Darren J. Beattie

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?

It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Donald J. Trump ran his insurgency presidential campaign against the coordinated opposition of every single powerful institution in the Western world. The single decisive factor working in Trump’s favor was his ability to appeal to the millions of ‘forgotten’ Americans who felt particularly ill-served by these institutions. Trump’s shock victory was therefore simultaneously a stinging indictment of America’s elite institutions and a surprising vindication of the functional legitimacy of our democracy. After all, if a candidate is able to win in spite of near-unanimous opposition of a country’s elite institutions, this says something reassuring about the workings of democracy per se.