By Philip Yeung
Life is stranger than fiction! You can become a second-hand owner of anything, but not the Nobel Peace Prize. Unless Trump enters the equation. The non-winner now has the medal in his cabinet.
I bet the Nobel Committee is having buyer's remorse in awarding the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to Maria Machado. The Venezuelan opposition leader lost no time in transferring it to Trump who, shamelessly, pocketed it.
During the toe-curling handover ceremony, the lady said with a straight face that Trump deserves the peace medal more than anyone else. That qualifies as the big fat, transparent lie of the century.
Machado is doing it for only one purpose. She is fishing for Trump's support in her unfulfilled ambition of becoming Venezuela's new president. But she has seriously miscalculated. Flattery alone never works with Trump. He still harbors bitter resentment against her for "stealing" the coveted prize, as his White House team gave her a cool reception.
This resentment has been conveyed in his letter to the Norwegian Prime Minister, to whom he openly admits being angered by the Nobel decision. Now that he has been denied the prize, he is under no obligation to think of peace. He has been provoked into waging war! Not one, not two, not three wars, but until we cry "No more!".
Venezuela and Greenland are just appetizers. Would World War III be next on the menu?
This is outright blackmail. To Trump, the peace prize is just a ransom. The Nobel award has entered the dark ages. This high honor has lost its luster.
Trump needs more than a prize. This man-child needs a child psychiatrist.
When he pocketed the medal, Trump mumbled something about Machado being a wonderful woman, but then said in the same breath that she is not yet prepared to govern, as she lacks the levers of power.
Machado left empty-handed, minus her medal.
Giving away the medal is an empty gesture. She knows that the award is non-transferable and non-sharable. With or without it, Machado is still the official winner. If she had thrown in the million-dollar-plus prize money, Trump might have been more convinced of her sincerity.
The whole charade is just a silly, circus act. Machado has cheapened the award by making its physical ownership an act of transactional politics---as a quid pro quo in a futile attempt to secure the presidency of her country.
Machado's brown-nosing shrinks her status and her nipples, as she tries to curry favor with a cruel puppet master and an unhinged global bully.
This saga leaves her a prize-winner without a halo, her name forever tarnished by her machinations. She is now joined to Trump at the hip, like a pair of Siamese twins. Two losers in one bundle.
The optics of her crawling to Trump won't go down well with her domestic audience. Her opposition status is secure. She looks like a supplicant and acts like a supplicant. Her integrity is suspect and so is her credibility. She is an embarrassment to her country and previous recipients.
Whatever Trump touches turns to ashes—from his casinos to his university. Everything is done for the headlines. Everything orbits around him. The Nobel Committee never thought that Trump being snubbed for the prize would anger him into aggression, putting Greenland, Canada, Mexico, Columbia and now Iceland in his crosshairs.
Trump is no peace-hugging leader. He is the antithesis of peace. Just ask his three wives, countless mistresses, and army of fellow litigants.
But as a second-hand owner, what will he do with the medal? He may physically possess it, but he can't display it as its rightful owner. It might end up being auctioned off one day when he is cash-poor.
Fifty years from now, nobody will care who the 2025 winner is, but people will still be scratching their heads over the terrible turmoil for a medal. Never has a "peace" award caused so much peril for so many people in so many countries.
Hang on to your hats. With Trump in the White House roller-coaster, every day is psychodrama day, and there are more than a thousand days left in his presidency.
Trump has forever changed the value of the Nobel Peace Prize. After this, all winners look like usurpers. Perhaps, from now on, it should be awarded only as a therapy to curb and cure war addicts.
Alfred Nobel must be turning over in his grave. His peace prize has degenerated into a trigger for war. For peace sake, no more nominees or winners until Trump is out of the White House door.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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