President Donald Trump complained at a Pennsylvania campaign rally Saturday night that the “fake news” completely skipped reporting his two Nobel Peace Prizes.
Trump has no Nobel Peace Prizes.
He was nominated this year for a 2021 prize.
On Saturday, Trump grumbled that there wasn’t a word in the “fake news” about his Nobel recognition.
“Somebody had a show where they said the amount of time devoted to Donald Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize — two of ’em — [was] zero on the networks, zero,”
he emphasized. ”It is so disgraceful. They’re so bad.”
Earlier in his speech, Trump did refer to his Nobel Prize “nomination.” He said he was so disappointed as he sat with First Lady Melania Trump in front of the TV that news reports failed to mention his nomination and instead focused on “weather.”
That weather in early September happened to be the beginnings of Hurricane Sally. He then falsely claimed he was nominated for another peace prize the very next day.
FactCheck.org has taken Trump to task for “repeatedly conflating winning a Nobel Peace Prize with being nominated for one.” Trump has grumbled about the huge media coverage of Barack Obama’s nomination for a prize, when in fact Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.
Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a far-right member of the Norwegian Parliament, told Fox News in early September that he nominated Trump for the 2021 prize. (He also says he nominated Trump in 2018.)
Two days later, Magnus Jacobsson, a member of Sweden’s Parliament for the Christian Democrats, announced on Twitter that he nominated “the US government” for the award — along with the governments of Kosovo and Serbia —“for their joint work for peace and economic development.”
While the Nobel Prize Committee reports numbers of nominees, it does not identify — nor confirm — who has been nominated.
Trump was also nominated in 2017 and 2018 for his “ideology of peace through force” strategy — a very Trumpian kind of concept. Those recommendations were believed to have been made by the same mysterious American who assumed the identity of a qualified nominator both times, according to an official of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. He refused to reveal the identity of the American whom committee members suspect.
Being nominated is not quite the “big thing” Trump makes it out to be, according to FactCheck. There are 318 candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize for 2020 — 211 individuals and 107 organizations. Russian President Vladimir Putin has also been nominated for the 2021 peace prize. Joseph Stalin was nominated — twice.
“Any person or organization can be nominated by anyone eligible to nominate,” the Nobel Committee web site states. There are potentially hundreds of thousands of people eligible to nominate a candidate.
Earlier this year Trump demanded “fake news” reporters return their “Noble [sic] Prizes.” There are Nobel Prizes for literature but not for journalism.