President Trump is a winner. He has achieved phenomenal success in real estate, television and, of course, prevailed multiple times over existential opposition to attain the world’s most distinguished political office. Scarcely a year into his second term as President, he has successfully intervened to de-escalate hostilities in multiple theaters of conflict across the globe. Given this remarkable commitment to peace, one would think he would be the obvious choice to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Indeed, four other American presidents have received the Peace Prize – why wouldn’t the President who effectively ended eight wars (and counting) become the fifth?
No political cause makes the Norwegian insiders feel better than undermining Republican presidents
Alfred Nobel’s will specifies that his prize should go to the person who, in the previous year, has “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.” Another populist hero and one of the prize’s first winners, President Theodore Roosevelt, is a worthy example. Seeking long-term peace in the Pacific, where America had just acquired Hawaii and the Philippines, Roosevelt mediated peace in the Russo-Japanese War. He successfully ended a conflict that had claimed 150,000 lives, and in doing so preserved the US-Japan friendship.
President Trump’s approach to using American strength to resolve conflicts without compromising our nation’s self-respect clearly follows in Roosevelt’s example. In fact, by Alfred Nobel’s own standards, arguably no one has ever deserved the award as much as President Trump did in 2025. His whirlwind diplomatic campaign saw the President engineer ceasefires in both Gaza and Iran and a peace treaty between Armenia and Azerbaijan, while playing critical mediation roles in Africa and South Asia, and making a spirited and encouraging effort to end the Ukraine war he inherited from Joe Biden.
Alfred Nobel wanted to end and prevent wars. President Donald Trump did so. He deserved the honor and it wasn’t even close. Instead, the Norwegian Nobel Committee granted to the honor to Venezuelan opposition figure Maria Corina Machado – a courageous woman, no doubt, who graciously gave her medal to Trump in recognition of his achievements.
The Norwegians’ petulant decision to snub our President is illustrative. Whatever prestige it once carried, the Nobel Peace Prize has become a joke. Like so many other creations of Europe’s 19th century golden age, the Nobel Peace Prize is now a skin suit. It has become a way for Norwegian political insiders to ride their favorite political hobby horses. For these Norwegians, “peace” doesn’t actually mean “peace” but instead means “things that make the special interest insiders feel good.” And so we give prizes to celebrate suffocating, anti-freedom bureaucracies like the European Union (2012).
No political cause makes the Norwegian insiders feel better than undermining Republican presidents. In 2002, then Nobel Committee head Gunnar Berge admitted that they had honored Jimmy Carter as a rebuke to President George W. Bush. In 2007, Norwegians seized another chance to rebuke Bush by giving the prize to Al Gore for making a slide-show about global warming. And in an unmatched desecration of Nobel’s legacy, the committee, reportedly under considerable pressure from then Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, gave it the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to president-elect Barack Obama for nothing at all. Stoltenberg was later tapped to helm Nato.
It’s hardly surprising that such a body would refuse to honor Trump. But the Committee’s hostility goes beyond mere ideological bias. The Norwegian government has, in fact, worked to make sure that Trump would never win. In 2017, Norway’s parliament specifically rewrote the rules for the Nobel committee membership just to block the selection of Carl Hagen, a Norwegian populist whose chief offenses were opposing mass immigration into Norway and being a vocal supporter of Donald Trump.
Instead, current members of the committee include foreign policy scholar Asle Toje, who one year ago condemned Trump’s populist government as an “American Oligarchy,” and Kristin Clemet, head of the NGO Civita, who complained last May that Trump is “dismantling American democracy” and “doing everything he can to tear down the liberal and rules-based world order.” And those are the two conservative members of the committee.
In short, it is no great loss for President Trump to be denied a discredited prize. The nations that are at peace and the people who are alive today thanks to President Trump’s noble efforts speak for themselves. We might paraphrase a former secretary of the Nobel Committee and say that Trump can well do without the Nobel Peace Prize – the real question is whether the Nobel Peace Prize can do without Trump.
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