“[Maria Corina] Machado doesn't have the support or the respect within the country.”

Mar-a-Lago press conference following the Maduro capture

Independent polling directly contradicts this. A nationwide face-to-face survey in late January 2026, after Maduro's capture, found Machado's opposition coalition would beat acting head of state Delcy Rodríguez 67 percent to 25 percent, and an AtlasIntel-Bloomberg poll in February 2026 found 56 percent of Venezuelans viewed Machado positively and 28 percent negatively. Machado is the most validated opposition figure in Venezuela. She won the October 2023 opposition presidential primary with nearly 93 percent of the vote to become the unity candidate, and when the Maduro regime barred her from the ballot she backed Edmundo González, and the vote counts the opposition collected from the country's election districts showed it had won the July 2024 election by a clear margin.

In October 2025, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded Machado the Nobel Peace Prize for her democratic leadership, calling her a key, unifying figure in a once-divided opposition. PolitiFact flagged Trump's dismissal of her, made while brushing off a reporter's question about whether he had spoken with her after Maduro's capture, as contradicted by the polling and documentary record.

"For her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy." — Norwegian Nobel Committee, awarding Machado the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize