This week the president of the United States finally achieved a lifelong dream, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. No, not from the Nobel Committee — they will never give anything to Donald Trump. Instead, Trump did what he is naturally best at: He extorted it from its rightful owner, and then posed with it as a trophy.

Recall that even before the Nobel Peace Prize was announced in October of last year, Trump was notably and publicly peeved at the idea that it might go to someone less deserving than him, namely the anti-Maduro Venezuelan politician and activist Maria Machado. How outrageous an attempt to deny the president his preeminence, when he was the one who bombed Iran’s nuclear sites, moved battleships into the Caribbean, threatened to annex Greenland, pondered the dissolution of the Western alliance, and visibly failed to secure peace in the Russo–Ukrainian War. The positively European ingratitude of it all was undeniable: How many penny-ante countries does a man need to use military force against to win a peace prize, after all?

It might have been merely yet another revealing insight into the funhouse world Donald Trump occupies. (Just the other day, in fact, I wrote about the essential tackiness and self-aggrandizing insecurity of the man, as demonstrated by his visual transformation of the White House into a reflection of his peculiar tastes and obsessions.) But then Trump had U.S. Special Forces swoop down and capture Nicolás Maduro, in what has proven to be a case of not-at-all regime change.

Trump, still smarting from his Nobel rebuke, declared in his post-operation press conference that Machado didn’t “have the support” of her country to lead, and instead declared that he himself would run Venezuela until such time as he saw fit to hold elections. (Later he declared Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, current head of the regime and longstanding Chávista, to be a “wonderful woman.”)

That leads us to Thursday, when Machado arrived with a gift for America’s (and, apparently, Venezuela’s) benevolent leader: her Nobel Peace Prize, which she of course insists properly belongs to him. Trump was happy to agree, posing with a broad grin next to his newest framed trinket. As far as people celebrating trophies they didn’t and never could win, it’s not quite like that time when Vladimir Putin stole Bob Kraft’s Super Bowl XXXIX ring — but it has that stench regardless. (Machado, clearly, knows how to “take one for the team.”)

Once again, there is nothing to be done about it except lament the unspeakably small-souled trashiness of our president, a man who needs to be bribed and publicly flattered to maybe do the right thing. Spare me your defense of “She gave it to him! She even said he earned it!” Nobody is fooled by the pretense. Donald Trump took office in 2025; Machado has devoted her entire adult life to opposition to Chávez and Maduro, and her party won an overwhelming election long before he retook power. Trump earned this prize in the same way that he earned the addition of his name to the Kennedy Center: by being vain enough to demand it beyond all reason.

Machado should not have had to debase herself — but that is the price of international politics in the Trump era. (Middle Eastern oil magnates instead bribe him with resort concessions and airplanes.) I refuse to judge her for bending to the obscenely vainglorious pretenses of a man who holds all the military and diplomatic cards, and is happy to show his hand to the world.

I instead judge the man himself. Even if Machado saw fit to “give” her prize to the president, any president worthy of the name would have been the big enough man — to say nothing of international diplomat — to politely reject the offer, and in so doing bank goodwill from the gesture. Not our president. Trump doesn’t care about diplomatic goodwill; he wants things. So instead, his administration has announced that Trump will keep the Nobel Peace Prize — eagerly pocketing another shiny bauble to add to his trophy case. Don’t be surprised if he breaks the medal out from behind its framed protective glass to wear to next month’s State of the Union.

This is a low.