For someone with “a hyper-fixation” about winning the Nobel Peace Prize, as an advisor put it, Donald Trump sure is going about it all wrong in his second spin as president and purported peacemaker.
Just as Neville Chamberlain didn’t get the award after appeasing Adolf Hitler by ceding the Sudetenland — “peace for our time,” the British prime minister declared, just a year before Germany next rolled into Poland to spark World War II — Trump won’t win a Nobel should he broker “peace” in Ukraine on the terms he’s lately gifted to its invader, Russia’s Vladimir Putin. And just as in 1939, Poland could be the emboldened aggressor’s next target, and not the last.
Nor would Trump be feted at some future Oslo award ceremony if he realizes his vision of peace in the Middle East: the ethnic cleansing of 1.8 million Palestinians from Gaza, to who-knows-where, so Americans can create a second “Riviera” — with the help of U.S. troops if the region doesn’t capitulate.
Opinion Columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
“The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too,” Trump proclaimed at a White House news conference Feb. 4. “We’ll make sure that it’s done world-class.” Just not for the Gazans who call it home.
The president spoke as he stood beside a grinning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the man responsible for turning Gaza into what Trump calls a “demolition site” primed for development. Minutes before Trump proposed “permanently” displacing Gazans — a violation of international law — he had fielded a question about whether he might nab the coveted Nobel for a separate Israeli-Hamas hostage deal (which former President Biden initiated).
“I deserve it,” he replied. “But they will never give it to me.”
Trump’s answer reflects his tiresome grievance that, as with the 2020 election, he only loses because a game is rigged against him. The proximate culprit apparently is a committee elected by Norway’s parliament, which culls thousands of nominations from around the world. But it seems simply a stand-in for dastardly globalists in general, in Trump’s view.
His pining for the prize is long-standing. Trump groused throughout his first term about his supposed snub, telling the Future Farmers of America in 2018, “They probably will never give it to me.” At the southern border in 2019, he boasted that Japan’s leader believed Trump should get the peace prize for his outreach to nuclear-armed North Korea; ultimately, Trump came away with dictator Kim Jong Un’s “love letters,” and Kim with more nukes than before. (According to Japan’s national newspaper, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe nominated Trump at the Trump administration’s request. “I’m not saying it’s not true,” Abe responded.)
And repeatedly during his 2024 campaign, Trump whined at rallies that he was more deserving than “Barack Hussein Obama,” who won the peace prize early in his presidency. Even Obama acknowledged his award was premature. To understand the Nobel committee’s thinking requires a recall of how damaged America’s global brand had become under President George W. Bush — after the Iraq invasion (based on a lie about weapons of mass destruction), CIA “black sites,” alleged torture, the horrific photos from Abu Ghraib and go-it-alone diplomacy overall.
The 2009 Nobel announcement recognized Obama, if mostly prospectively, for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy,” his advocacy of nuclear nonproliferation, international institutions, democracy and human rights, and his push for “a more constructive role” for the United States on climate change.
None of that applies to Trump.
Sycophants echo his I-wuz-robbed aggrievement. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who recently met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, on Tuesday told Fox News that Trump could win the peace prize for his efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war — “if it were fairly awarded.” On Friday, at a conservative gathering, national security advisor Mike Waltz predicted Trump would receive the prize because his is “the presidency of peace.”
Give us a break. It’s hardly going out on a limb to suggest that the Nobel panel would not see Trump’s machinations — in Ukraine, the Middle East or just generally in undoing the 80-year-old international order that America built after two world wars — in keeping with the ideals of prize creator Alfred Nobel, a 19th century chemist and entrepreneur.
On the same day that Bessent mused about Trump the Nobel laureate, Trump blamed Ukraine for its own invasion by Russia exactly three years ago. Ukraine — Zelensky specifically — “should have never started it,” Trump told reporters, parroting Putin. For days he condemned the democratically elected Zelensky — not Putin — as the “dictator” in this bloody drama.
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev gleefully posted: “If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US President, I would have laughed out loud.” Just what the world needs: Tyrants in Russia yukking it up along with those in China, North Korea and Iran, at democratic nations’ expense.
Last week, Trump’s negotiators met with Putin’s in Saudi Arabia, leaving Ukraine and European allies steaming on the sidelines, their fates on the table in Riyadh. Going in, the self-described artist of the deal gave Putin all he sought: renewed contact with the U.S., Ukrainian land Russia has seized and U.S. opposition to Ukraine joining NATO. Meanwhile, administration officials conveyed to Ukraine Trump’s demand for a half-share of its mineral wealth in return for past U.S. support.
Vice President JD Vance is busily aping the boss, denigrating Zelensky and scolding longtime European allies (in Munich, site of Chamberlain’s shame) for not embracing the continent’s far-right parties. But Trump’s former vice president was among the few Republicans objecting. Mike Pence posted on Wednesday: “Mr. President, Ukraine did not ‘start’ this war. Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. The Road to Peace must be built on the Truth.”
Truth: It’s also the road to the peace prize. For Trump, that’s the road not taken.
@jackiekcalmes
