The campaign to have Trump win the Nobel Peace Prize (“ineffective”, according to Le Monde) is nothing new. But it is now – specifically this Friday – that the saga will reach its next – or final – chapter. Will the US president once again be snubbed by the Norwegian Academy, despite the lobbying and pressure? Or are we in for a surprise perhaps even greater than that of 2009, when the Nobel Committee awarded the prize to the then US president, Barack Obama, months after his inauguration? The answers are as polarised as today’s world.
“I don’t think he’ll win the Nobel Peace Prize,” counters Julien Hoez, a geopolitical analyst and editor of The French Dispatch, based in Paris. “If he’d ended a war, I’d say he deserved it, but he hasn’t ended any. It seems ridiculous to say this, but if he’d done something to deserve it, then he’d deserve it. The problem is that he hasn’t done anything to deserve it; on the contrary, he’s made everything worse, everywhere.”
Hoez is not alone in this assessment. “The idea that this deluded, undiplomatic and far-from-peaceful US president could ever be ranked alongside figures such as Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and Martin Luther King Jr. is ridiculous,” argues Peter van den Dungen, a former fellow at the Norwegian Nobel Institute, in an opinion piece published less than a month after Trump rang Jens Stoltenberg, Norway’s current finance minister and former NATO secretary-general, to discuss his claim to the Nobel Peace Prize.
Whilst that may be his wish, it is by no means certain that he will succeed, not least because the nomination period for the 2025 Nobel Prize — 338 candidates, including 94 organisations — closed on 31 January, less than two weeks after Trump’s return to the White House. This means that recent expressions of support from various leaders, such as Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel or Hun Manet of Cambodia, will only count towards the 2026 prize. Above all, the heated debates over whether or not Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize are simply another sign of the times, points out Julien Hoez.
“Politics today has become so fragmented and so rife with disinformation that people like Trump lie without any resistance,” the analyst points out. “This is the man who is mobilising troops against US citizens themselves, who renamed the Department of Defence the Department of War because the teenagers who support him prefer the way that sounds. The way he and his team behave is outrageous, and much of what he is doing now are things he said during the campaign he would not do. Has he faced any consequences? No, because people simply do not care. His supporters think he deserves everything – he deserves the Nobel Prize, to be President of France, to be President of Timbuktu – and they prefer to ignore the lies so they can continue to support him. That’s why Trump has got this far. Ultimately, it all boils down to this politics of resentment.”
Highlighting a “theatrical leader” who “often makes up facts”, José Filipe Pinto does not disagree with Hoez’s analysis, referring to the “complications” of Trump “being late to the party when it comes to the truth” (after the interview, a study by the International Centre for Journalists concluded that the now US president was the “main source of disinformation” in the country in 2024, the year he was elected). “Trump has his own take on history; he claims to have ended seven wars, even though that version is not borne out by reality,” the analyst points out. “He creates his own reality, which, for the leader of a superpower like the US, I would say is… I cannot say dangerous, but I would say it is, at the very least, complicated.”