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NEED I LIST ALL THE REASONS WHY TRUMP SHOULDN’T GET A NOBEL PEACE
PRIZE?  
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Sidney Blumenthal
September 8, 2025
The Guardian
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_ Trump has been an enabler of war, famine, disease and death _

, REUTERS/Brian Snyde

 

Donald Trump’s thuggish campaign to bully his way to the Nobel
peace prize
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cause for the committee to reject him. There are many more substantial
grounds that render him patently unqualified to receive the award.

Among the numerous reasons that make him one of the least deserving
people in the world who should be honored, he has single-handedly
destroyed the United States Agency for International Development,
which has saved hundreds of millions of people from hunger and
disease, and promoted democracy and the rule of law around the world.
In an executive order
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on his inauguration day, 20 January, Trump slandered USAID as “not
aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to
American values” and claimed that its workers “serve to
destabilize world peace”.

That act of malice by itself should be sufficient to erase Trump from
the longest long list.

Clearly, the worthiest candidate for the Nobel peace prize, whether
its name was submitted before the deadline or not, is USAID. Since its
founding under John F Kennedy in 1961, USAID has supported extensive
programs on global health, food security, education and democratic
development that, by addressing the root causes of instability and
poverty, had promoted a more free, peaceful and prosperous world for
64 years until Trump destroyed it.

As a general rule, there should be no shame attached to an organized
effort to win the prize by Trump or others. Trump’s lobbying,
though, is stained, as is much else about him, by perverse statecraft
that has fostered conflict where none previously existed and his
unquenchable need for cult-like worship.

Several world leaders, such as Benjamin Netanyahu, have written in
support of Trump’s nomination at his behest, cynically calculating
that it would curry favor for their own often nefarious and warlike
purposes. Trump personally pressured
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prime minister, Narendra Modi, to write a letter based on the lie that
it was Trump who had “solved” a recent military conflict with
Pakistan. Modi was alienated by the improper request. After his
refusal to submit a false statement, Trump imposed a 50% tariff on
India, which sent Modi flying into the arms of China. There is no
existing international prize for this sort of willfully destructive
behavior.

The encomiums from Trump’s closest aides hailing him as the best
candidate are symptoms of the sycophancy that is the eternal mark of
authoritarian regimes. Fitting the historical pattern, obsequiousness
within a cult of personality substitutes for honesty, fact and
evidence. Trump punishes and purges forthright counsel, suppresses
factual intelligence and expert information that is not falsified or
distorted to achieve predetermined results, and dismisses evidence
regarding medicine, the environment and energy derived from the
scientific method.

The tenor of unctuous servility was perfectly voiced by Steven
Witkoff, Trump’s all-purpose international representative, speaking
at an August cabinet meeting. “There’s only one thing I wish
for,” he said
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“that the Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realizes
that you are the single finest candidate since this Nobel award was
ever talked about.”

The phrasing of Witkoff’s praise is eerily reminiscent of the words
uttered in the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate
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the character of Major Ben Marco, played by Frank Sinatra, who has
been brainwashed as a prisoner of war held by the North Koreans. He
repeats over and over again his admiration for an army sergeant from
his unit who has been programmed to be a political assassin on behalf
of both the communists and the American far right. “Raymond Shaw,”
says Major Marco, “is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful
human being I’ve ever known in my life.” In the movie, Shaw is
awarded a prize – the Congressional Medal of Honor – based on the
brainwashed testimony of his fellow soldiers.

“No matter what I do, they won’t give it up and I’m not
politicking for it,” Trump said
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He suggested the efforts to grant him the prize were spontaneous: “I
have a lot of people that are.” When he was handed a nomination
letter that Netanyahu had submitted, Trump said: “They will never
give me a Nobel peace prize. I deserve it.”

But Trump’s ludicrous hypocrisy about not pulling levers behind the
curtain to solicit nomination also is not a conclusive reason to deny
him the prize.

