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Donald Trump on Wednesday reiterated his call for the Nobel Prize committee to award him the Peace Prize as it looks into his peacemaking efforts.
Those peacemaking efforts, of which he estimates there have been eight so far, are underway, he says, and will soon include “another one” — even though there is still no sign of significant progress in talks between the United States and Iran regarding a new ceasefire. Not to mention that this would be happening in the middle of a war that he himself had started.
The president spoke to reporters in an announcement about his “Trump accounts” for children, after a brief return to Washington amid his string of near-daily campaign appearances across the country.
“I’ve done things that no one else has ever done. I’m not bragging, I’m just telling you the facts,” the president told reporters Wednesday. “No president has probably ever settled a war. I’ve settled eight.”
He then attacked his first-term predecessor, President Barack Obama, whom he accused of not knowing why he received the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. They awarded the peace prize to Obama, then president for less than a year, for his diplomatic efforts to restore ties with the Muslim world after nearly a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, which led some to believe that America was at war with the entire Muslim world.
The 47th president insisted Wednesday that he was more deserving of the award than Obama.
“Look, Obama got it, and he didn’t do anything. He still doesn’t know why he got it,” Trump said. “He got it when he was elected, didn’t he? Right from the start.”
“Whether I understand it or not, I have done much more,” the president said.
The president frequently cites statistics from the “eight wars” as a benchmark for his supposed peacemaking abilities, but this figure is not true. Several of the “wars” on Trump’s list weren’t wars at all, such as the disagreements between Serbia and Kosovo that never escalated into actual armed conflict under either of Trump’s presidencies. Another of the eight conflicts is the conflict between Iran and Israel, which remains largely ongoing in a three-way conflict now also involving the United States – this conflict has been going on for almost eight months.
Yet the war on Iran that he launched unilaterally has largely shattered Trump’s image as a steward of world affairs, even in the minds of his own supporters, who adopted that portrayal of the president during his 2024 campaign for a second term, as he hammered Joe Biden and Kamala Harris over Israel’s relentless strikes on Gaza and Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, which he has pledged to end.
A year and a half after taking office, Trump has made little to no progress in his efforts to negotiate an end to the war between Russia and Ukraine. A ceasefire exists in the Gaza Strip, where the majority of fighting has subsided, but most Gazans remain in appalling conditions, with much of the region’s infrastructure and housing destroyed. Israeli strikes continue to be carried out against refugee camps, causing new civilian casualties.
In touting his diplomatic credentials, the president is also ignoring a truth about his 2024 campaign: his promise to stop dragging the United States into endless wars with obscure objectives. His critics, both within and outside the Republican Party, now accuse him of doing so, as the war in Iran has evolved from an attempt to dislodge the Iranian government and gain control of its remaining nuclear materials to an end to shipping disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz.
However, Obama has long been a Trump fixation, and the president attacks him almost as often as he attacks Biden, who beat him in the 2020 election. On Wednesday, he warned that his allies wanted to see the Justice Department oppose Obama, Biden and Hillary Clinton, but asserted that he respected the sanctity of his office by refusing.
“I could have done very bad things to Hillary Clinton. I could have done very, very bad things to Joe Biden. I could have done very bad things to Barack Hussein Obama,” Trump said.
As he left the White House for a campaign rally in San Antonio, Texas, the president reiterated his confused assertion that the war in Iran was already “won” but not yet “over.”
“This is a war that has been won in terms of what we need to do. We need to get rid of — not nuclear weapons for, as you know, for Iran,” the president said.
“We took nuclear power away from them. If they had nuclear power, you would have had problems like you’ve never had before. So we did this for that reason. We basically accomplished that. Their military is now wiped out. Their entire country is wiped out right now. It will be over very quickly. And when it is, and when it is, oil prices will collapse.”
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