Francisco Rodríguez

anything of what Trump has done up until now, including the stigmatization of Venezuelan immigrants, the deportation of Venezuelans, for example, to El Salvador, to a jail where there's strong evidence that Venezuelans were subject to torture and inhumane treatments, the blowing up of boats in the Caribbean, which many, myself included, characterize as extrajudicial executions.

And all of these are leading to questions in the opposition where people are saying, well, was this the right strategy?

Did we want to get so close to the Republicans and to the Trump movement?

And haven't we alienated many other international actors and many national actors?

So people are now thinking, well, was this strategy right?

And what happens is something that happens a lot in politics.

There's this saying that nothing succeeds like success.

Well, I think the corollary of that is nothing fails like failure.

So the moment in which it becomes clear that your bid to take power did not work, if that's the case, is the moment when everybody starts questioning whether what you did was right.

Well, right.

I mean, that is the moment at which this whole attempt becomes the focus of significant criticism, because what we've seen also Machado do over the past week is to maintain her attempt to try to appeal to President Trump.

And in fact, there's a meeting that's planned for

later this week between them, so we'll have to see what comes out of that meeting.

But she's also insisted that one of the things that she wants to do is share her Nobel Peace Prize with Donald Trump, something that even led the Nobel Committee to issue a very unusual statement where they clarified that a Nobel Prize cannot be revoked, shared, or transferred to another recipient.

So if any of this works, then I think, well, people will, of course, be happy if Trump changes his position and says, well, yes, Maria Corina has to lead the transition.

Or what I think many people would be hoping now would be that Trump would say, well, the next step is that you have to have elections and that you have to have elections soon and they have to be free and fair elections.

And there, Maria Corina Machado can run just as any other candidate.

If Venezuelans see that light at the end of the tunnel, then I think that this can still play well in her favor.

But if what we see is a continuation of the current strategy by President Trump, including the idea that the election has to be delayed for an indefinite amount of time, President Trump actually said just a few days ago that Venezuelans wouldn't know how to have an election.

So that suggests that his view is one in which this process is going to occur very much in the long term.