Trump’s rancor about not receiving the prize that has not yet been
awarded is exactly the same as his resentment that he did not get an
Emmy for his reality TV show The Apprentice. For years he ranted
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“Should have gotten it.” “I got screwed out of an Emmy.”
“The Emmys are all politics.” “Con game.” “Irrelevant.”
Then, like the Emmy, he claimed the 2020 presidential election was
“rigged” and organized an insurrection to overthrow the democratic
result. In his paranoid chain of things wrongly denied him, now it’s
the Nobel. Fill in the blank.

Trump’s longing for the prize also reflects his anger that Barack
Obama received it. Trump’s animus
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Obama about the Nobel followed his viciously contrived birther
campaign. “Affirmative action,” said Trump. “Rigged.” “He
had no idea why he got it.” “If I were named Obama, I would have
had the Nobel prize given to me in 10 seconds.”

The diplomatic and political friction that Trump has gratuitously
produced between the US and Norway with his offensive remarks should
also not be the decisive issue that affects the judgment of the
committee. In 2018, Trump said
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“Why do we want all these people from Africa here? They’re
shithole countries … We should have more people from Norway.” His
comment evoked nationwide disgust in Norway. “On behalf of Norway:
thanks, but no thanks,” tweeted
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politician representing Norway’s Conservative party.

Trump’s recent 15% tariff
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on Norway, despite its insignificant trade deficit, has damaged its
fishing industry. His antipathy toward renewable forms of energy,
throwing the entire wind power industry into chaos, has cost
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Norwegian state-owned energy company Equinor, which had an ongoing
wind project off New York, about $1bn. In July, Trump called
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Norwegian finance minister, Jens Stoltenberg, the former head of Nato,
“out of the blue”. “He wanted the Nobel prize – and to discuss
tariffs,” a Norwegian newspaper reported. But none of these
offensive, obnoxious and even malign actions should be dispositive in
whether Trump receives the prize.

The reasons for denying him the award are much more fundamental and
salient. His disqualification for the Nobel is not that he an
inveterate liar, transparent faker and bungling schemer. It is that he
meets other much more germane and dangerous criteria that were
engraved for humankind epochs before the peace prize was ever
conceived.

Within mere months since reassuming office Trump has become a
harbinger across the globe of war, famine, disease and death. The
standards by which he should be judged are those described in
the Book of Revelation
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by the appearance of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Trump rides
or presumes to ride all of those dreaded emblems of destruction, which
do not foretell any glorious coming of peace, a new heaven and new
earth, or prophesy a cleansing moment for repentance, but instead
carnage followed by dictatorship and plagues without end.

Specifically, rather than biblically, Trump has been an enabler of
war. By his actions, he has supported Netanyahu’s offensive war for
the complete ethnic cleansing and destruction of Gaza. Through his
refusal to put conditions on $17.8bn in military assistance, Trump has
made it possible for Netanyahu to ignore the advice of the Israeli
army and intelligence leadership not to continue and expand that war.

Trump has called
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the US to “take over” and “own” Gaza to turn it into a
“Riviera of the Middle East”. This entity would generate profits
through a US-led trusteeship, private investment in mega-construction
projects and the “voluntary” relocation of Palestinians. Trump has
held a White House meeting about a plan
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the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation
Trust – or “Great Trust” – that envisions building the “Gaza
Trump Riviera and Islands” and the “Elon Musk Manufacturing
Zone” and paying Palestinians $5,000 to relocate. Under this plan,
Trump would personally profit in violation of the emoluments clause of
the constitution.

On Ukraine, Trump initially agreed to the European proposal for a
ceasefire that would result in new sanctions if Vladimir Putin did not
comply. But as soon as he was face to face with Putin at their summit
in Alaska, Trump crumbled
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side. The consequence has been the intensification of Russian bombing
of Ukrainian civilian targets – as well as the European Union
headquarters in Kyiv. Trump’s undermining of the ceasefire
initiative was his latest gesture toward Putin of admiration and
deference.

The Trump White House has said it will “not rule out” military
action to seize Greenland, a semi-independent territory of Denmark, a
Nato member. Meanwhile, Denmark reports that Trump has deployed
political personnel close to the White House to Greenland to agitate
for a US takeover and to prepare for possible US military operations
there. On 28 August, Denmark’s foreign minister summoned
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top US diplomat to warn the Trump administration against its covert
influence operation.

