BY SOUMANOU SALIFOU

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has been awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize “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.” There is not a shadow of doubt that the recognition of the fearless Latin American democratic icon has devastated Trump and his MAGA world.

Trump’s naked desperation for the Nobel Prize is no secret. When asked two days ago by a reporter about his expectation to receive the biggest honor on the global stage, Trump boasted: “We settled seven wars. We’re close to settling an eighth. And I think we’ll end up settling the Russia situation, which is horrible.” He clearly sounded desperate by adding, “I don’t think anybody in history settled that many. But perhaps they’ll find a reason not to give it to me.”

The contrast between María Corina Machado and Donald Trump in terms of contribution to world peace cannot be overstated.

For decades, María Corina Machado, 58, has led the struggle for democracy in Venezuela despite the massive perils that come with such audacious leadership.

In 2002, she co-founded Súmate, a Venezuelan civil society organization that advocates for free and fair elections and conducts training and election monitoring. In 2010, she rose to the National Assembly with a record number of votes, only to be expelled from her office in 2014. That, however, did not stop her from leading the Vente Venezuela opposition party, which climaxed in 2017 into the creation of Soy Venezuela alliance, an umbrella-entity that unites pro-democracy forces in the country across political dividing lines.

For his part, after losing the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump staged an unprecedented coup on January 6, 2021 to stop the confirmation of his duly-elected opponent—a move that resulted in three deaths and more than one hundred wounded among the police. Upon returning to the White House in 2025, he wasted no time in illegally using the military to police cities in the states that usually vote against his political party. The ensuing chaos includes dragging presumed illegal immigrants into the street in the middle of the night with their naked children.

If social justice is a contributing factor to world peace, here, too, María Corina Machado has a lot of merits, contrary to Donald Trump.

As far back as 1992, the Venezuelan Nobel laureate established the Atenea Foundation, which works to benefit street children in Caracas. By contrast, during his first week in office in January 2025, Donald Trump illegally dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, thus depriving needed populations in the third world of the food and medical support the United States has provided for decades.

In sum, it was easy for Trump to win back the White House in 2024 by exploiting American voters’ reluctance to elect a woman as president; but his decades-long actions against peace both in the United States and worldwide did not go unnoticed by the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

Knowing how Trump and his MAGA mob operate, one should expect them to demonize the highly respected Nobel Committee that has, at least for now, destroyed Trump’s moral by denying him the coveted prize. A prize deservedly won by true peace advocates that include the late Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr, the late President Nelson Mandela, the late South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and former President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia.