President Donald Trump has insisted nothing was standing in the way of the Nobel Committee awarding him this year’s peace prize, including the prize’s own rules.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on his way to give a speech marking the Israel-Hamas ceasefire agreement, Trump complained that the committee should have taken the extraordinary—and logistically unrealistic—step of providing this year’s prize for events that took place within the last few weeks.
“Now, in all fairness to the Nobel Committee, it was for 2024. This was picked for 2024,” he said. “But there are those that say you can make an exception because a lot of things happened during 2025 that are done and complete and great. But I did this not for Nobel; I did this for saving lives.”
Nominations for the $1 million Nobel Peace Prize, which are awarded every year in October, must be received by Feb. 1. By March, the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which oversees the award, has prepared its shortlist, according to the nomination and selection guidelines.
The committee reviews the candidates between March and August, and votes on the winner at the beginning of October.
Trump has been campaigning for the award for months. Earlier this year, he cold-called members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which chooses the winners, according to Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv.
He also launched a desperate last-minute bid on Oct. 10 to convince the committee that he was worthy of this year’s award, sharing a flurry of posts and headlines about how he deserved the prize.
The president has long had a chip on his shoulder over the fact that his predecessor, Barack Obama, won the prize in 2009.
“He got the prize for doing nothing. He got elected, and they gave it to Obama for doing absolutely nothing but destroying our country,” Trump raged on Thursday.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, he made the case for why he deserved special consideration outside the prize’s normal rules.
“This will be my eighth war that I’ve solved,” Trump said, without bothering to say which ones. “I’m good at solving wars. I’m good at making peace, and it’s an honor to do it. I saved millions of lives. Millions of lives.”
He also insisted that he “got every one of those done for the most part within a day.”
Norwegian Nobel Committee Chair Jørgen Watne Frydnes, however, told reporters last week that the committee was used to lobbying and media pressure, but that the room is “filled with both courage and integrity.”
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