President Donald Trump will keep the Nobel Peace Prize medal offered to him Thursday by Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, a senior White House official told NOTUS.
The gift was given during a more than two-hour meeting between the two leaders at the White House Thursday afternoon, part of an extraordinary bid to win his sympathies and shape the future of her country.
Speaking to a massive crowd outside the Capitol after meeting with lawmakers following her trip to the White House, Machado said she told Trump a story of another medal: this one given by General Marquis de Lafayette, a Revolutionary War hero, to South American military leader and statesman Simón Bolívar. She said it became a symbol of “brotherhood” between the people of the U.S. and Venezuela, and expressed hope that giving up her Nobel Peace Prize would go down in history as a similar gesture.