Donald Trump has spent years pursuing a Nobel Peace Prize. He hasn’t been subtle either, yearning transparently and unwaveringly, like a child pressing their nose against a sweetshop window.
The accolade had remained elusive, but now, in a twist that would be hilarious if it weren’t so dystopian, he’s ended up posing with a ‘Nobel’ anyway – not one awarded to him, but a medal handed over, willingly, by someone else.
It’s a secondhand prize for the man who only ever thinks of number one – and it is a photo-op with a dark undercurrent flowing beneath it.
Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who was disqualified from running in the 2024 Presidential election and had to flee persecution, presented Trump with her Nobel Peace Prize medal, awarded for advancing democracy in her home country, during a White House meeting.
This theatrical, tactical gesture of gratitude means that, by hook or by crook, Trump finally gets his Nobel – it’s just via a route that’s more circuitous, less illustrious, than he would have liked.
Almost immediately, the Norwegian Nobel Institute had to restate the obvious: you can give someone the physical medal, but you cannot gift them the title or the honour.
Good deeds can’t be conferred by osmosis, no matter how much someone wants a trinket to put on their mantle.
You can’t just lob the medal over and announce a new winner because it looks good on camera and just might grease a few wheels for your political aspirations.
It’s not hard to see what’s happening here.
Machado’s move is understandable in the bleakest sense. She is trying to survive by securing backing in a situation where Trump can – and is – reshaping a country’s future.
Despite her indisputable democratic mandate, Trump has shown more warmth towards the second-in-command of the leader he literally just deposed.
With her country’s safety in the balance, I can’t blame Machado reaching for whatever lever might still work.
But grand gestures can have unforeseen implications, and when democrats start offering trinkets to strongmen, strongmen learn the wrong lessons.
They learn that the world will bend itself into whatever shape their ego demands. That institutions are negotiable and legitimacy can be picked up like a souvenir.
This is the part people miss about Trump. Too many leaders treat him like a moody child – flatter him, indulge him, keep him sweet, and he’ll soften.
But Trump does not respond to flattery like a normal politician. A normal politician is pleased, then moves on. Trump banks it. He treats deference as a currency and he expects the world to keep paying so he can hoard it to his heart’s content.
If you hand him a medal, as FIFA President Gianni Infantino famously did, he doesn’t think ‘How kind.’ He thinks ‘How much more can I get?’
Which brings us back to Britain.
We’re the masters of ‘soft power’. Sometimes it’s culture, sometimes it’s diplomacy, and sometimes, if we’re honest, it’s just a bit of pomp and pageantry.
So we indulge him.
Consider Keir Starmer’s unprecedented second state invite to him. It was floated as savvy statecraft: Britain using its ‘unrivalled soft power’ to secure respect, influence, and concessions.
But it doesn’t seem to have actually got us anything. We’ve seen hints of tariffs being a bit lower here and there, but no meaningful concessions where it matters most – especially not on Ukraine.
At some point, we all started treating Trump like a king, and now he thinks he’s entitled to act like one.
And this is not just about national pride, or whether the Nobel prize’s image has been undermined. It is about what happens when leaders normalise the idea that the way to ‘manage’ an elected president is to perform fealty.
The slippery slope is real. This is how democracies get hollowed out. Not in one dramatic moment, but through a thousand little moments that go unnoticed or unopposed, until everyone forgets what politics is supposed to be.
Britain would do well to remember that power lies in being an opposing force when necessary. If Trump is transactional, then the transaction should not be ‘We’ll flatter you if you don’t hurt us’.
The transaction should be ‘We will work with you when it benefits both countries, and we will stand firm against you when it doesn’t.’
Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s new mayor, built his profile in part by framing himself in opposition to Trump – and you got the feeling that the President begrudgingly respected him for it, if their surreal show of mutual politeness in their Oval Office meeting was anything to go by.
Mamdani’s instinct was right. You don’t beat a planet-sized ego by orbiting it. You beat it by refusing to treat it as the centre of the universe.
That should be the British instinct too. No more breathless capitulation. No more treating royal invitations as bargaining chips. No more acting as though our dignity is a luxury we can’t afford.
I’m not a fantasist. I know we don’t have the world’s deadliest army, or the might of our Empire anymore (for good reason!). I know we disagree on plenty, and that those disagreements are often polarising.
But our moral core doesn’t shift. We’ve beaten tyrants before and in the face of years of Russian aggression and propaganda against an ally, our instincts haven’t shifted a millimetre.
We mustn’t give all that up for the ‘special relationship’ and endless exercises in geopolitical sycophancy.
Machado handed Trump her medal. I understand the agenda. But I can’t condone the execution.
Starmer, the UK, and Europe must take a lead and stop playing along. If we let politics become a series of offerings to one man’s vanity, we’ll lose the very greatest thing that we exported to the world and defines Britain: Democracy.
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