Bulwark Takes - Trump Wants to Take a Nobel Prize That Isn’t His

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

After the dramatic capture of Venezuela’s dictator Nicolás Maduro, Trump publicly suggested he’d be honored to “accept” the Nobel Peace Prize won by Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, as if awards work like trophies, souvenirs, or FIFA medals. Ben Parker and Mona Charen give their takes on the sheer absurdity and Trump’s warped understanding of Venezuela and immigration.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hi, everybody. Ben Parker from the Bulwark here, joined by Mona Charon. We have a ton of videos where you can get informed and get deep analysis from all of our experts about the news. But in this one, we just kind of want to point and laugh, because sometimes that's all we can really do. Let me just, let me just set the stage here about this whole Trump, Maria Karina Machado, no-l-Brize thing. And then we'll get into it. All right. Right after they're reading Caracas, where they set in the Special Forces, and they got Nicholas Maduro, the dictator of Venezuela and his wife, and they brought them out to the United States to face criminal charges. And a few hours later, Trump held this big press conference where he said, we're going to run Venezuela. And they said, oh, what about the Venezuelan opposition leader who just won the Nobel Peace Prize, Maria Karina Machado, who also, by the way, we apparently helped escape from Venezuela, where she was obviously living and hiding and all that. And Trump said, just to remind us that he's not a gangster, she doesn't have the respect.

She's a very nice woman, but she doesn't have the respect. Any comments so far? Oh, my God. Take the canoli. Yeah. You know, so her designated, they didn't allow her to run in that election as everybody knows. The Venezuelans didn't, right. The Venezuela.

and regime. So her stand-in did win two-thirds of the vote. Okay. She's not just a national heroine. She's an international heroine because she won the Nobel Peace Prize. Do people like lust after Nobel Peace Prize, you think? Trump does. Are there people who would do anything to get a Nobel Peace Prize? I mean, but this is, no, this is a new level. She had dedicated her Nobel Peace Prize to him. She said, I'm dedicating this to Trump. It's smart politics on her part. It was. No, it was.

I'm just rolling my eyes because this is the world we live in where people have to feel like they have to do that. Totally agree. Then we get this New York Times headline this morning. After Machado offers her Nobel, Trump says it would be an honor to accept it. And then it turns out that Trump is now open to meeting with Machado if she will give him her Nobel Peace Prize. Would you accept the Nobel Prize she wants to hand to you? Well, I understand she's coming in next week sometime. And I look forward to saying hello to her.

And I've heard that she wants to do that. That would be a great honor. What does he think that means exactly? Okay, maybe she hands him like the little like medallion thing, right? A little medallion. Maybe she gives him the money that comes with the prize. I hope she has the little strap because I'm sure he wants that strap. He wants to put it off what he did with the FIFA thing.

Yes. Are you going to do his name? Like, does he think that, like, I don't know, like, on the website of the Nobel Peace Prize, they're going to, like, have to change it because she gave him his piece. Does he think that, like, the Nobel Committee in Norway is going to be like, oh, dang, fooled us? Like, I'm getting over-excited. It's so stupid. It's so stupid.

I can't get famous. I know. I mean, and the fact, okay, so the psychology of this is just unbelievable. First of all, he said also in that same. account of, yes, it would be an honor to accept her Nobel Peace Prize. It would be an honor, he says. And then he said, it was a disgrace that the Nobel Committee didn't give it to him last year. And he said it was very embarrassing for them, or words to that effect.

Yeah, I'm sure they're very embarrassed that they didn't give it to him. Right. How do they show their faces in public in Norway? And how does he even imagine that people are going to react to this? I mean, that they're not going to say, oh, he is so pathetic that he's asking her to give him the medallion. Although, as you pointed out, he probably will also get the money. She'll probably give him the money, too, because we know how that works with this president. We know what he wants, yeah.

We know what he wants, yeah, even though by his standards, at this point, it's a paltry amount. What is it, half a million, 250 grand, something like that. It's not a, it may be a million. It's not a lot of money. It's, how many Katari Jets is that? Is that like half of a percent of a Katari jet or something? But does he think that people are going to see that thing, which he'll put, I guess, up next to all of his other stuff in the Oval Office

and he'll display it? Does he think people are going to think, oh, this is evidence that the Nobel Committee made a mistake and that Machado recognized that mistake and corrected it by giving the prize to the right guy? does he actually think that's how people are going to interpret this? Look, if this happens, I'll tell you what, is that a bunch of the right-wing infotainment system will start referring to Trump who, and now this is how they'll phrase it, received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Get it? Nobel Peace Prize holder. Nobel Peace Prize possessor Donald Trump. Unbelievable. And you know what? You know what? Maybe the New York Times will too. I don't want to give them to a preemptive credit.

