For Trump world, the focus shifts to next year’s Nobel Peace Prize

WASHINGTON – Wait until next year.

Public pressure to make Donald Trump the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize laureate began hours after the committee announced Friday that this year’s winner was Maria Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader.

Snubbed by the Nobel Prize selection committee, Trump should be the clear favorite for the prize next year, given the breakthrough he made toward the end of the Gaza war, his supporters said.

Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Ga., said Friday he would introduce a resolution in Congress saying Trump deserved the honor.

“He will be a strong candidate next year, and he should have been a slam dunk this year, but unfortunately the committee got it wrong,” Carter said in an interview. “But they’ve made their decision. So they’ll have a chance to make up for it next year.”

Jason Miller, a former senior Trump campaign official, told NBC News: “The legacy of the Nobel Peace Prize will be irreparably damaged if it is not awarded to President Trump in 2026. The voices calling for President Trump to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2026 will only become louder.” »

Few voices have been louder than Trump’s in asserting that he won the prize this year. The president mounted a rare public campaign to win, building on seven peace deals he says he has reached in trouble spots around the world.

He is getting closer to eighth place. A whirlwind of US-led diplomacy resulted in a ceasefire in Gaza. Hamas militants could release the remaining hostages early next week. And Trump plans to travel to the region this weekend to sign the deal and deliver a speech to the Israeli parliament.

Trump has long said he did not expect Norway’s five-member selection committee to give him the prize. The betting markets saw it the same way. Earlier this week, Polymarket, a prediction site, estimated his chances of winning at 2%.

The deadline to nominate Nobel Prize candidates was January 31, 11 days into Trump’s new term. Still, the committee was free to consider achievements that occurred later in the year as it selected candidates, said Nina Graeger, director of the Oslo Peace Research Institute, which ranks top candidates for the prize.

“Will you get the Nobel Prize? Absolutely not,” Trump said last week before an audience of generals and admirals. “They’ll give it to a guy who hasn’t done anything.”

But he believes it would be beneficial to reach a Middle East peace deal before the committee reveals the winner, said one person who met with him. This way, Trump could argue that the committee process was “rigged”; A president who rightly ended so many conflicts should have received the award that celebrates peace, this person said.

Shortly after the winner was announced, Steven Cheung, White House communications director, posted on social media that “the Nobel Committee has proven that it puts politics before peace.”

A lot can happen in a year. If the Gaza peace deal doesn’t hold — if fighting resumes and more Gazans die in the crossfire — Trump likely won’t be credited with raising false hopes about peace, foreign policy analysts say.

The committee will want to see whether the peace deal that Trump describes as a historic triumph is real or fleeting.

“We don’t know if the peace plan will be viable and sustainable,” Graeger said. “He should certainly be recognized for his efforts to end the war and really engage in that process. But there are many obstacles in implementing the plan.”

A second question is whether the “America First” president chooses to work more closely with other countries in the coming year. In creating the prize, Swedish inventor and entrepreneur Alfred Nobel felt that the winner should be someone who had “done the most or best work for the brotherhood of nations,” among other criteria.

The fact that he has threatened to acquire Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal does not help Trump’s chances, analysts say. The commission is unlikely to reward him for withdrawing from cross-border projects such as the Paris climate agreement or the World Health Organization, they said.

Kåre Aas, Norway’s former ambassador to the United States, said Trump would be a “strong candidate” for the prize if he ended the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars. However, the president would not be a candidate, he added.

Trump’s statements about absorbing Greenland and Canada “would also be reviewed by the committee,” Aas said. “The committee will not necessarily award him the Nobel Peace Prize if there is peace in Gaza and Ukraine next year.”