US President Donald Trump will host Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Corina Machado on Thursday at the White House, a senior administration official told AFP.<\/p>\n
Machado has so far been sidelined by Washington after US forces seized then-president Nicolas Maduro on January 3, with Trump’s administration claiming it would be “running” Venezuela.<\/p>\n
Hours after deposing Maduro, Trump said Machado lacked the “respect” necessary to run the country, even though in the run-up to the last election in Venezuela the United States backed her and her proxy candidate for president.<\/p>\n
The Trump administration has been working with Maduro’s former deputy, Delcy Rodriguez, who is now Venezuela’s interim president.<\/p>\n
Since Maduro’s ouster, Machado has heaped praise on Trump, and has offered to give him her Nobel Peace Prize, an award the US president has long publicly coveted.<\/p>\n
Speaking last week, Trump said it would be “a great honor” to accept the gift. The Nobel Institute has said the prize cannot be transferred from one person to another.<\/p>\n
On Monday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended Washington’s policy of dealing with Rodriguez rather than the opposition represented by Machado.<\/p>\n
“President Trump and his national security team made a realistic assessment of the reality on the ground in Venezuela, and that decision has turned out to be a good one,” she told Fox News.<\/p>\n
Leavitt said Washington had had “complete cooperation” from Venezuelan authorities, including on US seizures of oil.<\/p>\n
Trump has repeatedly said that the United States will be dictating how Venezuela is run after Maduro’s ouster, a characterization that interim President Rodriguez has denied.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
US President Donald Trump will host Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Corina Machado on Thursday at the White House, a senior administration official told AFP. Machado has so far been sidelined by Washington after US forces seized then-president Nicolas Maduro on January 3, with Trump’s administration claiming it would be “running” …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":966,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=964"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/964\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":968,"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/964\/revisions\/968"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}