Why Donald Trump Has Never Officially Won A Nobel Peace Prize
No matter how you might feel about former president Donald Trump, the fact is he's done many things most men or women his age can only dream about. Among many other things include, being the CEO of a multimillion dollar property company with holdings that at one stage spanned the globe, and also at one stage was worth more than it is today. He's been at the helm of a highly-rated reality TV show and, perhaps most notably, he's also been President of the United States.
And while his position in history is virtually guaranteed for many reasons, there are still items on Donald Trump's bucket list that we suspect he'd like to cross off. Like a second presidential term, going after political foes like Mitch McConnell and Liz Cheney. Perhaps he will go after an Emmy win because after eight nominations for "The Apprentice," Trump ended up with no wins. Oh, and there's the Nobel Peace Prize that eluded him for at least half of his presidency. As far as we can tell and in Trump's mind, there is no difference between the Emmy and the Nobel Prize, because frankly, he thinks he should have won them both (via Vanity Fair). There was, as far as he knew, just one small problem.
"Well, [the Nobel committee will] never give it to me. We should have gotten the Emmy for 'The Apprentice,' you know?" then President Trump told the New York Post in 2018.
The 2018 Nobel Peace Prize didn't go to Trump
But getting a Nobel Peace Prize may be a bit tougher than getting an Emmy. To start, anyone can be nominated, as long as the nomination comes from a specific group of people including parliamentarians, members of government, or current heads of state as well as distinguished university professors, past winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, and members — both past and present — of the Norwegian Nobel Committee — a person also cannot nominate himself. The selection process is then done in secret (via Nobel Prize).
Donald Trump's first shot at the Nobel Peace Prize came in 2018 courtesy of Norwegian parliamentarian Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a member of what Politico described as the right-wing Progress Party. The nomination was announced after the former U.S. President met with his North Korean counterpart Kim Jong-un in Singapore, which Tybring-Gjedde hailed as "a huge and important step in the direction of the disarmament, peace and reconciliation between North and South Korea" (via Politico). The bilateral relationship was eventually set aside by the Trump administration as Kim Jong Un's government continued its short-range missile tests and its nuclear and missile programs well into the end of 2020 (via Brookings).
And the 2018 prize? That eventually went to Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad for "for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict" (via The Nobel Prize).
Trump was nominated a second time in 2020
But as we all know, quitting is for losers, and in 2020 — a year that will go down in history as the year when the world stopped because of the deadly coronavirus pandemic. In addition, there were record-setting wildfires that torched sections of the West Coast and Black Lives Matter protests that engulfed urban centers across the country (via KSAT 12). It was then that Christian Tybring-Gjedde returned with another nomination for Donald Trump — this time for trying to broker a peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (via People). "For his merit, I think he has done more trying to create peace between nations than most other Peace Prize nominees," Tybring-Gjedde had said on Fox News. He also predicted other Middle Eastern countries would take the UAE's lead and "turn the Middle East into a region of cooperation and prosperity" (via The Guardian).
Tybring-Gjedde wasn't the only European parliamentarian who expressed his support for the former U.S. president. Trump was also nominated by Swedish lawmaker Magnus Jacobsson, who had filed a joint nomination which also named the governments of Kosovo and Serbia, "for their joint work for peace and economic development, through the cooperation agreement signed in the White House" (via Fox News).
The 2020 Nobel Peace Prize didn't go to Trump
It seems that 2020 was the year Donald Trump equated being nominated for a Nobel with winning it, because during a September campaign rally, he went after NBC News for leaving the nugget off their news cycle, saying: "So I turn on NBC with Lester Holt, another beauty, and they start with a hurricane, and then they went to something, and something else, and I'm saying, 'First lady, this is getting a little embarrassing, with 20 minutes into a half-hour show, they haven't mentioned the Nobel Peace Prize,' " Trump said (via People). "And then it went through the whole show and they never mentioned [it]," he continued. "And then I got nominated for a second one and they never mentioned. And when Barack Obama, Barack Hussein Obama, got nominated, no when Barack Hussein Obama got nominated, he didn't know why he was nominated."
For the record, former President Barack Obama actually won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, and the Nobel Peace Prize for 2020 was awarded to the World Food Programme "for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas." But even this created a problem for Trump, since the United Nations-affiliated body had the same name as a Washington, D.C. nonprofit headed by Hunter Biden between 2011-2015, making the Trumps the subject of yet another round of political memes (via Politifact).