US President Donald Trump finally got his wish of having a Nobel Peace Prize on Friday after months of insisting he was a worthy candidate — well, sort of. Venezuelan opposition leader and 2025 Nobel laureate, Maria Corina Machado, gifted the president her medal during a meeting at the White House.
A US official confirmed the president intends to hold onto it and his office posted a picture of him flashing a toothy grin as he received the framed medal.
Users on X, where the announcement was made, did not take kindly to Trump accepting an award he didn’t earn. They were quick to remind him the medal wasn’t the prize itself.
More than one user suggested the president may have pushed — read shoved — Machado into handing over the medal.
A user suggested maybe she was trying to avoid a fate similar to her primary opponent in Venezuela’s last presidential election, President Nicolas Maduro, who was recently taken into custody by US forces in a surprise raid on the country’s capital.
Netizens minced no words in referring to Trump as a fussing child who’d been given the toy he was eyeing.
Someone even compared Trump to Barack Obama, one of his predecessors who actually got his medal from the Nobel Committee in Oslo.
Other just couldn’t believe what happened was real and not an episode of some badly written sitcom.
While Trump may now be the proud owner of a 196 gram gold disc with a portrait of the inventor of dynamite on the front, the fact remains he is not a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Oslo’s Nobel Peace Centre, the official museum of the Peace Prize, seemed to have preempted Machado’s gesture and posted on X explaining, “A medal can change owners, but the title of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate cannot.”