Maybe the Nobel Peeve Prize.
Or perhaps the Nobel Prize for Childish Whining. Is there an award for Sheer Unmitigated Gall?
Donald Trump has spent the past half-year trying to bully his way into being granted — yes, this is actually true — the Nobel Peace Prize. This year’s laureate will be announced on Friday; it probably won’t be him. But the very fact that the US President has been working so hard to beat the committee into submission is a perfect encapsulation of his politics at home and around the world. The fact that he might succeed (whether this year, or some time before he eventually leaves office) shows just how far we’ve all fallen.
The Nobel Prize for Peace is probably the highest global honour that any person can achieve. A citizen of India might be awarded the Bharat Ratna, an American might receive the Medal of Freedom, a Briton might be granted a peerage and bling-draped membership in the Order of the Garter. But the Nobel is in a class all its own: If you win one, you’re in the company of world-historical icons like Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, and the Dalai Lama.
Which is precisely why Trump is demanding it. What do you give a billionaire who already possesses more power than anyone on the planet? One of the very few things left that can’t be bought or extorted. “I’m a very greedy person,” Trump said when first running for president (perhaps his most honest words).
This is the central fact of Trump’s quest for a Nobel, and the central fact of every action he has ever taken: It’s all about him. There is no concept of anything larger than himself. Every policy, every decision, every initiative is always based on feeding his insatiable hunger for self-gratification. It’s impossible to understand any aspect of Trump’s presidency without understanding this fundamental truth.
Four US presidents have been awarded the Nobel, and their examples are illustrative. Theodore Roosevelt won his for negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese War. Woodrow Wilson became a laureate after founding the League of Nations (the forerunner to the UN). Jimmy Carter received his Prize not only for brokering the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, but for decades of tireless humanitarian work after leaving office. None of them received the prize as a gift — they all earned it. But the final case is the one that grates most on Trump’s nerves: His immediate predecessor, Barack Obama.
Obama’s Nobel was awarded before he’d even completed nine months in office, and it would be fair to raise an eyebrow about it. Among those questioning the decision was Obama himself: “To be honest,” he said at the time, “I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honoured by this prize.” The best explanation for the choice might be that the Nobel committee was actually honouring the American voters, for what it recognised as a history-changing election. But Obama was surprised, and even a little embarrassed: He had certainly not campaigned for the Prize, let alone used the power of his office to extort it.
If Obama’s case for the award was questionable, Trump’s is downright absurd. He claims to have “solved six wars in six months”, and frequently boosts that figure to seven or eight. The actual figure is zero: None of these conflicts are anything close to “wars”, and Trump “solved” none of them. They all follow the pattern of the skirmish between India and Pakistan, which Trump claims to have “mediated”: As Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly made clear, the ceasefire was negotiated by the parties themselves (with over a dozen nations providing diplomatic assistance), and the underlying issue of Kashmir was not “mediated” by Trump in any way.
So why are presidents and prime ministers lining up to nominate him for a Nobel? The parade of sycophants includes the leaders of Pakistan, Israel, Rwanda, Cambodia and Gabon. The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan both lavished praise on Trump for ending a (largely dormant) dispute between their nations — despite the fact that he has repeatedly claimed credit not for ending their (already settled) conflict, but one between the (fictional) nation of “Aberbaijan” and the (real, but 3,000-kilometre distant) nation of Albania. Why are so many world figures humiliating themselves and their nations like this? Quite simple: Because Trump has a notoriously soft touch for flattery, and kissing up to him yields easy rewards. After nominating him, Pakistan was granted a tariff rate less than half that of India. Israel has been given lavish military aid and a free hand to pursue a campaign in Gaza that the UN Commission on Human Rights labels a “genocide”.
Set against this record of (not) solving (non-existent) wars: This is a president who has, in the past eight months alone, launched unprovoked airstrikes on two nations, killed civilians in international waters at least four times, deployed combat troops to three US cities, and (by terminating almost all American foreign aid) caused the deaths of an estimated 3,60,000 children so far (according to experts who track and quantify the real-world human impact of aid cuts), with 14 million more people projected to die needlessly in the next five years.
The Nobel Peace laureate is decided by five otherwise-ordinary Norwegian citizens, and Trump has reportedly already tried to strong-arm Norway’s finance minister to put pressure on them. The world’s wealthiest oligarchs, the CEOs of America’s largest corporations, and the leaders of most nations on Earth have already folded to him on issue after issue. But perhaps a few unpretentious Scandinavians will show greater courage and moral fortitude than the most powerful people on the planet. If the ideals of the Nobel Prize mean anything, we should all hope so.
The writer is author of Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God: Retracing the Ramayana Through India and Mullahs on the Mainframe: Islam and Modernity Among the Daudi Bohras
