Wait, Does Trump Really Think He Won A Nobel Peace Prize?

On Monday, U.S. President Donald Trump chose to spend one of his remaining days in office tweeting what is essentially a campaign video for an election he lost two months ago. It depicts his accomplishments while in office, including his appointment of Supreme Court judges, the many executive orders he’s signed, and of course the admiration of the beautiful boaters.

But in one segment of the video where Trump alleges he stands for peace, there appears to be a Nobel Peace Prize insignia superimposed over photos of Trump at the White House ceremony for the Abraham Accords. And while that agreement did help broker normalized relations between Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel, it did not win Trump the Nobel Peace Prize — though perhaps he believes it did?

While we know that delusions of grandeur are kind of Trump’s thing, this particular fantasy is one that has repeatedly resurfaced over his time in office. However, just like Trump's suggestion that his face be added to the Mt. Rushmore monument, his delusions are just that — delusions, not based in any reality.

Despite the fact that the lame duck president has never won a Nobel Peace Prize (and likely never will), Trump has maintained a strange relationship with the humanitarian honour, as he has with the notion of peace in general, since at least 2018. He has repeatedly raised the prospect of being deserving of the accolade. In 2018, the Norwegian Nobel Committee discovered that an unknown American pretended to be a qualified nominator in order to put Trump up for the esteemed recognition for his “ideology of peace through force,” reports New York Magazine. This was followed by the White House reportedly asking former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe to nominate Trump for the award in 2019. In 2020, far-right Norwegian lawmaker Christian Tybring-Gjedde nominated the outgoing president. 

And finally, this year, the White House released a statement in September announcing that Trump had been nominated for his role in the Abraham Accords — again put forward by Tybring-Gjedde. Around the time of this announcement, Trump complained at a Pennsylvania campaign rally that the “fake news never even” covered his two Nobel prize wins which do not exist.

Given his apparent need to celebrate himself and his achievements – real or fake – we don’t anticipate Trump’s faux campaign videos to simply end when he leaves the White House next month. But we do relish in the fact that in mere weeks, we will no longer feel any obligation to pay attention to his political fantasies.