U.S. President Donald Trump doesn’t just think a Nobel will solve the world’s Trump-inflicted problems. He believes it. He has said, quite clearly, that he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for his extraordinary labour of peace, especially in his second term.
He claims he has ended eight wars, from the Israel-Hamas War to the Israel-Iran War, the India-Pakistan War, the Thailand-Cambodia War, and the DR Congo-Rwanda War.
Can you think of anyone who has, in his words, saved millions of lives and done so much for world peace and security in the last nearly two years? And each settled war, for Trump, is the equivalent of one Nobel—eight prizes in all, yet he has been denied even one!
He’s not the only important person who thinks he has done what Napoleon could not do, and yet remains largely despised. In a meeting at the White House in January, the Venezuelan opposition leader, Marina Corina Machado, presented Trump with her 2025 Nobel Peace Prize gold medal, to right the wrong of the Nobel Committee.
Proxy medal not enough
Yet, the proxy medal has not appeased Trump. From his reaction when the Committee announced the 2026 winners in Oslo last week, the President is dying to get the real thing. That prize appears to be worth more than the combined value of Cuba, Greenland, the Strait of Hormuz, and the rash of trade tariffs.
He used bad words for the Nobel Committee, describing it as “forever discredited” and calling the members “a handful of radical ideologues who are anti-democracy and really enemies of civilisation”.
Trump also launched an attack on the prize winner, Navi Pillay, calling her a “mystery person nobody has ever heard of”.
Solicitation as strategy
Solicitation is a rare thing in the history of the Nobel. But what Trump cannot undo does not exist. In the cases of Leo Tolstoy and Albert Einstein, there were repeated third-party nominations, never a demand for the prize from the nominees or the nominators. The nomination of Adolf Hitler by a Swedish parliamentarian in 1939 was clearly a parody, and the nomination was quickly withdrawn.
This is why the 2026 Nobel Prize for Peace will go down in the records as one of a kind. Not just the laureate but the committee, the domicile country and the International Criminal Court are all in hot water because of the outrage of a sore loser.
President Trump has updated his list of “disgraced countries”, once an exclusively African collection, to include Norway, perhaps making it a list to be proud of.
Who nominated Trump?
Who nominated Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize? The Nobel Committee reportedly keeps lists of nominees and nominators confidential. It neither confirms nor denies claims during the period. Last year, U.S. Republican House of Representatives member for Florida, Anna Paulina Luna, publicly announced that she nominated the President for his self-acclaimed role in brokering the Israel-Hamas ceasefire.
Yet, the Trump-engineered ceasefire in Gaza has turned out to be a bloody campaign under a white banner. More than a year since the ceasefire came into effect on October 10, 2025, international monitoring groups and independent news analyses note that Israel has conducted daily air and drone strikes—attacking the territory on roughly 325 out of the first 361 days of the “ceasefire”.
According to data from the Gaza Ministry of Health and UN Humanitarianreports, at least 1,493 Palestinians, including women and children, have been killed. Also, about 5,299 people have been wounded during the ceasefire. While Trump covets the peace prize, Israel continues to breach the ceasefire without consequence.
Bombings, shootings, restrictions, encroachment by Israeli settlers, expropriation, theft of livestock and farm produce, and blockade of access to food and medicines in Gaza continue under the full glare of the peacemaker, Trump.
If that’s the ceasefire for which even Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif is also reported to have nominated Trump for a peace prize, then they left the Nobel Committee no chance other than simply to create a new Prize for War.
MAGA delusions
The trouble remains that the U.S., under a MAGA-shared delusion, railroaded a demagogue to the White House, and must imagine that their hysteria would press the world, including the Nobel Committee, to bestow a laurel on a gangster hero.
The dilemma of Trump and his supporters was captured in the press conference on Iran, where the U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, laid out the Middle East conflict in stark, anachronistic rhetoric. It’s a tragedy that the Trump White House is wantonly destroying the world order of peace and security and damaging institutions that the U.S. was at the forefront of building after World War I—institutions that have served the U.S. and the world well, despite their shortcomings.
The Nobel Committee recognised Pillay for “pressing states and national leaders to comply with the rule of law”, a subject in which the Trump administration has set one of the worst precedents ever. Pillay, a worthy recipient of the peace prize, had variously chaired investigations into serious human rights violations in places like Myanmar, Rwanda and Gaza—the last one an active crime scene where Trump’s policies have enabled travesties.
L’État, c’est moi
Trump didn’t stop at attacking the committee. Being the state and the grandmaster rolled into one like Louis XIV of France, he has got the U.S. to impose sanctions on the ICC; sanctions that are as doomed as his adventures in the Strait of Hormuz.
The indictment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the likely future indictment of Trump for war crimes in Gaza and Iran, respectively, by the ICC, must be upsetting for Trump, who wishes to “obliterate” every suspicion with a grand Nobel.
As he did to undermine the UN—instituting a Board of Peace filled with carefully chosen billionaire oil sheikhs—Trump might well be considering a parallel award in the class of the Nobel Prize, even if the sole objective is to award such a prize to Trump. That’s how much the president craves recognition to evade accountability.
Midterm blues? Perhaps
Unfortunately, the world is stuck with these hallucinations for the remainder of Trump’s term—which seems like an eternity. The flicker of hope that the mid-term elections might produce a Democratic majority in the U.S. Congress is tenuous. Demagogues like Trump seldom leave events to chance. The Capitol Hill invasion in January 2021 was a clear indicator that, when push comes to shove, institutional guardrails are the first casualties.
If Trump could park the world into Mar-a-Lago, or cram the seas and oceans into Trump Tower, he would have them like sausages. He would rename the Earth ‘Trump Island’ and crown himself His Imperial Majesty and the owner of Planet Earth.
His footprint speaks
Meanwhile, from Europe to the Middle East, and from Asia to Africa and North America, the world is reeling from the blows of the rash policies of this Nobel-Laureate-Wannabe, and paying the price in supply chain disruptions, rising inflation, geopolitical tensions, and worsening global misery.
It’s a joke that the current White House should think the president worthy of a peace prize, even a fake one. What does it take to call this insanity by its name?
Ishiekwene is the Editor-in-Chief of LEADERSHIP and author of the book Writing for Media and Monetising It.
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