Trump’s Tacky, Desperate And Doomed Quest For The Nobel Peace Prize

Trump is a very insecure man

Trump Nobel does not deserve peace prize

By now, we all know Donald Trump didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Sad.

That honor went, instead, to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, a woman far more deserving. The Nobel Committee cited her dedication to building civil society, fighting corruption, and strengthening democracy — all of which stand as the antithesis of who Trump is and what he’s doing to America right now.

Without naming names, the Nobel committee chair Jørgen Watne Frydnes noted during a press conference that this year’s award serves as “a warning to the world” about the growing threat of authoritarianism.

He added that the precursor to peace is democracy — something of which Trump’s Project 2025–style assault on the United States is the polar opposite.

But here’s what doesn’t make sense: his loud, tacky campaign for the prize in the first place. The Nobel Committee finalized its decision two weeks ago. The award always recognizes work done in the previous year, not the current one. So either Trump didn’t know the rules (which his staff certainly should have) or he simply didn’t care — too arrogant, too self-absorbed, too stupid and too narcissistic to notice.

The real question we should be asking is why he wants the award so badly.

Recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize embody the virtues of inclusive dialogue, conflict resolution, empathy, and a sincere commitment to human dignity. Trump embodies none of these. His record is one of abuse — deploying ICE agents like the Gestapo, racializing the National Guard’s deployment against mostly Black cities under false pretenses of “rising crime,” ordering cruel deportations of both undocumented and documented immigrants (including U.S. citizens), persecuting political opponents, defying the judiciary, threatening to “buy” Greenland, and accumulating a long list of sexual assault accusations and history of racism.

If anything, his résumé reads like a fascist’s fantasy — and he’s proud to call a few of them friends.

Trump’s obsession with the prize has a simple explanation: he craves international credibility.

In the U.S., Trump is used to strongarming admiration from bodies that wont freely praise him. Look no further than what he’s done to once-respected institutions like the Kennedy Center and awards such as the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The Kennedy Center used to celebrate the best of American art and culture. The Presidential Medal of Freedom was once given to people who genuinely served the public good — athletes, scientists, artists, humanitarians. Under Trump, both became props in his personal theater of grievance. He turned the Kennedy Center into a stage for his loyalists and handed out medals to right-wing media sycophants who amplified his xenophobic talking points.

Another example of Trump’s institutional vandalism is his war on education.

For decades, conservatives have derided universities as liberal indoctrination centers that undermine the traditional (read: white) family, promote diversity, and teach science grounded in facts rather than propaganda. To authoritarians, that makes higher education a threat. It’s no coincidence that intellectuals are always among the first targets in any dictatorship.

Trump can’t literally eliminate educators outright, so he attacks them in other ways — cutting federal funding, vilifying professors, and accusing universities of antisemitism to justify politically motivated federal investigations. It’s all part of the same playbook: intimidate, defund, and delegitimize anyone who teaches people how to think critically instead of how to obey. Thing is, he actually views forced admiration as genuine respect. That is how sick in the head this man is.

Trump hates these institutions precisely because they don’t honor him. So he tries to take them over — stacking boards with loyalists who reward his authoritarianism.

He can’t do that with the Nobel Prize.

Over the past few weeks, Trump has been tyring to insert himself into the Oslo ceremony, where the awards are presnted, by lying about wars he never ended. Agent Orange desperately wanted a prime-time moment to rant about his “achievements” and air his endless grievances about why he has not been thanked enough for them, just as he does each day in U.S. media.

Thank God the committee spared us that spectacle.

Still, Trump and his MAGA minions can’t help themselves. Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) is even drafting a bill to award the sitting president a Nobel Peace Prize — apparently unaware that only the Nobel Committee has that authority. These people are unserious.

And Trump, ever the victim in his own mind, is still seething that Barack Obama received the prize early in his presidency. He’s right about one thing: Obama didn’t earn it. The committee awarded it aspirationally, hoping he’d reverse the war-driven chaos of the George W. Bush’s years. That hope didn’t fully pan out.

But here’s what Trump understands — and resents — about that moment: the prize gave Obama global credibility. Respect. Legitimacy. Something Trump will never have.

He knows the world outside his MAGA cult sees him for what he is: a racist, sexist, xenophobic, transphobic, homophobic, authoritarian demagogue. And it eats at him. He bullies his way into legitimacy at home by deploying ICE and the National Guard against U.S. cities whose leaders he despises. His loyal base of white grievance voters love it, but their approval isn’t enough to feed his ego. He needs the world to see him as legitimate — to anoint him with a veneer of international respectability that he can never earn on his own.

Any institution with real legitimacy must, in his mind, be remade in his image and under his thumb. Whether it’s the Kennedy Center, the Supreme Court, or federal agencies, Trump infects what he can’t control and undermines what he can’t own.

At the end of the day, Trump’s pursuit of a Nobel Peace Prize is nothing more than the tantrum of a man who wants validation he’ll never gain because everyone outside of his MAGA death cult knows he’s a piece of shit, insecure, wannabe dictator.

He wants the Nobel Peace Prize like a five-year-old wants a gold star for finishing their homework. The difference is that the child actually earned it.

For the next three, godforsaken years of Trump’s rule, we’ll keep hearing him whine and rage about why he “deserves” a Peace Prize he’ll never get for conflicts he never resolved. Because for Trump, it’s never been about bringing forth peace — it’s about feeding his bottomless need for credibility in a non-MAGA world that knows he has none.