Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize Grievance, Explained (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: So, what is the deal with President Trump's preoccupation with being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize? And I'm not just talking about the fact that he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize that belonged to an actual awardee, Maria Machado of Venezuela a few days ago. I'm talking about today, he suggested in a Truth Social post that his desire for the United States to acquire Greenland is tied to the fact that the academy in Norway has not awarded him a Nobel Peace Prize. Now, forget for a second that the government of Norway does not actually award Nobel Peace Prizes. It's an academy in Norway, not tied to it, but that doesn't make sense. But even more so, Greenland doesn't belong to Norway. Greenland belongs to Denmark, so this doesn't make sense in at least two different ways, if not more. But I digress. So what is the basis of this, some might call, obsession? The White House declined to answer my question when I asked them, but former top Trump White House officials have speculated as to any number of reasons, ranging anywhere from a desire to leave a legacy, to it being the next big thing to conquer, to, quote, because Mr. Obama, a black man, was given it almost day one, Trump became obsessed over the insult, unquote. But as far as I can tell, this interest in being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize really started being obvious about 10 years after President Obama was given his Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. So in 2018, President Trump was asked about reports that he had been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize because of his efforts to denuclearize North Korea. This is what he said.

[00:02:02] Speaker 2: Do you deserve the Nobel Prize, do you think?

[00:02:04] Speaker 3: Everyone thinks so, but I would never say it.

[00:02:06] Speaker 1: Then the next year, in 2019, he started talking about this more.

[00:02:10] Speaker 3: I think I'm going to get a Nobel Prize for a lot of things if they gave it out fairly, which they don't. Well, they gave one to Obama immediately upon his ascent to the presidency, and he had no idea why he got it.

[00:02:21] Speaker 1: In addition to complaining about not having been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, as opposed to President Obama, who had, and at that point, to be frank, for very little in terms of accomplishment, President Trump started talking about how unfair it was that there wasn't any media coverage of the fact that he'd been nominated and, to be frank, being nominated is not actually that big a deal. Hundreds of people get nominated every year anyway. Then it became something that he talked about, complained about on the campaign trail.

[00:02:49] Speaker 2: If I were named Obama, I would have had the Nobel Prize given to him in 10 seconds. He got the Nobel Prize. He didn't even know what the hell he got it for.

[00:02:58] Speaker 1: But like a snowball rolling down a hill, getting bigger and bigger and bigger, now President Trump keeps talking about this with increasing frequency, talking about the assertion that he has ended eight wars, which, as we've covered before, is not true. He has not ended eight wars. Anyway, now he is involved in a major conflict and confrontation with other countries, diplomatically, economically, in terms of potential tariffs. He refuses to even take military intervention to acquire Greenland off the table. So all of this, rooted to the fact that he has not been awarded a Peace Prize, pretty much the definition of irony.