Norway is bracing for Donald Trump’s reaction should he not be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Norway simply hosts the prestigious award ceremony—its government has no involvement in deciding who wins. But with hours on the clock before the Nobel Peace Prize recipient is named, Norway’s politicians are sweating that Trump may not know the difference.
Kirsti Bergstø, the leader of Norway’s Socialist Left party, told The Guardian that Oslo must be “prepared for anything.”
“Donald Trump is taking the U.S. in an extreme direction, attacking freedom of speech, having masked secret police kidnapping people in broad daylight and cracking down on institutions and the courts. When the president is this volatile and authoritarian, of course we have to be prepared for anything,” Bergstø told the international newspaper.
“The Nobel Committee is an independent body and the Norwegian government has no involvement in determining the prizes,” she continued. “But I’m not sure Trump knows that. We have to be prepared for anything from him.”
The Nobel committee announced Thursday that it had decided the prize winner at the beginning of the week, before the Trump administration brokered a ceasefire arrangement between Israel and Gaza. Timeframe considered, “most Nobel experts and Norwegian observers believe it is highly unlikely that Trump will be awarded the prize,” The Guardian reported.
It’s no secret that Trump has pined for the international honor: The U.S. president phoned Norway’s Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg “out of the blue” back in July to inquire about the possibility of acquiring the prize, using tariffs as a cover for their discussion.
Trump has complained for years that his name has not yet been added to the ranks of prize recipients, who span some of the greatest figures of the last century, including Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Theresa, and Malala Yousafzai.
Part of the contention could be that Trump’s supposed political nemesis, former President Barack Obama, received the award in 2009 for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” Three other U.S. presidents have also won a Nobel Peace Prize.
“They gave it to Obama for absolutely destroying our country,” Trump said during an Oval Office meeting with Finnish President Alexander Stubb Thursday. “My election was much more important.”
Trump’s obsession with obtaining the prize has led to some odd boasts over the last several months, including that he has resolved eight wars around the globe in his second term alone. Trump has so far claimed responsibility for peace between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of Rwanda, between Cambodia and Thailand, between Israel and Iran, between India and Pakistan, between Serbia and Kosovo, between Egypt and Ethiopia, between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and for “doing the Abraham Accords,” all while complaining about a lack of recognition by the Norway-based judges panel.
As Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan pointed out last month, all of Trump’s war-solving braggadocio is “demonstrably untrue” to the extent that several of the listed examples were never even at war.
“Nobody in history has solved eight wars in a period of nine months. And I’ve stopped eight wars, so that’s never happened before. But they’ll have to do what they do. Whatever they do is fine. I know this: I didn’t do it for that, I did it because I saved a lot of lives,” Trump said Thursday while answering a barrage of questions about the prize. “But nobody’s done eight wars.”
The post Norway Is Scared Trump Will Retaliate If He Loses Nobel Peace Prize appeared first on New Republic.
