Although it is hard to quantify such things, one of the most repugnant acts Donald Trump committed in his first term was presenting the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the sleazoid Rush Limbaugh.
It happened in February 2020, during the State of the Union address. Incomparable Speaker Nancy Pelosi, herself a much-deserving recipient of the honor, famously tore up Trump’s speech, a moment that became the highlight of the evening, and a snaphost of history.
Awarding the medal to the despicable racist, homophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic — did I miss anything? — Limbaugh disgraced our nation’s highest civilian honor.
Trump did not do this in the traditional ceremony in a White House setting. He deliberately staged a grotesque spectacle in what used to be the revered House chamber — before Jan 6 insurrectionists and Speaker Mike Johnson soiled it. Introduced by Harry Truman and expanded upon by John F. Kennedy, the medal has been a defining measure of valiant citizenship.
Since then, Trump has crassly turned it into an award for allegiance to one man, as evidenced by Sean Hannity receiving it too. I should imagine that the medal was liquified once it touched the demonic Fox News host.
I’ve been thinking about that Limbaugh moment since Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado presented Trump with something he did not deserve: her Nobel Peace Prize medal.
The Nobel Committee and Foundation quickly clarified that the prize cannot be transferred or shared. Trump, sickly obsessed with winning a Nobel, accepted the framed medal because he believes he deserves one for “ending eight wars.” He didn’t, of course. Public figures in Norway called the gesture “absurd,” warning that it damaged the reputation of an award meant to honor genuine contributions to human dignity and peace.
Human dignity and peace are about as far away from Trump as Norway.
To make matters even more perverse and offensive, Trump sent a missive to Norway’s prime minister over the weekend, declaring that because he was not awarded the Peace Prize, he “no longer feel[s] an obligation to think purely of peace.”
The petty tyrant conflated his perceived “snub” with his broader geopolitical delusion that Greenland — governed by Denmark — should belong to him.
Trump’s behavior is an affront to every individual who has earned the Nobel Peace Prize. I was honored to work for a few years with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UNIPCC), which shared the Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore in 2007.
I helped lead a multi-year, global public relations effort on behalf of the UNIPCC. We assisted some of the 800 scientists in communicating their vaunted research in the run-up to the signing of the 2015 Paris Climate Accords — an agreement Trump has tried to bludgeon into irrelevance.
I can tell you from experience that those scientists deserved the Nobel. They are heroes. They work for the panel without pay, devoting their lives to slowing the existential threat of global warming.
They are making a real difference in the lives of all of us. Trump trashes them, just as he demeans all Peace Prize recipients who labor for the greater good.
Global and national honors are meant to do something remarkable. They exist for a reason. They rise above politics, controversy, and selfish ambition, and function as a civic trust. They are instruments that tell future generations what a society values, remembers, and aspires to become. Instead of lighting a path forward, Trump regresses, seeking to mangle, warp and darken.
He has also tried to disfigure, distort, and obscure the illustrious John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and its acclaimed annual Honors. Both were designed as cultural pedestals, celebrating artistic excellence and contribution. Trump not only slapped his name — illegally — onto the building and its hallways, he also hijacked the awards themselves.
His selections for the Kennedy Center Honors read like a variety show from 50 years ago: a cultural era Trump longs to resurrect. While artistic judgment is inherently subjective, Trump pushed his involvement to absurd lengths, ostentatiously inserting himself as host and centerpiece of the awards ceremony.
The resulting record-low ratings were fitting payback for his intrusion. But Trump will return, and rechristen the awards as the Trump-Kennedy Center Honors. The horror of it all.
His behavior regarding the Nobel Peace Prize reveals the same pattern. Unable to control an institution, Trump attempts to delegitimize and overwrite it. He frames the Nobel selection process as biased, rigged, and corrupt, simply because it refuses to validate his ego.
In Trump’s mind, he deserves a peace prize for invading countries, kidnapping leaders, and threatening to seize allied nations — militarily or otherwise — against the will of their people. Yes, those are truly Nobel-worthy credentials.
In Trump’s bulbously blubbering brain, honors are not earned through humility, sacrifice, or talent. They exist to soothe his profound insecurities or to serve as props for his vain and simpleminded supporters.
To Trump, the very definition of a sybarite, honors are reduced to plaques of undeserved adulation and favoritism. Prestige is replaced by pettiness. Achievement becomes irrelevant.
This is where “guilt by association” becomes dangerous. Trump does not accidentally tarnish institutions. He intentionally sullies them so they can no longer judge him, restrain his future abuses, or stand as moral counterweights to his behavior. He wants to appear bigger than the institutions, and the awards, themselves.
Instead, as with everything else he touches, Trump diminishes their luster and corrodes the legitimacy of earning honor through merit.
To him, these honors are merely extensions of personal and presidential branding. It’s no different from the bogus Wikipedia entry Trump shared, claiming he was the “acting president of Venezuela.” He seeks to falsify his biography by implying he has the Nobel, or positioning himself as the arbiter of American culture.
Honors are fragile. They only work when they belong to a free society, not to an autocratic asinine officeholder desperate for shameful praise.
Trump thinks he’s writing a glorious history all about himself. But this history he’s creating steps over the line, and lands in the dustbin of history. One day, Trump’s name will sit alongside Caligula, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Tsar Nicholas II.
All failed emperors, who never knew when to stop.
- John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her “Best 25 of 2025.”
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