Power, Recognition, and the Politics of Spite
Trump doesn’t govern toward outcomes — he governs away from perceived slights. Policy is rarely the point. Narrative ownership is. If he can’t author the story, he’d rather burn the page than share the byline. And María Corina Machado is precisely the kind of figure who breaks his preferred grammar of power. She represents legitimacy that isn’t transactional. Authority that can’t be bullied, bought, or branded. Moral capital that accumulates quietly — the kind that doesn’t shout, doesn’t posture, and therefore can’t be drowned out by volume. That alone is destabilizing to a man whose entire political method relies on noise as proof of truth. The Nobel fixation matters here, and pretending otherwise is willful blindness. Trump doesn’t just resent elites — he resents recognition he didn’t receive. The Nobel isn’t dismissed because it’s meaningless; it’s dismissed because it didn’t choose him. And so when Machado occupies that space — restraint over dominance, persistence over specta...
