A far right Norwegian politician has nominated Donald Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize. Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a Norwegian Parliament member, leader of the populist Progress Party, and chairman to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, submitted the nomination on September 9, citing his role in helping broker a peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. Tybring-Gjedde told Fox News, “For his merit, I think he has done more trying to create peace between nations than most other Peace Prize nominees.”
In his letter to the nominating committee, Tybring-Gjedde wrote, according to Fox News, “As it is expected other Middle Eastern countries will follow in the footsteps of the UAE, this agreement could be a game changer that will turn the Middle East into a region of cooperation and prosperity.” He also lauded the US president’s “key role in facilitating contact between conflicting parties and… creating new dynamics in other protracted conflicts, such as the Kashmir border dispute between India and Pakistan, and the conflict between North and South Korea, as well as dealing with the nuclear capabilities of North Korea.”
“Indeed, Trump has broken a 39-year-old streak of American Presidents either starting a war or bringing the United States into an international armed conflict,” Tybring-Gjedde continued, referring to Nobel laureate and former President Jimmy Carter. The negative reaction to Trump’s nomination was swift and fierce on Twitter. “The Nobel Peace Prize’s lustre is often undermined by a hat tipping process which allows celebrities and tyrants to join the running. Trump’s nomination should be seen for what it is – a cheap publicity stunt by a far-right politician,” journalist Martyn McLaughlin tweeted.
Um.. yea.. nope,” activist Sheryl Lynne tweeted. “How much does a nomination cost Christian Tybring-Gjedde? What’s in it for you? You nominate a monster, a racist, a mentally unstable sub-human for the prize? Do you not have TV or newspapers in Norway?” Another activist replied: It is not like Trump helped avert some war! Meanwhile he fans the flames of civil war here at home! Man facepalming… Trump has made a mockery of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Now he wants to cheapen the Nobel Peace Prize! I wonder how big the bribe was for this idiot to nominate him?”
Tybring-Gjedde told Fox News that he is not trying to curry favor with Trump. “I’m not a big Trump supporter,” he said. “The committee should look at the facts and judge him on the facts — not on the way he behaves sometimes. The people who have received the Peace Prize in recent years have done much less than Donald Trump. For example, Barack Obama did nothing.”
President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for what the Nobel Committee saw as “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” It was a shock, considering Obama had only been in office for just over 200 days, and had only made peaceful proposals at that point. Trump, whose disdain for Obama is no secret, criticized the decision roundly at the time, and has brought it up routinely for the past decade — especially when he was nominated for the prize himself in 2018.
Yes, this isn’t the first time that Tybring-Gjedde has nominated Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize. He, along with fellow Norwegian politician Per-Willy Amundsen, submitted a nomination in 2018 following Trump’s summit in Singapore with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Trump did not win. The prize, instead, went to Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad “for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict,” per the Nobel Committee.
Trump has an obsession with winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and declared that the committee was rigged because Obama once won. “They gave one to Obama immediately after his ascent to the presidency, and he had no idea why he got it,” Trump said to a Pakistani journalist at the UN General Assembly in September 2019. “You know what, that was the only thing I agreed with him on.” He also said that “everyone thinks” he should win, but that “they probably will never give it to me. You know why? Because they don’t want to.”
It should be noted that literally anyone can be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Even Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Benito Mussolini received nominations in the past. Currently, there are 318 candidates, including 211 individuals and 107 organizations.
