President Donald Trump was widely mocked after the White House didn't see the irony in sharing footage of him being awarded The Richard Nixon Foundation’s Architect of Peace Award after Trump griped about not winning this year's Nobel Peace Prize.
Earlier this month, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the prize to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”
The White House immediately went on the defensive, and communications director Steven Cheung accused the Nobel Committee of “placing politics over peace,” saying it was “astonishing” that Trump was not recognized after his administration’s role in brokering a Gaza ceasefire deal earlier in the week. Israel has since violated the terms of the deal.
However, Trump, for all his campaigning, was barely eligible for the prize to begin with. Nominations for this year’s award closed on January 31, 2025, just days after Trump began his second term in office.
Now, just a couple of weeks after Machado won the prize, the White House published a video of a grinning Trump winning the Architect of Peace Award.
But there's a significant irony to this considering some of the most high-profile recipients of the prize—named after a president who notoriously resigned and was once considered the most corrupt in U.S. history due largely to his role in the Watergate scandal—engineered foreign policy decisions that had deadly consequences.
For example, past honorees, former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld spearheaded the "War on Terror," pushed for the invasion of Iraq on the false premise that the regime of Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and had an operational relationship with Al-Qaeda.
Additionally, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger—who controversially received the Nobel Peace Prize—has been accused of war crimes and backing authoritarian regimes for actions including the bombing of Cambodia, U.S. involvement in the 1971 Bolivian and 1973 Chilean coups, and support for Argentina’s military junta during its Dirty War.
All of this is to say that people were not impressed—and that Trump's award is not the recognition he thinks it is.
Maybe Trump can be quiet about winning a peace prize now that he's received a participation trophy.
@thepassingtramp/X
@BryceWayne10s/X
@PressSec/X