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Trump’s Advice to Venezuela’s Democracy Champion: Don’t Go Home
President Trump is tempering the political ambitions of María Corina Machado, a Nobel laureate, as he deepens ties with her foes in Venezuela.
Anatoly Kurmanaev and Tyler Pager
Tyler Pager reported from Washington.
The exiled leader of Venezuela’s pro-democracy movement, María Corina Machado, received a warm White House reception days after announcing her decision to return home.
Ms. Machado was invited to breakfast last Friday with President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio after requesting a meeting to discuss her plans, according to a U.S. official and another person briefed on the meeting. The three spoke for nearly two hours in a private dining room next to the Oval Office, the two people said.
But the hearty welcome belied a negative message delivered during the meal. Mr. Trump advised Ms. Machado, who in January gave Mr. Trump her Nobel Peace Prize for deposing the country’s autocrat, not to return home for now, the people said.
The recommendation echoed similar messages conveyed by other Trump administration officials to the Venezuelan opposition leader in recent weeks, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Trump told Ms. Machado, 58, that security conditions in Venezuela were volatile and that he was concerned about her safety, the people said, who, like other people interviewed for this article, requested anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Ms. Machado declined to comment for this article. The State Department referred questions to the White House, which confirmed the meeting but declined to comment publicly.
Mr. Trump’s polite recommendation was far from an order, but it crystallized the diverging objectives pursued by the White House and Venezuela’s main opposition alliance in a country upended by the sudden end of President Nicolás Maduro’s 13-year rule.
U.S. forces swooped into Venezuela’s capital in January and captured Mr. Maduro and his wife, Cilia, who are both awaiting trial in New York.
After removing Mr. Maduro, Mr. Trump has prioritized stability and energy deals in Venezuela, finding an unlikely enforcer of his interests in Mr. Maduro’s former vice president and interim replacement, Delcy Rodríguez.
The focus on continuity in Venezuela has put the White House increasingly at odds with Ms. Machado, Venezuela’s most popular politician, who, from exile, has seen her political capital erode at a decisive moment in her country’s future.
People close to the White House say Mr. Trump’s stake in keeping Venezuela stable and the country’s oil flowing has only risen since the U.S. attack on Iran, which plunged global energy markets into turmoil.
“We have a great situation going over there, with a wonderful president, a wonderful president-elect, Delcy. And she is doing a great job, and they are all doing a good job,” Mr. Trump said at an event at the White House last week. “We’ve taken hundreds of millions of barrels of oil out already,” Mr. Trump added, exaggerating the scale of Venezuela’s oil trade with the United States.
Days later, the State Department filed a document with a U.S. court, recognizing Ms. Rodríguez, who has never held elected office, as the country’s ruler.
Mr. Trump’s deepening ties with Ms. Rodríguez, Mr. Maduro’s long-serving economic architect, have not prevented him from praising Ms. Machado to drum up support among Venezuela’s diaspora in South Florida, where the opposition leader is immensely popular. On Saturday, for example, Mr. Trump called Ms. Machado and put her on a loudspeaker during a dinner with local Republican officials at his golf club in the Miami suburb of Doral, the heart of Florida’s Venezuelan American community.
Ms. Machado, a longstanding opponent of Venezuela’s ruling Socialist Party, led a grass roots electoral campaign in 2024 that defeated Mr. Maduro at the polls and earned her the Nobel Peace Prize.
The country’s electoral board, however, announced fraudulent results and declared Mr. Maduro the winner. A wave of repression followed the vote and forced Ms. Machado to go into hiding inside Venezuela. She continued campaigning for democracy while in hiding.
In December, as the Trump administration was finalizing plans to capture Mr. Maduro, Ms. Machado decided to leave Venezuela to collect the Nobel Prize. Her risky, clandestine journey from Venezuela to Norway electrified supporters, increased her global fame and cemented her reputation for personal courage.
But the decision to go into exile carried political costs that have become apparent after Mr. Trump settled on working with the remnants of Mr. Maduro’s government rather than prioritizing elections, which current polls show Ms. Machado would comfortably win.
Ms. Machado said last month that elections in Venezuela could happen as early as next year. But Mr. Rubio and the Rodríguez administration are discussing a longer time frame, with the vote potentially taking place in the second half of 2027, according to people close to the Venezuelan government. The people said Mr. Rubio has made it clear that Washington needs to see a democratically elected president in Venezuela before Mr. Trump leaves office in early 2029.
Ms. Machado has sought a bigger role in Washington’s calculations by ingratiating herself with Mr. Trump, including the extraordinary gesture of presenting him with her Nobel Prize at the White House in January, a move that bewildered the prize’s organizers. But the flattery has so far brought limited benefits.
In the months before Mr. Maduro’s capture, various White House officials grew increasingly frustrated by the inaccurate assessments from Ms. Machado’s team about the fractures inside the Venezuelan government. Some officials, and people close to Mr. Trump, also disliked her uncompromising political agenda, which ruled out any negotiations with Mr. Maduro’s political movement, known as Chavismo, according to people familiar with the matter.
When Mr. Trump decided to highlight the impact of the Venezuelan military operation during his State of the Union address last month, he chose to invite Enrique Márquez, a centrist Venezuelan politician who had been freed from a Caracas prison after Mr. Maduro’s downfall. He did not extend an invitation to Ms. Machado, the people familiar with the matter said.
Ms. Machado received various invitations for the speech from members of Congress, but decided not to accept because the offer did not come directly from the president, the people said.
Mr. Trump’s decision to spotlight Mr. Márquez is part of a wider effort by some members of his administration to broaden their engagement with Venezuela’s opposition beyond Ms. Machado, the people said.
Ms. Machado won 93 percent of the votes in the last primary held by the Venezuelan opposition in 2023. But her uncompromising agenda has also alienated most of Venezuela’s political, economic and military elites, a factor that proved decisive to the Trump administration’s decision to pick Ms. Rodríguez over her to lead the transition.
“People like to say ‘the opposition’; the opposition is very diverse,” Mr. Rubio said referring to Venezuela at a Senate hearing in January, weeks after Mr. Maduro’s downfall. “There are members of the opposition that were once part of Chavismo and turned against it. There are members of the opposition that have never been Chavistas, like María Corina Machado, and have been very forceful against it.”
“That broad sector has to be represented,” Mr. Rubio added.
Some members of Ms. Machado’s team have long used her overwhelming primary victory to discredit opposition politicians outside her movement, accusing them of being sellouts.
Mr. Márquez’s appearance in Washington last month provoked a similar response.
Days after the State of the Union address, one of Ms. Machado’s closest advisers, Magalli Meda, posted a political cartoon depicting a forlorn Ms. Machado in the background, as Mr. Trump summons an image of Mr. Márquez with a wand out of a magician’s hat.
The post raised eyebrows among some Trump administration officials.
On March 1, Ms. Machado announced that she intended to return to Venezuela to lead a “new and gigantic electoral victory.”
“I’m going to return to Venezuela in a few weeks,” Ms. Machado said in a video message posted on social media. “I want to do the same as what is desired by hundreds of thousands of exiled Venezuelans across the entire world.”
It is unclear when she intends to travel or if the meeting with Mr. Trump has affected her plans.
On Tuesday, Ms. Machado arrived in Chile to attend the inauguration of the country’s new right-wing president, José Antonio Kast, who campaigned on a promise to deport Venezuelan migrants from the country.
Patricia Mazzei contributed reporting from Miami and Robert Jimison from Washington.
Anatoly Kurmanaev covers Venezuela and its interim government.
Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
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