President Donald Trump was mocked online after he sounded off on why he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize and claimed to have resolved a "conflict" between Cambodia and Armenia—two countries that have never been at war and are 4,150 miles apart.
Trump made the remark during a Saturday appearance at the American Cornerstone Institute's Founders' Dinner at the Mount Vernon estate in Virginia. While Trump did not describe what had transpired between the leaders of the respective capitals of Phnom Penh and Yerevan, he nonetheless insisted that war "was just starting, and it was a bad one."
He said, first addressing the actual ongoing conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan:
"Armenia and Azerbaijan, going on for years. They came to my office, two leaders, both great guys, one was there 22 years, one was there seven, and they both said during their entire term in office all they did was kill people on the other side."
"And now they're both sitting in my office, in the Oval Office. It's pretty wide—you had one over here, one over there—and slowly, over the course of about an hour, they came close. And at the end of an hour, we were hugging each other and holding hands. It was an amazing thing."
And then things went off the rails a bit.
"We settled that war that was not "settleable" as the expression goes. Cambodia and Armenia—it was just starting and it was a bad one. We have Cambodia, Armenia, Kosovo, Serbia, Israel, Iran, Egypt, and Ethiopia. That's a beauty. They built a little dam in Ethiopia that's like the largest in the world."
You can hear what Trump said in the video below.
The mockery was swift.
Trump appeared to confuse Armenia’s tensions with Azerbaijan with border violence between Cambodia and Thailand.
The Trump administration did help ease the latter dispute: in July, clashes along the Cambodia–Thailand border killed 43 people and displaced more than 300,000 over five days.
Working with Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, Trump made calls to both sides and helped broker a ceasefire on July 28. The following month, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet joined Pakistan and Israel in nominating Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize, praising his “visionary and innovative diplomacy” in defusing the crisis.
In July, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said "it's well past time that President Trump was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize," claiming that he “has brokered, on average, one peace deal or ceasefire per month,” and pointing to mediations he led between India and Pakistan, Cambodia and Thailand, and Egypt and Ethiopia, among others.
Notably, Leavitt did not address the war in Ukraine, despite Trump’s frequent promises to bring it to an end on his first day in office, nor did she mention the ongoing conflict in Gaza, where the United States continues to provide arms to Israel. She also failed to mention that Trump often claims credit for settling conflicts he had nothing to do with. According to The New York Times, in June, Trump told Prime Minister Modi of India how proud he was to have ended the conflict between India and Pakistan, and Modi snapped back that it was not due to his intervention at all.
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