Venezuela’s Maria Corina Machado seems to have taken a cue from disgraced Scandinavian novelist Knut Hamsun
Donald Trump is not the first authoritarian-adjacent figure to acquire a Nobel medal that was never meant for him. In 1943, Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun sent his Nobel Prize for Literature to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels to secure an audience with Adolf Hitler. Hamsun, a genuine literary innovator and early father of modern psychological fiction, fell under Hitler’s spell and paid for it with lasting infamy.
Trump’s fixation on the Nobel Peace Prize has revived this grim precedent. Like Hamsun, he covets the prestige more than the principle. When the Nobel Committee refused to bend, a surrogate solution emerged: Venezuela’s opposition leader María Corina Machado handed Trump her Nobel medal in hopes of securing his support. The obsession endures, gold still out of reach.