a dozen times, there’s always next year.