Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado said she dedicated the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to former U.S. President Donald Trump because of what she described as his decisive backing for Venezuela’s pro-democracy movement, explaining in interviews and public remarks that the award belonged “to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support of our cause.” The 57-year-old politician, long a central figure in efforts to end Nicolás Maduro’s rule, confirmed that she spoke with Trump by phone after the announcement on 10 October and that she accepted the honor “in his name and in the name of the Venezuelan people,” a formulation she repeated across U.S. outlets as she fielded questions about the surprise dedication.
Trump, who has campaigned openly for the Nobel in recent years while touting his role in Middle East diplomacy and pressure on authoritarian governments, told reporters the call was unsolicited and that Machado told him she believed he “really deserved it.” “It’s a very nice thing to do,” he said at the White House. “I didn’t say, ‘Then give it to me,’ though I think she might have. She was very nice.” The former president has argued that his pressure campaign against Maduro, including sanctions and diplomatic isolation during his previous term in office and later as president again, materially aided the Venezuelan opposition’s efforts to contest the country’s 2024 election and keep international focus on alleged abuses.
The dedication quickly became the focal point of reaction to the committee’s decision, overshadowing even the citation that praised Machado for leading “a brave and committed” non-violent struggle for free elections and the rule of law after Venezuelan authorities barred her from the 2024 ballot. In an unusual twist for a Nobel announcement, the White House criticized the award as “political,” while the committee’s chair, Jørgen Watne Frydnes, defended the choice in general terms and reiterated that selections are grounded in Alfred Nobel’s criteria. Conservative media and Republican allies amplified Machado’s remarks about Trump, while the laureate’s own team confirmed the call and her wording.
Machado’s explanation, in substance, linked the dedication to a decade-long arc of international pressure on Caracas that intensified under Trump-aligned policy hands. In television comments and a weekend Fox interview clip promoted online, she praised what she called sustained, personal attention from Trump and his circle, framing it as essential to sustaining momentum after Venezuela’s contested 2024 vote and to maintaining sanctions that opposition figures argue are leverage for democratic concessions. “I dedicate this prize to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support of our cause,” she said. “He has shown unwavering support for our people.” Her campaign manager, Magalli Meda, said the pair spoke shortly after the Nobel announcement and exchanged congratulations.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee’s press release put the honor in a different register, avoiding geopolitical score-settling and focusing instead on Machado’s leadership “amid a growing darkness” and her perseverance after authorities used courts to block her candidacy and jailed allies of the opposition ticket. The citation nodded to the post-election environment in which Edmundo González, the 2024 opposition standard-bearer whom independent reviews said outpolled Maduro, has lived in exile while activists in Caracas face prosecution. Rights groups credit Machado with sustaining pressure inside Venezuela and keeping a fragmented opposition aligned behind a non-violent route to transfer of power.
Reactions in the United States tracked political lines. Republicans who had publicly lobbied for Trump to receive the Nobel seized on Machado’s dedication as vindication, while critics dismissed it as gratuitous and argued that the committee’s embrace of a Venezuelan dissident underscored precisely the kind of grassroots, non-violent struggle the Peace Prize was meant to reward. On Newsmax, Rep. Derrick Van Orden said the committee “doesn’t deserve Trump,” casting the decision as ideological; the committee chair declined to be drawn into commentary about Trump specifically, reiterating that selections are made on “genuine contributions to peace.”
Machado’s own political biography explains why her words carried unusual weight beyond Caracas. A former lawmaker and longtime face of the liberal opposition, she built an international network that spans Latin American and European capitals, cultivated ties with U.S. policymakers in both parties, and has repeatedly framed her strategy as a mix of domestic mobilization and outside pressure. During and after the 2024 campaign, she urged the United States and regional allies to condition sanctions relief on verifiable steps toward electoral fairness and the release of political prisoners, while insisting the opposition reject armed struggle in favor of mass civic action. Supporters say that dual focus—uncompromising on democratic principles, adamant about non-violence—made her an archetypal Nobel candidate. The committee’s language mirrored that view, praising “courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist.”
