Trump: A Nobel shakedown

President Trump finally has his Nobel Peace Prize, said Brian Bennett in Time—“sort of.” Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado visited the White House on Jan. 15 and gifted him the 18-karat gold medal she won in November for her brave defiance of Nicolás Maduro’s brutal autocratic regime. Speaking to reporters, Machado said she told Trump that he deserved the medal for his “unique commitment” to Venezuelan freedom and likened him to George Washington. Let’s be clear what happened here, said Jeffrey Blehar in National Review: Trump “extorted the medal from its rightful owner and then posed with it as a trophy.” He made it abundantly clear before last year’s Nobel Committee announcement that he’d be peeved if he didn’t get the Peace Prize. And after the U.S. captured Maduro this month, White House insiders said the only reason he didn’t name Machado as Venezuela’s interim president was that she had committed the “ultimate sin” of accepting the Nobel. To secure U.S. support for a true democratic transition in Venezuela, Machado likely thought she had no choice but to hand “our impossibly small-souled president” a prize he did not win or deserve.

Trump’s “unquenchable thirst” for adulation and awards is deeply amusing, said Aaron Blake in CNN.com. It’s also deeply disturbing. We have a president who is making world-changing decisions based not on America’s best interests but whether or not he thinks he’s been sufficiently flattered. A failure to kiss the ring can be cataclysmic. This week, he blamed his threat to conquer Greenland on the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s failure to recognize his supposed contributions to world peace. “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS,” he wrote to Norway’s prime minister, “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace.”

But sucking up to Trump doesn’t necessarily deliver results, said Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark. Having handed over her Peace Prize, Machado now has nothing else to give a president who always wants more. Meanwhile, Delcy Rodríguez—Maduro’s former vice president and now the U.S.-approved interim president of Venezuela—can supply Trump with “a steady stream of income,” which is why he’s likely to stick with her. Machado made a mistake in thinking that she could defeat autocracy at home by providing “cover and legitimacy” to an aspiring autocrat here in the U.S. But anyone who “bows and scrapes” before Trump “spits in the face of Americans being beaten in the streets of Minneapolis. And makes our attempt to save American democracy a tiny bit harder.”