They might say Trump, who received the Nobel Peace Prize for Maria Corrine and Ashado. Some mainstream media will do that, and it'll be the stupidest thing. True. And, you know, it also does betray this other thing about Trump, which is he has this very primitive way of thinking that, like, physical stuff is all that matters in the world. I mean, we saw, and it has real world consequences.

Is there a word for that? Is there a word for being obsessed with, like, the material nature of things? Like an ism for like material obsession. Materialism. Oh, yeah. Thank you. Sorry. Go ahead.

But like we so real world consequences, right? I mean, he is so obsessed with trade in widgets, trade in stuff, physical stuff that you can touch and smell and holding your hand. Whereas he, so he completely misses that a huge amount of world trade and a huge amount of American exports are. services. It's not physical stuff that you can touch, but it's hugely important to the economy. He misses that. It goes right over his head. He doesn't get that. He's obsessed with physical stuff. You know, even with this Venezuela thing, right, he thinks that by having hold of the oil, which is, we don't need oil right now. I mean, we have massive amounts of our own, besides which the price is low. so the last thing the oil companies want is a whole new source of oil.

But in any event, he doesn't recognize. He thinks, oh, there's oil on the ground. As somebody was putting it, you know, unlike in Saudi Arabia, where you can stick a straw in the ground and basically oil comes out. In Venezuela, it's very tarry and sticky and it requires all kinds of investment. What are they called heavy sour or something like that? It requires like the most processing of any oil or something. Right.

It would take a huge amount of physical capital, intellectual capital, you know, investment, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, he just doesn't understand anything about that side of life. In that sense, he's just simple-minded. There I said it. I would like to remind you that in many ways, the future of the global economy depends on a man who looked at a car and said, and I quote, Everything's computer. Everything's computer. He's so trapped in the past. I mean, in so many ways, on so many different levels and so many different issues. I know we're going a little far field here, but so I just wrote in this most recent piece,

you know, in 1980, like Fidel Castro, there was a thing called the Mariel Boat Lift before most of you were born. I was alive. I remember the Mariel Boat Lift. A bunch of people started getting into little boats and going over to Florida, so many that the regime couldn't control it.

And it was very embarrassing to Castro. Oh, part of it was also that this was an intentional outlet to get people dissatisfied with the regime out of Cuba so he could solidify his hold. Correct. And so he decided for that reason to let them go, partly for that reason, also because he couldn't stop them. And so he decided as a little gesture of contempt and spite to also put on some of those boats, some of his criminals from his jails and maybe even some mental patients. I don't know.

So Trump gets this thought in his head from 1980. And ever since then, if he doesn't like a regime, he says, they're sending, they're emptying their prisons. They're emptying their mental asylums. They're sending them all to us. He said that about Venezuela, even as recently as the press conference after the capture of Maduro. The Maduro regime emptied out their prisons, sent their worst and most violent monsters into the United States to steal American lives. And they came from mental institutions and insane asylum. they came from prisons and jails.

It is a complete delusion. There's no evidence of this at all that any country has done it except that one time. And during the Muriel Boat Lift, the vast majority of people were not from prisons or mental... They were just refugees. It was some tiny percentage of them were sour apples sprinkled in by the Castro regime.

And by the way, can I make one other point? I'm sorry, I'm getting really pedantic, but what the heck. I can't remember the number of people who actually wound up, wound up in Miami, but it was thousands of people wound up in Miami. And economists use that as a real world experiment where they say, oh, all of a sudden there was a huge influx of immigrants. What did that do to the local economy? We wonder, guess what? The economy expanded, okay?

Far from taking jobs from locals and driving up poverty, blah, blah, blah. No, the economy boomed. They created jobs. They became consumers. They also hired other people. I mean, it was. And then they all voted for Trump. Eventually, their kids did, unfortunately. Yeah.

But that could very well be changing now. One of the other things from the past that Trump is obsessed with is the fact that Barack Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize for not being George Bush. And that's where this all comes from. Yes, yes, yes. And so Trump thinks, like, you know, he's held onto this idea of the Muriel Boat Lift, this sort of false idea he has for 40, years. He can certainly hold on to the idea for, what has it been, not even two decades now, that Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize for nothing. And he says, you know, I guess if Obama can get a Nobel Peace Prize for nothing, so can I. We're going to have more of these

Bulwark Plus takes. Maybe they'll be more informative than this. Maybe they'll be more pointing and laughing.