President Donald Trump’s supporters regularly pursue his favor by prostrating themselves in appearances on his favorite Fox News shows. Supplicants to this “audience of one” have sought everything from pardons to jobs to policy changes to contracts. 

But new ground was broken on Monday night as Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado made her case to lead that country after the U.S. overthrew its dictator, Nicolás Maduro, in a Fox interview with Trumpist mouthpiece Sean Hannity. As she made her appeal, she threw in an offer to give Trump her Nobel Peace Prize, which he covets.

Machado, a favorite among the U.S. right whom the Maduro regime barred from running in the 2024 presidential election, was giving her first televised interview since U.S. forces seized Maduro and his wife, who now face drug charges in New York. Trump subsequently declared that the U.S. is “in charge” of Venezuela but has not moved to uproot the regime and install Machado or her allies; on Monday, Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president, was sworn in as interim president. 

Trump’s “lack of interest in boosting Machado,” The Washington Post reported Sunday, “stemmed from her decision to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, an award the president has openly coveted.” The Post quoted a person “close to the White House” who claimed: “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.”

Machado’s appearance on Hannity’s show the next night gave her an opportunity to change the president’s mind — a chance she apparently hasn’t had otherwise, as she told the host she hadn’t spoken to Trump since “October 10, the same day the prize was announced.” 

Hannity, for his part, seemed to be in Machado’s camp, stressing in his introduction that she was “making headlines” as a potential Maduro successor and had repeatedly praised Trump and “thanked President Trump and his support and commended his resolve to help the people of Venezuela many, many times publicly and on X and elsewhere.”

The Fox host subsequently asked Machado to discuss how she had dedicated the Nobel Peace Prize to Trump, which he noted was “not very usual.” She replied by showering the president with praise, saying that Trump had “deserved” to win it and does so even more now. 

“I do want to say today, on behalf of the Venezuelan people, how grateful we are for his courageous vision, the actions, historical actions he has taken against this narco-terrorist regime to start dismantling this structure and bringing Maduro to justice,” she explained. 

Hannity remained fixated on the subject, which apparently matters most to his most powerful viewer. 

“Did you at any point offer to give him the Nobel Peace Prize? Did that actually happen?” he asked Machado. “I had read that somewhere. I wasn't sure if it was true.”

“Well, it hasn't happened yet, but I certainly would love to be able to personally tell him that we believe the Venezuelan people -- because this is a prize of the Venezuelan people — certainly want to give it to him and share it with him,” she replied. 

Machado went on to make her pitch for what a “free Venezuela” — presumably under her leadership — could achieve. Hitting talking points that seemed geared toward appealing to Trump, she said the country would be a “security ally” of the United States that would dismantle “the criminal hub of the Americas,” become the “energy hub of the Americas” by providing “security to foreign investment,” and “bring millions of Venezuelans that have been forced to flee our country back home.” 

Hannity added that she had previously “offered reparations to Laken Riley's family and other families that have lost loved ones because of Tren de Aragua.”

Machado also took swings at Rodríguez, whom she described as “one of the main architects of torture, persecution, corruption, narco-trafficking” and the “main ally and liaison with Russia, China, Iran.” She added that Rodríguez is “certainly not an individual that could be, you know, trusted by international investors.”

“We won an election by a landslide under fraudulent conditions,” she concluded. “In free and fair elections, we will win with -- by over 90 percent of the votes. I have no doubt about it.”

Machado refrained from invoking another talking point she has previously deployed to try to win Trump’s support — that Venezuela “rigged” the 2020 U.S. election. Fox paid out an $787.5 million settlement in 2023 and faces another $2.7 billion lawsuit stemming from its past promotion of this debunked conspiracy theory 

Will the “free and fair elections” Machado says she would dominate actually happen any time soon? No one in the administration seems that interested in bringing them about — but the power of the Fox-Trump feedback loop is that the agenda can swiftly change in response to a single Fox segment.