At least Trump didn’t win the Nobel Prize. Or, wait — did he?

There’s no way around the grotesque fact that millions of people all over the world woke up on Friday, Oct. 10, facing a dreadful question: Had Donald Trump won the Nobel Peace Prize? Whether that says more about Trump, about the troubled history of that blatantly misnamed award or about the world is a matter of opinion.

Well, that isn’t what happened. At least not technically. If most of those millions of people chose to heave a sigh of relief and scroll onward, without focusing on the details — OK, some pro-democracy activist in a massively screwed-up Latin American country that’s been in the headlines; fair enough, at least it wasn’t him — honestly, who can blame them?

But anyone who insists on blurring their vision badly enough to perceive the choice of Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado as in any way a rebuke to Trump, or a rejection of the global tendency he represents, is badly fooling themselves. (That’s a well-known moral hazard of the Trump era, but one that remains difficult to resist.) We’re at the opposite end of the spectrum here from the election of Pope Leo XIV, which absolutely and without question was intended as a forceful rejection of MAGA and the global right.

It’s difficult to imagine the upside-down universe where I end up writing this sentence, but it happens to be reality: The Vatican stood up to Donald Trump, but the Nobel committee bent the knee.

That committee, by the way, often pretends to be outside or above politics, which is a mysterious or perhaps laughable claim, since its five members are directly appointed by the Norwegian parliament and typically include several former government ministers. (Yeah, all the other Nobel prizes are given in Sweden, but the peace prize is administered by Norway, for reasons.) On this occasion, it appears to have arrived at its own version of the Columbia University compromise, and I do not mean that as a good thing. (Pro tip: Anytime the word “compromise” comes up in politics, somebody’s getting owned.)

As you may have surmised, the Columbia Compromise is a preemptive, non-negotiated capitulation in advance to MAGA-style tyranny, in hopes of maintaining a semblance of independence while fending off an all-out assault. It’s the supposedly shrewd tactic deployed by numerous American universities, major law firms and other institutions of civil society. In short, it’s what people do way too often in the face of fascism, and if we know one thing about it for sure — well, actually, we know two: It’s humiliating and it doesn’t work.

Trump and his minions don’t want symbolic victories or secret handshakes or coded messages of solidarity. In their 1970s game-show understanding of politics, they want implausibly large sums of money (bedsheet-size checks are not mandatory but would be nice), loud noises, glittering prizes and abject submission. They didn’t get any of that this time around, and they’re pissed: Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize (and all the others as well), but some lady they’ve never heard of got it instead; all those woke, Obama-loving DEI lutefisk-eaters up in Norway must pay.

It’s reasonable to feel at least a little compassion for Machado, who is not much more than a pawn or placeholder in this MAGA-world mini-melodrama, and probably knows it. Her real-world situation, and Venezuela’s agonizing predicament, should not be reduced to a simplistic hero-villain narrative. She has clearly shown courage and resolve in resisting President Nicolás Maduro’s increasingly corrupt and despotic regime, which has finally lost its last vestiges of international left-wing legitimacy. (That should have happened a long time ago, honestly, but in certain quarters the “tankie” tendency endures.)

But it’s also true that Machado has explicitly allied herself with Trump and the global right, which has been obsessed with reconquering Venezuela ever since the rise of Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s far more successful predecessor, in the late ‘90s. She has repeatedly made clear that she supports U.S. sanctions against Venezuela (as the government propaganda billboard illustrating this article alleges) and would favor a military coup or outside military intervention.

You can’t claim that Machado doesn’t know her role: She abased herself before Trump as vigorously as she could after the Nobel announcement, even “dedicating” the prize to him, in an English-language tweet, “for his decisive support of our cause.”

This recognition of the struggle of all Venezuelans is a boost to conclude our task: to conquer Freedom.

We are on the threshold of victory and today, more than ever, we count on President Trump, the people of the United States, the peoples of Latin America, and the democratic…

— María Corina Machado (@MariaCorinaYA) October 10, 2025

Machado’s support for democracy — which, to be clear, Venezuela absolutely does not have under Maduro — also involves opening the nation’s enormous petroleum reserves to multinational oil companies, which is likely the most important issue to her foreign backers. In 2018, she even wrote to Benjamin Netanyahu requesting Israel’s help in fomenting regime change, arguing that the Venezuelan government was in “close collaboration with Iran and extremist groups, which as everyone knows, threaten Israel in existential form.” (It’s not clear whether Bibi wrote back.)

In a political vacuum, Machado might seem like a reasonably on-brand choice given the recent trajectory of the Nobel Peace Prize, which has wandered far away from its express mission of honoring those who have “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” For the most part, the award has become a generalized tribute to activists for human rights and democracy or symbols of progress, at least as those things are defined by a committee of upper-crust Norwegians.

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No such political vacuum exists or ever has, of course, and for the Nobel committee to ignore the war in Gaza for the third straight year — this time in favor of a controversial right-wing figure in a medium-sized South American nation — is a blatantly political decision. As for the glorious history of the Nobel Peace Prize, the fact that Henry Kissinger got one and Mahatma Gandhi did not pretty much sums it up.

Of course Trump didn’t deserve the world’s most prestigious single award — assuming we know what “deserve” means — but the Norwegians have created their own problems with an extensive history of bizarre or inexplicable choices. Trump only cares about the Nobel in the first place because they gave it to Barack Obama, which seemed nonsensical and condescending at the time and looks even worse now. (As for the other U.S. presidents to win the award — Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson — well, let’s move on.)

It would have been a travesty for Donald Trump to win the Nobel Peace Prize only days after urging the generals under his command to wage war on American civilians. But to stake out an admittedly outrageous devil’s-advocate position, at least it would have been honest. Instead, as antiwar activist and author David Swanson suggests, the Nobel committee galaxy-brained itself into giving him the prize by proxy, while “hoping in vain that Trump manages to understand that.” That was just straight-up cowardice, which is probably even worse.