President Donald Trump is obsessed with getting a Nobel Peace Prize. President Barack Obama won one—so why can’t he?
His desperation is so transparent that foreign leaders are now using it as a tool of manipulation. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on July 7 that he would nominate him. A group of African leaders followed. So did Pakistan—just one day before condemning Trump for bombing Iran. Now Cambodia’s joined in on the butt-kissing.
Officially, the prize goes to the person who, in the words of its namesake Alfred Nobel“shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
Imagine Trump, of all people, being the recipient of that.
Of course, a nomination means almost nothing. According to Snopes, hundreds of thousands of people around the world are eligible to nominate anyone—including national legislators, university professors, and more. Back in 2020, a far-right Norwegian lawmaker nominated Trump, long before self-serving world leaders figured out how to game the system to flatter him.
But Trump doesn’t care about the difference between a nomination and actually winning the esteemed prize. In 2020, he treated being nominated as a monumental achievement. Again, from Snopes:
At a rally in Minden, Nevada, on Sept. 12, Trump called the nominations “a big thing,” saying that on Sept. 11 he had been “nominated a second time for another Nobel prize,” a confusing formulation of words that muddled the fact that he was only nominated for one award, albeit by two different individuals. He touted the nomination again at a rally in Las Vegas on the following day, telling the crowd, “They nominated your president, twice last week, on two different subjects, for a Nobel prize.”
Sean Hannity, Fox News host and one of the president’s most prominent supporters, tweeted that in the space of “only one week,” Trump had been “nominated for not one, but two Nobel Peace Prizes,” the same oddly inaccurate phrasing used by the president himself.
Between Sept. 10 and Sept. 14, Trump and his campaign ran a combined total of 48 Facebook and Instagram ads touting the nominations as part of his reelection pitch to voters. Half of those ads contained a graphic with an unfortunate spelling error that read “President Trump was nominated for the Noble Peace Prize.”
So far this year, the Nobel committee has received 338 nominations for the 2025 prize. The deadline was Jan. 31. Don’t be surprised when Trump starts whining that he didn’t win, despite taking office again a mere 11 days before the deadline. And expect a repeat performance next year, too, when he is actually rejected.
But how could Trump even be in the conversation?
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He bombed Iran. He encouraged ethnic cleansing in Gaza. He’s currently threatening nuclear war against Russia. He sanctioned International Criminal Court judges. He trashed the United Nations. He gutted the U.S. Agency for International Development, which will cause millions of avoidable deathsaccording to a study by The Lancet. And somehow this is a man promoting “fraternity between nations”?
Trump wants the world to see him as a peacemaker. But he’s never created peace—only chaos. And no amount of flattery from influence-seeking foreign leaders will change that.
