For days now, Trump has been whining about the world’s lack of recognition for all the groovy peace-making he’s been conducting on behalf of an ungrateful world.
If you’re struggling to see exactly what peace he’s talking about, look no further than the Russian-Ukrainian war he solved within 24 hours of taking office. Or the ceasefire he brokered between Israel and Iran which, as of this writing, has lasted almost half a day. Not to mention all those lives I guess he saved by… cutting off food and medicine to the world’s most vulnerable people?
It is, of course, absurd to describe Donald J. Trump as a man of peace, unless maybe you want to spin his Vietnam War draft-dodging as “conscientious objection.” This is a guy who called for the execution of five innocent teenagers. Who sent the Marines to Los Angeles. Who, only months ago, oversaw the dismantling of the literal United States Institute for Peace. (A dismantling which, thankfully, has now been reversed by the courts.)
Is the whole Peace Prize thing a troll? Maybe. One hesitates to ascribe too much sincerity to his rantings. Then again, nobody thought he actually believed he won the 2020 election, either; now it seems as though he does. Just like he seems to actually believe that windmills cause cancer. Just like he appears to sincerely believe he was chosen by God to lead the nation to ruination a new golden age.
Then again, he wouldn’t be the first person to get a Nobel Peace Prize they didn’t deserve. Obama won one simply for not being George W. Bush. The 1991 Burmese Nobel laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, later turned a blind eye to the persecution of her country’s minority Rohingya population.
They gave one to Henry Kissinger, for God’s sake, a man whose hands were so bloody, his Rolling Stone obituary read “Henry Kissinger, War Criminal, Dead at 100.”
But there was also Nelson Mandela, Albert Schweitzer, Martin Luther King Jr. People who, as Obama said in his Nobel acceptance speech, spoke ”to our highest aspirations.” People who believed, Obama said that, “Our actions can bend history in the direction of justice.”
Does that sound like our current Chief Executive?
While there’s as much basis for awarding him a Nobel Peace Prize for his work as president as there is awarding him an Oscar for his work in Little Rascals, it’s sort of fun to imagine the scene. Picture it: Trump in his monkey suit, bowing his head to receive a medal from some Norwegian dude he ordinarily wouldn’t bother to flick a booger at. Seems odd for a guy we’re told puts America first, last, and always. And hey, what kind of American accepts socialist peace prizes, anyway?
Sure, it’s sort of humorous to consider Trump as Nobel laureate, but the pathetic side more than outweighs the funny.
How can a single human being over the age of three be as needy as our Commander-in-Chief? We are governed by a person governed by bottomless insecurity and depthless self-hatred. If giving him a participation trophy would moderate his excesses, I’d say we should do it.
But it wouldn’t. Nothing would. No amount of power, money, or fame is enough. No honor high enough. No Qatari plane free enough. Give him a Nobel Peace Prize and he’ll start whinging that he should have also won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his 2007 tome Think Big and Kick Ass. He’ll want the Biology Prize for fast-tracking the Covid vaccine he then disavowed. And then he’ll insist on that Oscar.
Maybe we can just keep giving him prizes for the remainder of his term to distract him from the hard business of chopping up the nation and selling it for scrap.
Each night could be a different award. Every night a rotating cast of grave-looking white men presenting him with various made-up honors: “The Jon Voight Award for Excellence in Hair Maintenance” or something.
And still it wouldn’t be enough.
Which is the irony of humanitarian awards like this. I suspect the people most deserving of them are the people least interested in receiving them. They’re the people on the streets protesting the kidnapping of their neighbors. Or fighting government corruption. They’re activists and dissidents and those willing to sacrifice everything in the service of others.
In other words, the best model for winning a Nobel Peace Prize might be to study Donald Trump’s life and conduct your own in exactly the opposite manner.
You might not win an award, but you won’t feel like you need one. The reward will be a life lived in service of others. There may not be a golden toilet in your future, but consider how much better you will feel about your life than the current President of the United States feels about his own. Who knows? Maybe he’ll end up winning one after all, but we know – and, more importantly, he knows – that he’ll always be a loser.
The post Opinion: We Can Give Trump Every Prize He Can Think Of. He’ll Still Be a Loser appeared first on The Daily Beast.
