President Donald Trump’s extraordinary public lobbying campaign for a Nobel Peace Prize hasn’t proven very convincing.
A Washington Post-Ipsos poll last month showed even about half of Republicans said Trump didn’t deserve one. Just 22% of Americans overall said that he did.
But on Wednesday a Trump Nobel suddenly became more plausible with the announcement of a phase-one ceasefire deal in Gaza.
Much remains to be ironed out, and time will tell how successful it is. The news also didn’t seem to arrive in time for this year’s prize announcement, which happens to be Friday.
But even some nonpartisan foreign policy experts and Trump critics are starting to take the possibility more seriously, albeit for next year.
“If the peace plan moves forward, Mr. Trump may have as legitimate a claim to that Nobel as the four American presidents who have won the peace prize in the past,” longtime New York Times national security reporter David Sanger wrote, “though with less bombast and lobbying.”
Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, meanwhile, said Thursday that he would lead the effort to give Trump a Nobel if Trump ended the wars in both Gaza and Ukraine.
Even as all that was happening, though, we got a series of reminders that Trump’s quest for a Nobel suffers from a number of deficits – of his own making.
Most notably, his legally and factually dubious efforts to crack down on the opposition in the United States and to launch extraordinary strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean might dissuade the people who judge this kind of thing from honoring him for his contributions to peace.
Imagine Trump competing for a Nobel prize even as his own country devolves into a heavy-handed deployment of the military on US soil and as Trump launches what many experts regard as extrajudicial killings that could amount to war crimes.
It’s a remarkable split-screen. And it’s worth breaking down.
The Gaza deal
There is no question that what was accomplished Wednesday was significant – and that Trump played a major role in it.
While the initial phase-one ceasefire deal didn’t include major parts of Trump’s 20-point plan, it’s clearly a major step in the right direction.
And it came after Trump took some remarkable steps. His administration has made a point to build relations with Middle Eastern leaders and make them a key part of the process. And perhaps most notably, Trump has exerted an unusual amount of pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“This cease-fire and hostage release, if it happens, only came to fruition because of Trump’s willingness to pressure Prime Minister Netanyahu,” Aaron David Miller of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told the Times. “No president, Republican or Democrat, has ever come down harder on an Israeli prime minister on issues so critically important to his politics or his country’s security interests.”
Trump’s unwieldiness and willingness to throw his weight around on the world stage in unorthodox ways have flummoxed world leaders. But the initial Gaza deal shows the potential reward side of the high-risk, high-reward approach.
Trump’s Caribbean campaign undercuts him
The Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of Trump’s Nobel campaign was in stark relief on Wednesday.
Even as Trump was marking a significant win on Gaza, we got a number of reminders that this is a president who is also leaning into what his administration has termed an “armed conflict” to justify killings in the Caribbean.
On Wednesday alone, a member of Trump’s own party suggested the administration might be killing innocent people with its boat strikes and could be plunging us towards all-out war in Venezuela. The president of Colombia offered similar warnings while suggesting his own citizens were killed by the strikes. (The White House called that allegation “baseless and reprehensible.”)
“We don’t just blow ships up,” Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky told Bloomberg TV. He added: “Some of the more skeptical among us think that maybe this is a provocation to lead to real regime change, a provocation to get the Venezuelans to react so we can then insert the military.”
Paul and another Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, voted Wednesday with nearly all Democrats to check Trump’s ability to launch the strikes. The vote failed.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro, meanwhile, said the boat strikes have opened up “a new war zone” and suggested the United States was pursuing oil rather than drug-smugglers.
Petro didn’t offer evidence of his claims and is a longtime Trump critic. But questions abound about the strikes, and the Trump administration hasn’t been forthcoming – especially about its evidence that the targets were who it has claimed they were.
The administration claims the strikes are needed to combat drug-smuggling. But generally speaking, drug boats are interdicted rather than eliminated without due process. Given the strikes have been launched outside the context of a declared war, critics note that the situation amounts to the administration claiming the authority to kill anyone it wants based on its say-so.
When a critic last month said these strikes amounted to war crimes, Vice President JD Vance responded: “I don’t give a sh*t what you call it.”
The domestic crackdown
Trump has also taken extraordinary steps to militarize the US homeland.
But it’s not just that he’s done that. It’s that he’s done it while pitching an exaggerated case that his political opponents are often violent terrorists and that certain areas of the country are under siege. He’s also skirted the legal limits of his authority to use the military domestically in multiple cases.
That all culminated over the weekend in a ruling from a judge appointed by Trump himself. The judge said Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, was illegal because the evidence showed protests there were not “significantly violent.”
The administration then attempted a workaround that the judge said appeared “to be in direct contradiction of my order.”
The judge also floated the possibility that the Trump administration was effectively trying to implement “martial law” and said its actions “risk blurring the line between civil and military federal power — to the detriment of this nation.”
Trump is also speaking openly about throwing Democrats who oppose his efforts in jail. And in speeches to military leaders and troops, he’s tried to pit them against Democrats.
All of it smacks of an authoritarian effort to dominate the internal opposition – which would be pretty discordant for a Nobel prize winner.
Trump’s broader exaggerated case for a Nobel
It’s also worth re-emphasizing in this moment that Trump’s broader campaign for a Nobel is built on vastly overstated assertion .
Gaza isn’t the only war Trump is claiming to have ended. He’s also set about in recent weeks telling anyone who will listen that he’s ended more than a half-dozen other wars, ranging from Africa to the Middle East to Asia.
This is not accurate. As CNN has reported, Trump has contributed to agreements between long-standing foes in some cases. But in others, the countries involved have downplayed the US role. And in still others, there wasn’t even an actual war taking place.
Trump has even mixed up the names of the countries he’s supposedly saved from war, leading European leaders to mock him last week.
Trump is nothing if not gifted at exaggerating his accomplishments and creating alternate, hyperbolic realities that his supporters embrace. But even this stands out for its brazenness.
And alongside everything else, it would be rather bizarre for someone who doesn’t seem to grasp his own role in ending conflicts – or lies about it – getting such a prominent award for that.