Trump vocal about desire for peace prize, anticipates Nobel political prejudice

At least four people, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have nominated President Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize this year.

Mr. Trump thinks he deserves it, and he isn’t shy about telling everyone. He also believes he won’t receive the international honor.

“I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize no matter what I do,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media last month.

In his January inaugural address, the president promised to be a peacemaker and a unifier. He has pledged to end the Russia-Ukraine war, make nuclear peace with Iran and settle the Israel-Hamas war.

In 2020, he struck the Abraham Accords, an agreement that normalized relations between Israel and other countries in the Gulf region. Mr. Trump says any one of those achievements merits the peace prize.

“I should have gotten it four or five times,” he has said.

For years, Mr. Trump has coveted the prize and questioned why others have received it. One laureate hits especially close to home: former President Barack Obama.

“If I were named ‘Obama,’ I would have had the Nobel Prize given to me in 10 seconds,” Mr. Trump said during his reelection campaign in October. “He got the Nobel Prize. He didn’t even know what the hell he got it for. Remember, he got elected. Well, so did I. He got elected, and they announced he was getting the Nobel Prize.”

The Nobel Committee awarded the prize to Mr. Obama on Oct. 9, 2009, after he had been in office less than nine months, for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” The committee cited his efforts to fight climate change and stop nuclear proliferation.

Only two other presidents have won a Nobel Peace Prize while in office. President Theodore Roosevelt won in 1906 for his effort to end the war between Japan and the Russian Empire. President Wilson won in 1919 for helping launch the League of Nations, a precursor to the United Nations, at the end of World War I.

President Carter won the award in 2002, more than 20 years after he left office, for his decades of promoting democracy and human rights and mediating disputes.

Presidential historian Craig Shirley said Mr. Trump’s accomplishments overshadow those of Wilson and Mr. Obama when they were awarded the prize.

He said the League of Nations was never that powerful, and the U.S. didn’t join it because the Senate rejected the idea over national sovereignty concerns. Mr. Shirley also noted that Mr. Obama won the award early in his presidency, with few concrete accomplishments.

“Obama won it for being Obama,” Mr. Shirley said.

Conservatives and liberals alike criticized Mr. Obama’s Peace Prize. Even Nicholas Kristof, a liberal columnist for The New York Times, called the award “premature.”

Geir Lundestad, who was secretary of the Nobel committee when Mr. Obama won the prize, later said he regretted giving it to him. He said that even Mr. Obama was shocked that he received the award and had debated skipping the ceremony because of the controversy.

“Even many of Obama’s supporters believed that the prize was a mistake,” Mr. Lundestad told The Associated Press in 2015. “In that sense, the committee didn’t achieve what it had hoped for.”

Mr. Shirley agreed that Roosevelt’s talks to end the Japan-Russia war were worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.

The betting website Oddschecker has Mr. Trump as the second favorite choice behind Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Alexei Navalny, a vocal critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin for decades. Navalny died in prison in February 2024.

The website has Mr. Trump with an implied probability of roughly 32% and Ms. Navalnaya with nearly 35%. Behind Mr. Trump are Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and climate activist Greta Thunberg, among others.

Mr. Shirley said Mr. Trump is unlikely to win the Nobel Peace Prize because of the prize committee’s bias against conservatives. In his view, the committee’s two biggest snubs in history — Gen. Douglas MacArthur for overseeing the post-World War II occupation and reconstruction of Japan, and President Reagan for ending the Cold War — were because of their conservative views. Of the four U.S. presidents who have won the Nobel Peace Prize, three were Democrats.

“No one deserved a peace prize more than Douglas MacArthur, and he was passed over because he was conservative,” he said. “There are five U.S. embassies in Israel because of Trump’s work. He implemented the Abraham Accords. He stopped a war between India and Pakistan.”

Despite the raft of nominations, some critics argue that Mr. Trump doesn’t deserve the award. They point to his inability to strike deals to end the conflicts between Israel and Hamas, or Russia and Ukraine. They say he has ignored the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip and that his bombing of nuclear sites in Iran took lives.

Five academics authored pieces in The Conversation arguing against bestowing the honor on Mr. Trump.

Emma Shortis, a professor at RMIT University in Australia, wrote that Mr. Trump is undeserving because he has “deployed the military against American citizens … threatening the United States’ traditional allies with trade wars and annexation.” She also asserted that Mr. Trump’s cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development would result in the deaths of 14 million people, including 4.5 million children, by 2030.

“Indulging Trump’s embarrassing desire for trophies might appease him for a short time. It would also strip the Nobel Peace Prize of any and all credibility while endorsing Trump’s trashing of the international rule of law,” she wrote.

The Nobel Peace Prize was first awarded in 1901. According to Alfred Nobel’s wishes, it is to be given to “the person who 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.”

Since then, 111 individuals and 31 organizations have been recognized, some more than once.

The window for nominations for the 2025 prize closed in January, and the Nobel website says a short list of winners is being prepared. The committee received 338 candidates: 244 individuals and 94 organizations.

The 2025 prize announcement is scheduled for Oct. 10 at the Norwegian Nobel Institute.

Mr. Netanyahu announced last week that he had nominated Mr. Trump for the award.

“He’s forging peace as we speak, one country and one region after the other,” Mr. Netanyahu said in his letter to the Nobel Committee, which he shared online.

Pakistan announced in June that it had nominated Mr. Trump for the honor “in recognition of his decisive diplomatic intervention and pivotal leadership during the recent India-Pakistan crisis.” The next day, however, Pakistan condemned the U.S. for bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Pakistan also is one of the many countries negotiating a trade deal with the Trump administration to avoid high tariffs.

Rep. Buddy Carter, Georgia Republican, nominated Mr. Trump “in recognition of his historic role in brokering a ceasefire between Israel and Iran” and preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Republican Reps. Darrell Issa of California and Claudia Tenney of New York also have nominated the president.

Most of these nominations were submitted after the deadline, but Anat Alon-Beck, an Israeli-born law professor at Case Western Reserve University, said she nominated Mr. Trump before the deadline.

She wrote that the nomination was for Mr. Trump’s efforts to release the hostages in Gaza, along with “standing firm against antisemitism and fostering historic agreements to bring stability to the world’s most volatile regions.”

Oleksandr Merezhko, a Ukrainian politician, said he nominated Mr. Trump in November because of his “considerable contributions to world peace.” However, he withdrew the nomination in June, saying he had lost faith that Mr. Trump could secure peace between Russia and Ukraine.

In his first term, Mr. Trump was nominated by a Finnish member of the European Parliament, a group of Australian professors, a Norwegian lawmaker and former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

The calls for Mr. Trump to receive the award have become a litmus test for the administration. Foreign leaders and domestic allies have learned it’s a sure way to get Mr. Trump’s attention.

While Mr. Netanyahu was in Washington, he presented Mr. Trump with the letter he sent to the Nobel Prize committee.

At a White House meeting Wednesday, five leaders of African countries endorsed Mr. Trump’s nomination.

“And so he is now bringing peace back to a region where that was never possible, so I believe that he does deserve a Nobel Peace Prize. That is my opinion,” said Gabonese President Brice Oligui Nguema.

He said Mr. Trump’s negotiation of a peace deal between Congo and Rwanda helped stabilize the Economic Community of Central African States.

Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye said Mr. Trump would be a worthy recipient.

Mr. Trump’s political opponents say it’s a charade.

“All of them — Netanyahu, Putin, the sultans and princes — have solved the least difficult puzzle to solve on the planet,” former Obama senior adviser David Axelrod wrote on social media. “With Trump, lavish flattery and blandishments will get you everywhere!”