President Donald Trump, who has long declared himself more than deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize, isn’t getting his hopes up that he’ll be announced as the 2025 laureate on Friday.
Multiple senior White House officials and out-of-government advisers maintained to the Washington Examiner that the president is deserving of the award but privately doubted that he’ll win, so much so that the White House hasn’t planned any ceremony regarding Friday’s announcement.
“If he gets nominated, the president will probably Truth and say, ‘Thank you,’” one senior aide stated frankly. “I don’t think there’s anything super dramatic planned.”
“I think he thinks he deserves it, but he isn’t holding his breath,” that person added.
“As the president says, it’ll probably go to someone who writes a book about Trump, but it won’t go to Trump himself,” one senior White House official noted. “He says that privately, and he said that in different words publicly.”
Multiple individuals and groups, ranging from Republican lawmakers to Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet to the family members of hostages held in captivity by Hamas, have publicly claimed that they’ve nominated Trump for the award.
But nominations for the 2025 slate of Nobel prizes closed on Jan. 31, and it remains unclear if Trump was actually nominated in time to be considered for this year’s prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, which oversees the annual laureate selection process, declined to comment on Trump’s inclusion on the list of the more than 300 people and groups up for consideration this year. Furthermore, the committee seals its deliberations for 50 years, so unless the committee specifically confirms that Trump was among this year’s crop of nominees on Friday, the world won’t find out for decades if he was seriously considered in 2025.
The White House is similarly in the dark, with one senior official telling the Washington Examiner they have “no idea” if Trump is in the running.
Still, Trump winning on Friday isn’t totally out of the question.
Polymarket, a digital prediction market, saw Trump’s chances of winning jump from 1% to 5% on Wednesday after the president announced that both Israel and Hamas had agreed to the initial phase of his 20-point Gaza peace plan.
According to Polymarket, political activist Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of former Russian opposition leader Alexander Navalny, maintains the best Nobel Peace Prize chances of any individual nominee with 9%, as of Wednesday evening, while Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms hold the best chance of any nominee at 30%.
One longtime Trump adviser bemoaned the timing of Trump’s breakthrough on Gaza, joking that had it come earlier in the year, the committee itself “would’ve been forced” to award the prize to the president.
“I’m being a little melodramatic, but I think after his work on Gaza, there’s no way you can genuinely argue against him winning next year if he doesn’t end up winning on Friday,” that person stated. “I mean, they gave it to [former President Barack] Obama, in his first year in office, for basically nothing. But peace in the Middle East? That has to mean something, and everyone knows it.”
Trump has allegedly been nominated twice before for the Nobel Prize, first in 2018 for his efforts to normalize relations between North and South Korea and again in 2020 for his role in brokering the Abraham Accords.
And the president has repeatedly stressed to the press, foreign dignitaries, and just about anyone who will listen that he would view never being named a Peace Prize laureate as an insult.
“Will you get the Nobel Prize? Absolutely not. They’ll give it to some guy that didn’t do a damn thing,” the president told Pentagon leaders in Quantico, Virginia, on Sept. 30, claiming that the multiple wars he’s helped end since January make him more than deserving. “It’ll be a big insult to our country, I will tell you that.”
And the president again downplayed expectations Wednesday while fielding questions from reporters at the White House.
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“I have no idea,” he responded when asked if he believes he will win on Friday. “We settled seven wars. We’re close to settling an eighth, and I think we’ll end up settling the Russia situation, which is horrible.”
“So I don’t think anybody in history has settled that many,” Trump added. “But perhaps they’ll find a reason not to give it to me.”