Trump has openly and desperately campaigned to be given the gong, but was overlooked. The White House accused the Nobel Committee of placing “politics over peace”
The White House has blasted the Nobel Peace Prize Committee for snubbing Donald Trump.
Steven Cheung, the White House Communications Director, said the committee “proved they place politics over peace” by overlooking the US President for the honour.
“He has the heart of a humanitarian, and there will never be anyone like him who can move mountains with the sheer force of his will,” Cheung wrote on social media.
Asked about Trump’s desperate campaigning for the gong, Juergen Warne Frydnes of the Norwegian Nobel Committee said: “In the long history of the Nobel Peace Prize I think this committee has seen any type of campaign, media attention and we receive thousands of letters every year, from people wanting to say what to them means peace.
“This committee sits in a room filled with the portraits of all laureates and that room is filled with courage and integrity. We base our decision only on the work and the will of Alfred Nobel.”
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The Norwegian Nobel Committee gave the prize to María Corina Machado, a Venezuelan opposition politician, honouring her “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”
The US President has openly campaigned to be given the prize, and received a string of nominations from politicians around the world – many of whom were keen to curry favour with the world’s most powerful man.
Trump has frequently complained that predecessor Barack Obama was given the prize for “doing nothing”.
His claim to have ended seven wars as well as the Abraham Accords, agreed during his first term, were among the reasons given by Trump’s nominees – though the cutoff date for nominations was January 31st, just 11 days into his second presidency.
His open lobbying will almost certainly have worked against him, as will his extrajudicial killings of people on alleged drug boats leaving Venezuela, renaming the Department of Defence to the Department of War, and his deploying troops to US cities.
Asked about Trump’s campaigning following the announcement, Juergen Warne Frydnes of the Norwegian Nobel Committee said: “In the long history of the Nobel Peace Prize I think this committee has seen any type of campaign, media attention and we receive thousands of letters every year, from people wanting to say what to them means peace.
“This committee sits in a room filled with the portraits of all laureates and that room is filled with courage and integrity. We base our decision only on the work and the will of Alfred Nobel.”
Trump’s name was submitted in December by Republican Rep. Claudia Tenney of New York for his brokering of the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states in 2020.
Trump and his supporters are likely to view the decision to pass him over for the award as a deliberate affront, particularly after the president’s involvement in getting Israel and Hamas to initiate the first phase of ending their devastating two-year-old war.
The peace prize, first awarded in 1901, was created partly to encourage ongoing peace efforts. Alfred Nobel stipulated in his will that the prize should go to someone “who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
Three sitting U.S. presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize: Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, Woodrow Wilson in 1919 and Barack Obama in 2009. Jimmy Carter won the prize in 2002, a full two decades after leaving office. Former Vice President Al Gore received the prize in 2007.
Obama, who was a focus of Trump’s attacks well before the Republican was elected, won the prize early in his tenure as president.
“He got the prize for doing nothing,” Trump said of Obama on Thursday. “They gave it to Obama for doing absolutely nothing but destroying our country.”
As one of his reasons for deserving the award, Trump often says he has ended seven wars, though some of the conflicts the president claims to have resolved were merely tensions and his role is easing them is disputed.
But while there is hope for the end to Israel and Hamas’ war, much remains uncertain about the aspects of the broader ceasefire plan, including whether and how Hamas will disarm and who will govern Gaza. And little progress seems to have been made on the war between Russia and Ukraine, a conflict Trump claimed during the 2024 campaign that he could end in one day.