There are statements that benefit from timing, and there is Donald Trump saying today that he should have won the Nobel Peace Prize “more than anybody that ever received it,” on a day when U.S. forces are conducting their second round of strikes against Iran following the collapse of the ceasefire he signed 21 days ago.
Trump made the Nobel claim, per Raw Story’s live coverage, as a response to a reporter’s question at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. He has previously won the FIFA Peace Prize in February, which is a different award given by a different organization for different reasons, and which he accepted from Gianni Infantino in a ceremony at the Kennedy Center whose name was removed by a court order in May. The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by a Norwegian committee in Oslo, has been given to figures including Malala Yousafzai, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr., and has not yet been given to a sitting president who started a war, signed a ceasefire, declared the ceasefire over, and resumed the war within 21 days.
The Nobel Peace Prize committee has not commented on his claim. The committee does not typically comment on unsolicited nominations, particularly from the nominees themselves. Trump did not specify which previous Nobel Peace Prize recipient he believes deserved it less than him, though the field includes Mandela and King, which is a comparison he presumably considered and made anyway.
The Iran war, which he described to reporters yesterday as “not even a war, it’s a military operation,” restarted Wednesday after Iran attacked commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, which had been the stated trigger the first time as well. The ceasefire signed at Versailles on June 17 lasted 21 days. The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded annually. The Iran war has now started twice in five months.
When the president who started a war, signed a peace deal, and restarted the war claims he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize more than anyone who ever received it, the Nobel committee is presumably at a loss for where to begin.
Sources
Raw Story: Critics roast Trump’s ‘completely insane’ rant about Nobel Peace Prize on Air Force One
HuffPost: Trump Makes Absolutely Wild Assertion About War He Claims To Have Ended
