One of the more nauseating sights these last few days has been the way that this year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and Trump have been acting. Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado initially accepted the prize and this apparently really ticked off Trump who seems to have made it one of his major life goals to get the prize. He was so incensed that Machado got it that he supposedly rejected installing her as president of Venezuela after his attack on that country and the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro, even though Machado fulsomely praised Trump for his assault on Venezuela’s sovereignty.

Machado, seeing her chance of becoming president slipping away because of Trump’s childish pique, tried to ingratiate herself with him even more by ‘presenting’ Trump with the prize at their meeting at the White House.

The Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has presented her gold Nobel peace prize medal to Donald Trump after meeting him in the White House, nearly a fortnight after he ordered the abduction of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro.

Machado, who received the award last year for her struggle against Maduro’s “brutal, authoritarian state”, told reporters on Thursday she had done so “in recognition [of] his unique commitment [to] our freedom”.

Several hours later, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Machado “presented me with her Nobel peace prize for the work I have done. Such a wonderful gesture of mutual respect.”

A photograph circulated later by the White House showed the US president with the gift displayed in a large frame. Inside the gold frame beneath the medal, a text read: “Presented as a personal symbol of gratitude on behalf of the Venezuelan people in recognition of President Trump’s principled and decisive action to secure a free Venezuela.”

This makes both of them look like sad losers. How pathetic must you be to pressure someone to give you a prize that was awarded to them? And how pathetic must you be to give a prize that was awarded to you to someone else in order to ingratiate yourself with them? It has been made abundantly clear by the peace prize committee that while the winners of the prize can do what they like with the physical medal, that does not mean that whoever they give it to is now considered the winner. There seems to a sense of incredulity about this circus.

A sense of disbelief gripped Norwegian media and expert community following news that Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado gave her award medal to US President Donald Trump, who had been hankering after the accolade.

“That’s completely unheard of,” Janne Haaland Matlary, a professor with the University of Oslo and a former politician, told public broadcaster NRK. “It’s a total lack of respect for the award, on her part,” she said, calling the act “meaningless” and “pathetic.”
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The award cannot be shared or transferred, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said in a statement last week. It didn’t respond to phone calls and text messages seeking comment on Friday.
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“This is unbelievably embarrassing and damaging to one of the world’s most recognized and important prizes,” Raymond Johansen, a former Oslo mayor with the ruling Labor Party said in a Facebook post. “The awarding of the prize is now so politicized and potentially dangerous that it could easily legitimize an anti-peace prize development.”

In other words, the whole thing is a farce.

The Peace Prize committee had already lost a lot of respect because of having given it in the past to some truly awful people. Trump would easily be the worst person to ever get the award (which is saying a lot considering that war criminal Henry Kissinger also got it) but that does not mean that the committee might not have been considering giving it to him some time in the future. But by acting this way, Trump may have harmed his chances since if they now give it to him, it would look like they are even more craven and were bullied into doing so,

The whole thing is trivial and makes Trump and Machado look utterly pathetic. With apologies to William Shakespeare and the comic strip Pearls Before Swine, one might even say that it is Machado over nothing.