US President Donald Trump has pursued a Nobel Peace Prize, citing his efforts in Ukraine as a key factor. Photo / Carolyn Van Houten, The Washington Post
President Donald Trump has long quested after a Nobel Peace Prize, a distinction that would put him in a vaunted and exclusive club.
Unlike a United States presidential campaign, winning a Nobel Peace Prize depends on an electorate of five - and Trump may not have a majority.
Trump’s desire for a Nobel has been a through-current of both of his terms, but his effort has escalated in recent months.
He has mused aloud that the peace deal in Ukraine that he worked on in recent weeks might be one key to the prize.
However, at least three of the five Norwegian deciders have criticised Trump publicly, making his path to winning their votes far from clear.
Trump’s campaign has ranged from public comments with fellow world leaders to a private push with Norwegian Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg.
Stoltenberg built strong ties to the US President as Nato’s secretary-general and his Norwegian Labour Party has a say in the appointment of members to the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
Trump has also taken credit for ending an ever-increasing roster of conflicts: Last week’s tally started at six and by Friday was 10, “if you think about pre-wars”, Trump said.
The President has also offered a fatalistic account of his Nobel chances, acknowledging that the committee may never swing his way.
“A lot of people say … no matter what I do, they won’t give it up, and I’m not politicking for it. I have a lot of people that are,” Trump told a reporter this month as he signed a peace agreement with Armenia and Azerbaijan. “It would be a great honour, certainly.”
Trump’s appetite for the peace prize may be driving him to stick with efforts to resolve the war in Ukraine - including a focus on direct talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a tactic that even some hawkish Western diplomats say makes some sense, given the Russian leader’s singular control over his country’s war effort.
He will need to win over committee members who for now at least appear sceptical.
The chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, decried in December “the erosion of freedom of expression even in democratic nations”, calling out Trump by name.
“Trump launched more than 100 verbal attacks on the media during his election campaign,” said Frydnes, 40, who has also served as the head of Pen Norway, a group that promotes freedom of expression.
Frydnes, who oversaw the rebuilding of a centre-left political youth camp after it was hit by a 2011 attack by a far-right extremist that killed 69 people, is an appointee of Stoltenberg’s Labour Party, which holds power in Norway.
In a nation where just 7% of people said they would vote for Trump over former vice-president Kamala Harris in a poll conducted by Novus last October, scepticism of the US President is a mainstream view.
Some members of the Nobel committee make no secret that they feel similarly.
“After just over 100 days as president, [Trump] is well under way in dismantling American democracy, and he is doing everything he can to tear down the liberal and rules-based world order,” wrote Kristin Clemet, a former centre-right Norwegian education minister and another of the five committee members, in May.
A third member of the committee - and thus potentially, the lock on a Trump-sceptic majority - posted several messages critical of the President during his first term. In a photo on Facebook posted the day before the 2020 election, the committee member, Gry Larsen, was wearing a red “Make Human Rights Great Again” baseball hat.
Larsen, a former centre-left politician, also wrote in a 2017 Twitter post that “Trump is putting millions of lives at risk”, criticising a decision to reduce US foreign aid.
The other two committee members don’t have a clear history of criticising Trump.
One of them, academic Asle Toje, wrote sympathetically about Trump’s legal travails during the Biden Administration.
None of the committee members responded to requests for comment, and a spokesman for the Norwegian Nobel Institute declined to comment.
Frydnes, the committee chairman, asked in January about Trump’s Nobel aspirations, didn’t directly answer whether he would ever be willing to hand the President the prize.
Awarding a Nobel Peace Prize to a head of state is “perhaps often the most controversial. Both because if you’re a head of state, you have power. You have power, and you’ve used power.
“You often have blood on your hands if it’s a conflict. But you also have the power to do things afterwards, which complicates the picture,” Frydnes said.
Regardless of the inclinations of the five Norwegians who make the decision, praising the President and declaring him deserving of a Nobel has become de rigueur for some world leaders paying visits to the White House.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brought Trump a nomination letter. Some have also slammed former President Barack Obama, who was awarded the prize in 2009 just months after coming into office, a decision that even Obama acknowledged generated “considerable controversy”.
“Who, if not President Trump, deserves the Nobel Peace Prize? I don’t want to go into the history of some very strange decisions of Nobel Peace Committee to award the prize for someone who didn’t do anything at all,” Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said during the visit with Trump.
Aliyev’s Armenian counterpart, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, said the same.
“Hopefully you will invite us” to the award ceremony, Pashinyan told Trump.
“Front row. You’ll be front row,” Trump said to laughter.
Trump’s campaign has not been purely a laughing matter.
The President raised the issue in a phone call with Stoltenberg last month, according to a person familiar with the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
“We discussed tariffs, economic co-operation, and it served as preparation for his call with [Norwegian] Prime Minister [Jonas Gahr] Store,” Stoltenberg said in a statement. He added: “I will not go into further detail about the content of the conversation”.
The call was first reported by Dagens Naeringsliv, a Norwegian business newspaper.
As a former Norwegian Prime Minister, Stoltenberg would have had a say in the appointment of committee members, but once the committee has been appointed by the Norwegian parliament, its members jealously guard their independence. They might not appreciate a pressure campaign.
“It’s rather unusual for a candidate to talk like that,” said Nina Graeger, the director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, a group that researches international peace efforts and creates an annual list of potential recipients of that year’s award.
“While maybe the White House could brand President Trump as a peacemaker-in-chief, if you want, remember that genuine peace is measured over time, and it rarely rests on one leader alone,” Graeger said.
“The fact that Trump has challenged and even undermined international co-operation, which is one of the areas that the Alfred Nobel will focuses on, makes it a little bit maybe unlikely.”
Jimmy Carter, another former President Trump has slammed, also won a peace prize, in 2002. So did Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt.
Former vice-president Al Gore and former secretary of state Henry Kissinger also won prizes. None were without controversy.
Trump appears to be almost certain not to receive this year’s award, which will be announced in October, since the cutoff for nominations was in January.
The 2025 shortlist from the Peace Research Institute Organisation includes Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, for his efforts to mediate peace in Gaza; the Carter Centre, founded by former President Carter; and the International Criminal Court, whose top officials Trump has targeted for their efforts to investigate US and Israeli officials.
Next year, perhaps.
Some Norwegians are trying to keep the door open to peace in Ukraine.
“I do give Trump credit for the developments that have taken place this week, in gathering European leaders to talk about ending the war in Ukraine,” Graeger said.
“It’s a very unconventional way of trying to broker a peace agreement. It’s not by the book,” she said. “Sometimes that could work. I’ll just want to give him that.”
- Aaron Schaffer and William Booth contributed to this report.
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