If there were any remaining doubt that President Donald Trump was the most pick-me president the country has ever seen, it should be dispelled by his preposterous cold call to Norwegian Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg to beg for help getting the Nobel Peace Prize.
On Thursday, Politico Europe reported that Trump made the call out of the blue last month, ostensibly to talk about his tariffs, but he also used the opportunity to make his plea for the Nobel Peace Prize. He even had high-level officials on the call—because apparently Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer don’t have anything else to focus on.
President Donald Trump with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been charged with war crimes.
And this wasn’t even the first time that Trump has buttonholed Stoltenberg about this. It’s not clear why Trump thinks pestering Norwegian politicians is the pathway to the prize, given that the Nobel selection committee—not elected officials—chooses the winner. Perhaps he just can’t conceive of a world where a country’s leader is unable to threaten or fire everyone to get his way. But the Nobel selection committee is deliberately insulated from government pressure. No current government officials can sit on the committee.
Trump has been nominated for the Nobel prize largely by foreign leaders who have realized that they can manipulate him with flattery. Leading the way is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has literally been charged with war crimes.
During a White House visit with Netanyahu in February, Trump whined about not getting the Nobel prize while discussing how Israel would forcibly relocate all Gazans. How peaceful!
Cambodia’s prime minister also did some sucking up, saying that Trump deserves the award for his phone call to the leaders of Thailand and Cambodia, which ended heavy fighting between the two countries. Yes, just a phone call. Real heavy lift there.
It’s not clear if Trump even understands the Nobel Peace Prize process. The deadline for 2025 nominations was Jan. 31, and any nominations received after that are considered for the following year. So Trump can wave around these nominations all he wants, but it doesn’t do any good for 2025. Come December, we’ll have to hear him whine about not winning this year. And then we’ll have to do it all over again throughout 2026.
Trump’s latest bid for Nobel attention is bringing Russian President Vladimir Putin to Alaska to discuss a ceasefire in Ukraine. Given that the last time Trump met with Putin he sided with the Russian dictator rather than U.S. intelligence services—and the fact that he blames Ukraine for starting the war—it’s unclear how he would improve the “fraternity among nations” required to win the prize.
Also, it appears that his big peace solution might be giving Russia access to valuable Alaskan and Ukrainian minerals, which does not actually seem like a peaceful deal for anyone except Russia.
But the Nobel Peace Prize isn’t the only award Trump is thirsting for.
Trade counselor Peter Navarro thinks that Trump should get the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences because he “basically taught the world trade economics” for his “fundamental restructuring of the international trade environment in a way where the biggest market in the world has said, ‘You’re not going to cheat us anymore. We’re going to have fair deals.’”
Sure, that award has always gone to people with PhDs in economics or related fields, for complex things like “methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships” and “analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity.” But what are those accomplishments in the face of Trump’s economic wizardry, which consists of randomly imposing and retracting tariffs and crashing the economy?
President Donald Trump at a casting call for “The Apprentice” in 2004.
Of course, Navarro also thinks that tariffs are tax cuts, so it’s no wonder that he thinks Trump is a genius for starting a trade war with the rest of the world.
Trump is also fairly confident that he deserves to be a Kennedy Center honoree, a designation that’s given to people who’ve made significant contributions in the performing arts. When rolling out his terrible slate of his honorees recently, he groused that he’d never been named one.
Does he really think hosting “The Apprentice” was a valuable contribution to U.S. culture? Oh, God. He probably does.
Trump would be thirsting for the Nobel Peace Prize no matter what, because he’s just a thin-skinned baby who needs constant reassurance that he’s the greatest. But he’s also driven by the fact that President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize—a fact that Trump simply cannot stand.
Trump is used to throwing out every threat at his disposal and getting his way. But he can’t bully his way into the Nobel Peace Prize, and that’s absolutely killing him.
Good.