Trump’s own response to the Nobel outcome mixed grievance with self-promotion. He highlighted his role in brokering a recent ceasefire and hostage deal between Israel and Hamas and said he had discussed broader peace prospects with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who later told a U.S. outlet he would consider nominating Trump for the Peace Prize if he could help end Russia’s war. The White House, in parallel, criticized the Nobel committee’s selection as political and insisted U.S. policy toward Venezuela was focused on restoring democracy and countering narcotrafficking. The juxtaposition—Machado’s dedication to Trump on the one hand and the administration’s broadside against the award on the other—reinforced how tightly the prize announcement is entangled with Washington’s domestic divides.
Asked directly why she attached Trump’s name to an honor that the committee awarded for her own actions, Machado cast the dedication as both personal and strategic. In U.S. television remarks, she thanked “President Trump” for “standing with the people of Venezuela when it mattered,” an allusion to sanctions and diplomatic backing that her camp credits with constraining Maduro’s access to financing and weapons, and to the visibility that came from high-profile U.S. engagement. Critics note that sanctions have also deepened Venezuela’s humanitarian collapse; Machado counters that the root cause is misrule and repression, and that easing pressure absent structural change would entrench a dictatorship. Within that logic, dedicating the prize to a foreign leader associated with pressure is intended as a signal to keep it up.
Trump’s claim that the laureate told him he “really deserved it” added a combustible phrase to a weekend of statements. The Independent quoted his extended riff to reporters in which he said Machado had accepted the prize “in honor of you,” an account that his allies repeated as a kind of proxy acceptance speech. The Associated Press reported that Machado’s team confirmed the call and her praise for Trump’s support but emphasized that the prize itself was hers—and Venezuela’s. As with many Nobel cycles, the interpretive battle over what, precisely, the committee meant to endorse began within minutes of the announcement; this time, Machado’s own dedicatory flourish ensured that Trump would be part of the frame.
In Caracas and among the diaspora, reaction focused less on the Trump angle than on what the Nobel might mean for activists still in jail and for leverage in any renewed talks. The prize, opposition figures said, validates a narrative of civic resistance and could stiffen European resolve to keep election conditions and prisoner releases at the center of any sanctions debate. Pro-government voices dismissed the award as an act of foreign interference and seized on Machado’s praise of Trump as further evidence, in their telling, that the opposition takes direction from Washington. The laureate, now operating mostly from hiding inside Venezuela after a fresh round of warrants, used the announcement to call for unity and vowed to keep pressing for “a peaceful transition.”
Machado’s point-by-point rationale for the dedication remained spare, but the contours are clear in her public language and her politics over the past decade: she believes sustained external pressure—especially from the United States—has been a necessary condition for any democratic opening; she sees Trump as uniquely willing to apply and expand that pressure; and she regards the prize as a platform to reinforce that message while keeping attention on Venezuelans who, as she put it, “risk everything for freedom.” The decision to name Trump was thus both a thank-you and a nudge to a patron whose favor she seeks to retain. In the economy of international advocacy, such signals are rarely accidental.
The Nobel Committee’s documents do not mention Trump, and there is no suggestion that Machado’s dedication factored into the selection; it came after the decision and reflects the laureate’s own priorities. The chair has been at pains to steer attention back to the core of the citation: non-violent struggle against repression. But even as the committee tried to hold that line, the dynamics of U.S. politics and media ensured that Machado’s reference to Trump defined much of the first wave of coverage. For supporters of the former president, it was confirmation that his approach to Venezuela won recognition at the highest level; for detractors, proof that the prize had been dragged into partisan theatrics. Machado, a seasoned campaigner, has lived with that kind of polarization for years and appears to have judged the trade-offs acceptable if the dedication helps keep her cause high on Washington’s agenda.
By the weekend’s end, two things were settled. The Norwegian Nobel Committee had placed Machado’s name alongside past dissidents and rights advocates, an imprimatur that will travel with every future appeal she makes on behalf of prisoners and voters in her country. And the laureate herself had answered the question of why she invoked Trump: because, in her view, his attention and pressure have mattered, and because naming him in this moment might help ensure they continue. Whatever one makes of that calculus, it is unmistakably her own—a political choice layered atop a prize awarded for a political life lived at personal risk.