Peace Rage
Donald Trump and the Nobel Prize
Pondering how to write about the week’s biggest news story, I’ve found myself in an ethical quandary. Last week I wrote about the inglorious and sometimes farcical history of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The week before that, I wrote about what a rancid old barbarian Donald Trump is.
This week these two positions of mine collided, perhaps irreconcilably, when the Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded to the Venezuelan dissident Maria Machado.
On the face of it, Machado’s victory seemed well-deserved. Here is a woman who has risked her personal freedom to defend and uphold democratic values in her unhappy native land. “Democracy is in retreat internationally,” said the Nobel Committee, when announcing Machado’s victory. By awarding the prize to Machado, the Committee wanted to give the world a timely reminder that democracy “is the foundation of peace.”
Who could argue with this claim? Who could deny that the Nobel Prize would seem, on this occasion, to have gone to a worthy recipient?
Well, Donald Trump could. In his view, Machado’s victory was a nauseating travesty of justice, because the prize clearly should have gone to someone else – namely, Donald J. Trump himself. After all, Trump has been hailed, by no less an authority than his own White House, as “the peace president”. This is a man who has spent a whole year of his life, off and on, tirelessly and shamelessly angling to win the Nobel, which is more than you can say for Machado.
Earlier this month, as Nobel season approached, Trump made one last brazen pitch for the prize. On Truth Social, while announcing that he had just masterminded a ceasefire in Gaza, Trump underscored his Nobel credentials by quoting, in all caps and with an exclamation mark, the words of Jesus H. Christ himself. “BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS!” he posted.
Trump’s motives for wanting the Nobel Prize are complex. He doesn’t just want it because of his sudden-onset interest in peace. He also wants it because he hates and envies, and desperately wants to get even with, certain bitter enemies of his who have won the Prize in the past.
“They gave it to Obama,” he has said, “for doing absolutely nothing but destroying our country.”
Last week, when the 2025 Nobel was awarded to Machado instead of Trump, there was consternation in Trumpian circles. How could a man who wanted the prize so badly not get it? It just didn’t seem fair.
“The Nobel Prize died years ago,” said Trump’s roving envoy Richard Grenell. “The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace,” tweeted Trump’s Communications Director Steven Cheung.
Beyond America’s shores, leading members of the global Peace community joined the chorus of disbelief. “This award has lost credibility,” said Vladimir Putin, whose sandal-wearing commitment to the principle of non-violence is a matter of long public record. The Byelorussian dictator Alexander Lukashenko – another renowned incense-burner – called the dudding of Trump an act of “sheer stupidity.” Benjamin Netanyahu, with typical puckishness, observed that the Nobel Committee merely “talks about peace,” while “President Trump makes it happen.”
Trump’s own reaction was more muted and philosophical. While he welcomed the public support of his fellow granola-munchers (“Thank you to President Putin!” he wrote on Truth Social) he stressed that he wasn’t in the peace game solely for personal gain. He also finds peace to be a desirable thing in itself, provided that nobody else gets the credit for it. “I’m happy because I saved millions of lives, many millions of lives,” he said.
Trump noted, too, that the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize was, in a technical sense, awarded to honor peace-mongering activities conducted in the previous calendar year. “You could also say it was given out for ’24,” he said, “and I was running for office in ’24.” In other words, it remains conceivable that the orgy of global peace that Trump has instigated this year will be garlanded, retrospectively, when the Committee hands out next year’s prize.
While he was at it, Trump pointed out that Maria Machado couldn’t have won this year’s prize without his personal supervision (“I’ve been helping her along the way”). Furthermore, he claimed that Machado had assured him, during a private telephone conversation, that he deserved the Nobel way more than she did. Trump’s memory of this part of their conversation was vivid, even though he seemed to have temporarily or perhaps permanently forgotten Machado’s name:
The person who actually got the Nobel Prize called today, called me and said, “I’m accepting this in honor of you, because you really deserved it” … I didn’t say, “Then give it to me,” though I think she might have. She was very nice …
In light of all this, you can probably see why I’ve found myself in an ethical bind this week. Having voiced my own skepticism about the Nobel Prize for Literature just a week ago, I’m surely obliged to exercise some intellectual consistency here, and admit that Trump and his various toadies do have the ghost of a point. Like the literary prize, the peace prize is given out by a panel of flawed human beings, whose decisions can indeed be influenced by narrow political concerns.
