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Donald Trump was thirsty for diplomacy’s biggest medal. He woke up Friday, still parched.
Even before he returned to the White House in January, the President has been waging a far-from-subtle campaign for a Nobel Peace Prize. On Thursday, Trump made a last-minute pitch for the biggest prize in diplomacy, telling reporters in the Oval Office that he accomplished what no one else has. “I know this: that 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,” Trump said during an Oval Office meeting with the President of Finland.
It was a big swing that turned into a bigger whiff.
The deadline to nominate a person or organization was Jan. 31, just days into Trump’s second term. Most of the achievements that Trump has touted as a reason he should win have come after that date. So too did most of the nominations for Trump to get it—many of them from world leaders who were widely seen as doing it to curry favor with him.
Still, Trump has been relentless in his pursuit. That did not sway the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which on Friday said the recognition was going 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.”
Still, with headlines of a nascent peace between Israel and Hamas dominating the moment, Trump was holding hope as late as this week that he could join the ranks of Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, and Nelson Mandela.
Read More: Why Trump Didn’t Deserve the Nobel
Trump, fueled by a bone-deep contempt for Barack Obama—who won the plaudit in his first year as President—has been shameless in his bid to become the fifth person in his role to get the prestigious nod for those who chase peace, disarmament, and international cooperation. On the surface, those markers do not exactly align with Trump’s record of isolationism, antagonism, and domestic militantism. (For more on why his winning the prize was always unlikely, check out this column from the director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo.)
But facts don’t matter to Trump. In his mind, he’s the bringer of peace, ender of wars, champion of tranquility, and more deserving than any of the 337 others to receive nominations this year. Winning would mean Trump had drawn a prize that proved elusive to former President Bill Clinton, who helped broker the 1993 Oslo Accords and presided over the Camp David talks in 2000 that both got within striking distance of peace between Israelis and Palestinians. In his telling, Trump has ended as many as eight wars on his watch, although those claims are at best iffy. And the backlash would have been seismic.
The push has been in the making for years. In 2018, he told his first-term Cabinet he deserved the honor. (That was also the same year that it was disclosed that two nominations for Trump were forgeries.) In June, he told reporters near his golf club in New Jersey that he “should’ve gotten it four or five times.” In September, he told the United Nations that he deserved the win. And a week later, he told Generals and Admirals summoned to Washington for a pep rally that denying him the prize would be “a big insult to our country.”
But ever the troll, Trump seemed to pre-but his rejection. “They won’t give me a Nobel Peace Prize because they only give it to liberals,” Trump said in June. And last month, he again couched his loss as expected. “Will you get the Nobel Prize? Absolutely not.” And again on Thursday, he said he would be fine with a snub: “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.”
If this grievance feels familiar, there is a good reason: it’s a mirror image of his perceived slights from the Emmys. Trump never got over his zero wins for his turn as the host of The Apprentice. And for someone who awards himself club championships at golf courses he owns and prints fake covers of TIME, the self-promotion is to be expected.
But a Nobel prize is in its own league. And unlike other trinkets that Trump secured through bravado and bluster, the international panel did not bend. No amount of bullying could buy Trump a prize for peace, an irony lost only on the President.
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The post Trump Loses Nobel Peace Prize He Shamelessly Campaigned For appeared first on TIME.
