Trump says he will meet Machado — and would accept Nobel Peace Prize from her

President Donald Trump said he will meet with Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado next week — and that he would accept the award she has said she wants to share with him.

“I understand she’s coming in next week sometime, and I look forward to saying hello to her,” the president said of the Venezuelan opposition leader during an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity that aired Thursday. Trump added that he heard Machado wants to give him the prize, “and that would be a great honor.”

On Friday, the United States and Venezuela took halting first steps toward a resumption of diplomacy. A delegation of Venezuelan diplomats is expected to arrive in Washington in the coming days, according to a statement by the Venezuelan government. And on Friday, diplomatic and security staff from the U.S. Venezuela Affairs Unit — including John McNamara, the interim chargé d’affaires — traveled to Caracas, according to a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel movements in a fluid security environment.

The Venezuelan delegation and U.S. diplomats will discuss how the diplomatic missions in both countries can be reestablished after “the aggression and the kidnapping of the President of the Republic and the First Lady,” the Venezuelan government said in a statement, referring to the capture by the U.S. of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores.

It is unclear whether the newly sworn in interim President Delcy Rodríguez would be part of the Venezuelan delegation arriving in Washington, D.C.

The White House on Friday morning did not provide details about Machado’s trip or specify what issues she and Trump would discuss.

In an interview with Hannity this week in which she heaped praise on Trump, Machado said she had not spoken to the U.S. president since October, when she was announced as the latest Nobel laureate.

She had been in hiding in Venezuela during President Nicolás Maduro’s last days in power and turned up in Oslo, where her daughter accepted the prize on her behalf. But she promised to return to her country and called for elections to replace Maduro.

“But I do want to say today, on behalf of the Venezuelan people, how grateful we are for [Trump’s] courageous mission,” Machado said on Hannity’s show this week, adding that she and the Venezuelan people want to “share” the prize with Trump after the U.S. military seized Maduro and his wife and brought them to New York to stand trial on narco-terrorism charges.

Trump has openly coveted and publicly lobbied for the Nobel Peace Prize, claiming to have “solved” a number of international conflicts. Several world leaders have backed his claims.

Machado, a former National Assembly member, won the opposition primary in Venezuela two years ago but was barred from running by Maduro in the general election. Maduro claimed victory over the candidate Machado backed, but ballot audits by The Washington Post and independent monitors show the reported election result was invalid.

Following the U.S. operation to arrest Maduro on Saturday, Trump said the U.S. would “run” Venezuela with the cooperation of Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president, who has become the country’s acting leader. Trump has not given a timeline for when elections would be held and said he did not believe Machado had the support to run the country after Maduro’s removal.

“I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader,” Trump told reporters last weekend. “She doesn’t have the support within, or the respect within, the country. She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect.”

Two people close to the White House previously told The Post that Trump was not willing to support Machado because she accepted the Peace Prize. “If she had turned it down and said, ‘I can’t accept it because it’s Donald Trump’s,’ she’d be the president of Venezuela today,” one of the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation.

Machado told Hannity she believed that if elections were held, she would win the presidency in a landslide.

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John Hudson contributed to this report.