On the other hand, given my general contempt for Trump, I might be expected to spin the Nobel incident as yet another demonstration of the man’s transcendental vulgarity. To throw a public tantrum about not winning a peace prize … this, surely, is the most deliciously Trumpian thing Trump has ever done – the glorious epitome of Trumpism, the acme, the summa, a sublime synthesis of all the festering resentments and vices and disorders that make up Trump’s horrendous personality: the petulance, the nastiness, the childishness, the nihilism, the unfunny buffoonery, the utter lack of even the smallest shred of decency, or class, or shame, or charity, or taste, or dignity.
After some reflection, I’ve decided to side with Trump on this one. I’ve been thinking about some of history’s more famous peacemakers; and I’ve come to see that they, like Trump, were only human too. We tend to romanticize the peacemakers of the past. We tend to wish away their rough edges. But the fact is that the selfless provision of peace to humankind can be a taxing business; and the more tirelessly a person strives to render peace on a global scale, the more entitled they are to get a bit tetchy when their work is not rewarded with immediate personal dividends. Let’s call this phenomenon Peace Rage. And let’s admit that it has cropped up far more often over time than our politically correct historians would have us believe.
After all, did Jesus Christ himself not say, “I am come not to give, but to receive”? Yes, he did not. And did he not also not say, during the Sermon on the Mount:
Whoso bringeth peace on earth, doeth great service unto all his brethren. Yet where be the reward of the peacemaker? Yea, great shall be his reward in heaven. Trumpets shall sound before him there. But verily I say unto you, where be his reward on earth? Therefore credit ye not the lesser peacemaker. And dare not call him peacemaker, that delivereth lesser peace than I.1
Or take Joan of Arc. When she was burned at the stake for heresy at the age of nineteen, of Arc uttered these final words: “Tenez la croix haute, pour que je puisse la voir à travers les flammes.” Translated loosely and perhaps inaccurately into English, this means: “How about a sainthood you ungrateful twats?”2
Of course, Joan did not specifically complain about not receiving the Nobel Prize, which didn’t exist in the 15th century. But it’s a fair bet that if it had, and if she hadn’t won it, she would have given the Nobel Committee a foul-mouthed piece of her mind.
The first Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded in 1901. In the years since, the Nobel Committee has made some famously baffling decisions. To date, none of them as been quite so baffling as the snubbing of Donald Trump. But some of them have been in the same ballpark.
Gandhi himself was repeatedly overlooked for the prize, despite his lifelong commitment to non-violent resistance. In 1930, the Mahatma walked barefoot for 24 consecutive days, over 240 miles of hot Indian dirt, to protest Britain’s oppressive salt tax. But despite this spirited pitch for worldly honors, the Nobel Committee snubbed Gandhi for that year’s prize. Instead they gave it to a Swedish archbishop named Nathan Söderblom.
When the grim news of Söderblom’s victory was broken to Gandhi by an aide, Gandhi replied: “Seriously? You mean I could have been wearing shoes this whole time?”3
Then there is the case of Ngo Thanh Hieu. Hieu was one of several Vietnamese monks who publicly immolated themselves in Saigon in 1963, to protest the inhumanity of the South Vietnamese regime. Having assumed the lotus position in a public square, Hieu had a fellow monk douse him with kerosene. Just before his accomplice struck the match, Hieu uttered his famously moving final words: “If you see someone walking towards me with a medal, put me out.”4
It’s the same wherever you look. The lauded peacemakers of the past were only human, like Trump. If you scratch the surface of their reputations, you find that they too hungered for other things besides peace. John Lennon’s original title for “Give Peace a Chance” was “Give Me Praise and Money Now, or Fuck off!”5 George Harrison’s working title for “The Inner Light” was “The Outer Accolade.”6
Last week, while lamenting the idiocy of the Nobel Committee, Trump’s Communications Director Steven Cheung allowed himself to get just a little bit carried away. “He has the heart of a humanitarian,” Cheung said of Trump, “and there will never be anyone like him who can move mountains with the sheer force of his will.”
Cheung can be forgiven for letting the radiance of Trump’s humanity lead him into overstatement. But strictly speaking, Trump isn’t quite the first historical figure capable of moving mountains with his mind. He is in fact the second. God, who created the mountains to begin with, did it first.
Nor is this the only respect in which Trump resembles the God of the Old Testament. Like Trump, God took no shit from anybody. Like Trump, He didn’t like it when people short-changed him in the praise department. Like Trump, He was sometimes known to break into all-caps when lower-case letters did not seem sufficient to make his point.
Who exactly does Donald Trump think he is? Listening to some of God’s more aggressive rhetoric in the Holy Bible, I think I can have a guess. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” God said, in the course of handing down the first commandment:
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: For I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.
That quote I did not make up.
Certain quotations and factual claims in this article have been invented out of thin air to make Donald Trump seem less appalling.
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