President Donald Trump has lost out on the Nobel Peace Prize after the Norwegian committee responsible for awarding the honor chose Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado instead.
Trump has long lobbied for the prize and had hoped his role in the Israel-Hamas ceasefire agreement struck earlier this week might finally have clinched it for him.
Excitable members of the president’s MAGA coalition, led by his son Eric Trump, had called for him to be rewarded for his efforts in seeking to bring peace to Gaza, with more than one claiming the deal was so significant that the entire prize should be renamed after him in place of founder Alfred Nobel.
But Trump himself did not dare get his hopes up, giving a cagey answer when he was asked about his prospects by a reporter at the White House on Wednesday.
“I have no idea,” he answered her. “I mean, look, I did settle – Marco [Rubio] will tell you – we did settle seven wars. We’re close to settling an eighth and I think we’ll end up settling the Russia situation, which is horrible… I think we’ll settle that so… I don’t think anybody in history has settled that many but perhaps they’ll find a reason not to give it to me.”
Asle Toje, deputy leader of the Nobel committee, had already signaled that Trump might not get it by suggesting that his aggressive campaigning for the accolade might count against him.
“These types of influence campaigns have a rather more negative effect than a positive one,” Toje said. “Because we talk about it on the committee. Some candidates push for it really hard, and we do not like it.”
Had Trump been victorious, he would have been the fifth American president to receive the prize, following Theodore Roosevelt (1906), Woodrow Wilson (1919), Jimmy Carter (2002), and, most importantly for the current commander-in-chief, Barack Obama (2009).
Obama was given his prize in his first year in office for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” the committee said at the time.
Trump is thought to have long envied Obama’s popularity, and many point to the former Illinois senator’s mocking him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April 2011 over his “birther” conspiracy theory, which wrongly alleged that the 44th president was not eligible to serve because he was not born in the U.S, as still sticking in the president’s craw.
Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii.
While other political enemies have come and gone since the Trumps succeeded the Obamas in the White House in January 2017 – Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris – the Republican has continued to stew over his rival, not least over his Nobel Prize win.
Speaking to The New York Times this March, Trump’s estranged former national security adviser John Bolton claimed that the president “saw that Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize and felt if Obama got it for not doing anything, why should he not get it?” Trump has certainly griped to that effect in many of his speeches and rally addresses over the years.
When Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard announced a spurious investigation into Obama-era intelligence officials in July, Trump responded by posting an AI video of his predecessor being sent to prison, a wish-fulfilment fantasy in which Obama is imagined pacing a dank jail cell wearing an orange jumpsuit.
Former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, in an op-ed for MSNBC, argued that the video amounted to “a projection of everything Trump fears and envies about his predecessor: Obama’s grace, intellect, global stature and, most of all, the fact that Obama’s very presence in the White House redefined what power could look like in America.”
He continued: “It’s clear that Obama has been living in Trump’s head rent-free for the last two decades. Some think he first ran for president because Obama made fun of him at the White House Correspondents Association dinner. He mistakenly called Biden by Obama’s name multiple times while campaigning, once even saying he beat Obama in 2016. He’s even claimed he is healthier than Obama.
“Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize? Trump spends years obsessing about winning it himself. Obama passes a historic healthcare law? Trump makes it his top priority to overturn it.”
