President Donald Trump on Friday praised Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado while explaining more of his reasoning for not backing her to lead Venezuela after the ouster of Nicolás Maduro.
“Well, if you ever remember a place called Iraq where everybody was fired, every single person, the police, the generals, everybody was fired, and they ended up being ISIS,” Trump told reporters while leaving the White House for Florida. “So, I remember that.”
Trump previously said that Machado lacked the respect of her people to lead the country.
Trump spoke positively about his meeting with Machado on Thursday, where she presented him with her Nobel Peace Prize medal. “But I’ll tell you, I had a great meeting yesterday by a person who I have a lot of respect for, and she has respect, obviously, for me and our country, and she gave me her Nobel prize,” Trump said.
Asked why he would want someone else’s prize, Trump said, “Well, she offered it to me. I thought it was very nice. She said, you know, ‘You’ve ended eight wars, and nobody deserves this prize more than, in history, than you do.’ And I thought it was a very nice gesture and, by the way, I think she’s a very fine woman, and we’ll be talking again,” he said.