Trump has repeatedly laid claim to the territory of the Panama Canal
Zone and threatened
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use military force to seize it. These threats were apparently made in
part to pressure the government of Panama to reduce or eliminate the
bill for taxes on Trump Organization properties that they were accused
of evading there. In 2017, a joint Reuters-NBC News
investigation reported
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the Trump Ocean Club International hotel and tower in Panama City was
a front for international money laundering for narcotics trafficking,
dubbed Narco-a-Lago. The Trump Organization asserted it bore no
responsibility for the activity within its units.

Trump has also repeatedly laid claim
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the entire nation of Canada, another Nato member, to be occupied by
and added to the United States as a single state. The White House has
refused to rule out the use of military force for that purpose.

On 21 June, Trump ordered Operation Midnight Hammer, a surprise,
coordinated air strike on Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow,
Natanz, Isfahan and other locations. The mission involved B-2 bombers
dropping massive ordnance penetrator (MOP) “bunker buster” bombs
on the Fordow site and other weapons against the other facilities.
When Lt Gen Jeffrey Kruse, director of the Defense Intelligence
Agency, reported a preliminary intelligence assessment that Iran’s
nuclear capability had not been “obliterated”, as Trump had
boasted, he was summarily fired
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Trump has claimed to have brokered a peace agreement between
Azerbaijan and Armenia, after the parties came to the White House for
a ceremony to sign a peace treaty. Both governments, however,
subsequently acknowledged that this was a publicity stunt
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to help Trump with his campaign for the peace prize and that no peace
agreement
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actually concluded.

Trump’s claim to have brokered a peace agreement between India and
Pakistan was yet another stunt to burnish his credentials for the
prize. When he was snubbed by Modi, Trump used it as a pretext for
imposing a punitive tariff. His claim to have brokered a peace
agreement between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and
the withdrawal of Rwandan forces from DRC soil was similarly false
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Rwanda-controlled M23 rebels remain on DRC soil, committing massacres
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14 villages in July, and the peace agreement is a fiction.

Trump has also enabled the Netanyahu government’s campaign of famine
against the population of Gaza, granting Netanyahu impunity for his
starvation project, while ordering the US representative to the United
Nations not to sign
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statement from all 14 other members of the security council that the
famine in Gaza is a “man-made crisis” and in violation of
international law.

A huge famine also rages in Sudan, connected in significant part to
the proxy war fought there by a US ally, the United Arab Emirates.
Trump’s decision to stop all USAID relief operations as part of his
administration’s wholesale demolition of the agency has made the
Sudan famine far more acute. As a result, more than 80% of emergency
food kitchens have shut down. The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and
the International Rescue Committee (IRC)
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stated that the funding cuts are directly contributing to deaths from
starvation and disease. The NRC warned
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Sudan’s crisis to worsen “beyond measure”.

Besides creating the conditions for famine, Trump’s decision to
terminate USAID could lead to more than 14 million additional
preventable deaths globally by 2030, according to an authoritative
July 2025 study
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the British medical journal the Lancet – “a staggering number of
avoidable deaths”.

According to the report, “USAID funding was associated with a 65%
reduction in mortality from HIV/Aids (representing 25.5 million
deaths), 51% from malaria (8 million deaths), and 50% from neglected
tropical diseases (8.9 million deaths)”, among significant decreases
in many other diseases. But Trump has wiped out all these programs.

At home, Trump has eviscerated the National Institutes for Health and
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and withheld $2.6bn
from Harvard University in federal funds including for medical
research on cancer and other diseases. After an armed man with a
semi-automatic rifle opposed to vaccines fired 150 rounds into the CDC
headquarters in Atlanta and murdered a police officer, Trump said
absolutely nothing. He has been a stalwart against any restriction on
guns, which are almost without exception the weapons used in school
massacres, mass shootings and violent crime.

“I looked,” reads the Book of Revelation, “and there before me
was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death.”

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_Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill Clinton and Hillary
Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume
political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man
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With His Angel
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the Powers of Earth
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He is a Guardian US columnist_

* Donald Trump
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* Nobel Peace Prize
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