I would like to congratulate this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, but first we need to help the president of the United States through the discovery that it’s somebody else.
At his rally in Syracuse on Friday, the president explained that he had settled eight wars and therefore deserved eight Nobel Prizes. Eight. Apparently, he’s been keeping track, and someone in Oslo is about to receive an invoice with increasingly hostile payment terms.
I hadn’t realized the prizes accumulated that way. I thought you were recognized for an extraordinary contribution to peace, but apparently you get a stamp every time you announce that a conflict is over, and after eight stamps you can redeem them for a diplomatic incident.
This year’s prize went to Navi Pillay, the former UN human rights chief recognized for her work in international justice and accountability for atrocities. Trump responded by repeatedly explaining that he had never heard of her. That must have been devastating for a woman who spent decades working on human rights. All those years, and she forgot to appear on television during the precise interval between his breakfast and his first complaint about breakfast. Perhaps future nominees could submit their qualifications in a format he recognizes. A laminated photograph. Their name in gold. A brief testimonial from a man who sells pillows.
He also warned, “We will not forget Norway, that you didn’t give this prize.”
Imagine being Norwegian and discovering that you’ve personally offended the president of the United States by going about your Friday while a committee gave someone else a medal. You were just buying bread, and now you need to explain yourself to NATO.
The committee, incidentally, is independent of Norway’s government. This creates a difficult customer service situation because the person demanding to speak to the manager has reached the prime minister, and the prime minister is also not the manager.
Somewhere, I imagine a patient Norwegian official trying to explain the distinction while Trump grows increasingly certain that the fjords are involved.
But the finest detail came during his explanation of why he deserved recognition as a peacemaker. Discussing Iran, he said, “Either they give us everything or they don’t exist any longer.” I would leave that part off the application.
If I were helping him assemble his materials, I would gently suggest that threatening to erase a country might distract the judges from the tenderness of his vision. We could move it to a separate folder, perhaps marked Things to Stop Saying Until After the Ceremony.
It’s a challenging acceptance speech to rehearse. Thank you to the committee, thank you to my family, and I’d like to dedicate this award to everyone who complied before I had to remove them from the map. The eight-prize demand also raises logistical questions. Does he want them presented individually? Would Norway need to read his name eight times while he approaches the stage from slightly different angles? Could they put the medals in an egg carton so he can check that none are missing?
There would have to be an aide responsible for counting them before departure. I would want that count witnessed and notarized. You can’t get halfway across the Atlantic and discover that the president believes somebody pocketed Peace Number Six.
By Saturday morning, he was still listing his claimed accomplishments on Truth Social and complaining that he had not received the “Noble Peace Prize.”
Perhaps that explains the administrative confusion. Norway has been awarding the Nobel, while he has spent the year applying for something from a much smaller organization that recognizes excellence in being Donald. There’s something exhausting beneath the spectacle. An award honoring peace has become another occasion for the world to manage his feelings, with the people living through actual wars reduced to supporting evidence in a complaint about insufficient applause.
Still, I think Norway should prepare. Keep a small box of emergency trophies near the entrance, somewhere easily accessible to visiting dignitaries. The engraving can say Excellent Job Wanting This.
Make eight. We can’t afford to have him count seven.
Well done Shanley - I love this.
Nothing screams PEACE, either, like applying the death penalty to folks on boats hundreds of miles from the USA with no trial and no sentencing guidelines. Or lavishing gifts and praise on other dictators and authors of genocide. Or spending decades enriching yourself while sowing hatred and discord in your own country 24/7.