特朗普的诺贝尔和平奖追逐如今沦为笑柄——这实属活该

Trump’s Nobel Prize quest is now the butt of the joke — and appropriately so

2026-10-09T19:12:48.677Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/09/politics/trump-nobel-peace-prize

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump used his status as the world’s most powerful man to effectively coerce the Nobel Peace Prize winner to give him the medal she won.

On Friday, Trump’s quixotic and often bizarre quest for his own Nobel was the butt of a joke for the latest winner, South African human rights pioneer Navi Pillay.

“If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump,” Pillay quipped to an applauding crowd.

Trump responded later Friday by re-posting a social media post from an ally who attacked Pillay and the Nobel Committee.

The indignity for Trump — and now his second straight Nobel loss since returning to office — caps what is now clearly a lost cause.

His campaign for the Nobel epitomizes the problems of his second term: He seeks personal glory, but he’s all too eager to try and take shortcuts to get there. And strewn along the path are haphazard and often counterproductive gambits.

To recap:

• He brought up the award repeatedly, effectively launching his a lobbying campaign on behalf of himself.
• His main claim for why he deserved the award — that he settled more than half a dozen wars — is simply false, as CNN has noted.
• Trump drove home how bizarre that claim was when he repeatedly misstated the names of the countries whose wars he supposedly settled.
• Trump didn’t even convince much of his own base; a Washington Post poll last year found just 22% of Americans and 49% of Republicans said he deserved the prize.
• Talk of a legitimate Trump claim to a Nobel briefly perked up when a phase-one ceasefire deal was reached in Gaza.
• But even by that point, the Trump administration was also doing something that seemed quite problematic: It was killing people — alleged drug-traffickers, it has said — without due process on the open seas. Many experts have regarded these as extrajudicial killings that could amount to war crimes.
• Also at that time, Trump had dispatched the US military to several places across the country — in some cases illegally, it turned out.
• When Trump didn’t win the Nobel last year, FIFA created its own peace prize and bestowed it on him in a transparent effort to curry favor with the president. (The ceremony was a sight to behold.)

But the whole charade really fell apart early this year.

That’s when Trump ramped up his talk about taking over Greenland. He even left open the possibility of taking it by force — effectively threatening an invasion of a NATO ally (although he later backed off that effort).

He actually did invade Venezuela to arrest Nicolás Maduro. The White House might argue this was a humanitarian mission to free the Venezuelan people of an evil, criminal dictator. But Trump left the rest of the regime in power and has since pitched the invasion as an effective seizure of Venezuelan resources (read: oil). He even summarized the operation thusly last month at the United Nations General Assembly: “To the victor belong the spoils.”

That is not a phrase associated with the average Nobel Peace Prize winner.

A couple weeks after the invasion, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado gave him her medal, apparently hoping it would convince Trump to more strongly support her cause. It has not worked.

And then Trump in February launched a war against Iran, based on inconsistent and highly suspect claims, that has much of the world crying foul. The war, which has now stretched more than seven months, almost certainly eliminated any hope Trump had of winning a Nobel.

That’s really the story here: Trump looking for his Nobel in all the wrong places — and constantly shooting himself in the foot in the process.

If the president wanted a Nobel prize, it might have behooved him to try and hue a more closely to international law and not kill people who aren’t part of an armed conflict on the high seas. He might also not want to spend time cracking down on the opposition within the US while threatening and launching foreign invasions.

And after failing to end a Russia-Ukraine war that he assured he could end on Day One of his presidency, Trump instead repeatedly exaggerated his role in ending wars. (And in some cases, they weren’t even actual wars.)

Then, when he didn’t win the Nobel last year, he got other people to give him consolation prizes – even though, in both instances, the scene only seemed to drive home Trump’s desperation.

Of course, he doesn’t seem all that worried about looking desperate. Just look at his long-running quest to put his name on things like the Kennedy Center.

He seems focused on crafting the appearance of glory without the hard work and discipline. He’ll throw his weight around in hopes of winning laurels, even if the vast majority of other people don’t view them as legitimate or deserved.

As recently as this week, Trump said it would be “a great discredit to” the Nobel Committee if he didn’t get the award.

His attitude was summed up nicely in a New York Magazine interview last month. Reporter Ben Terris asked the president about Democratic Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff’s allegation that he is pursuing his own glorification because nobody else will build monuments to him when he’s gone.

“That’s true,” Trump said. “Nobody will do it once I’m gone. When I leave here, nobody will.”