President Donald Trump has made it no secret that he covets a Nobel Peace Prize.
He consistently touts his work as “president of peace,” negotiating multiple deals around the world. He even appeared at the FIFA World Cup drawing last month to personally accept the inaugural peace prize from the organization after he was rejected by the Nobel committee.
So you could be forgiven for thinking the stunning capture of former Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, over the weekend in Caracas, might complicate his ambitions for the prize in the future.
Republicans don’t see it that way.
“If Yasser Arafat can win the Nobel Peace Prize, the possibilities are endless,” Matt Dole, a GOP strategist based in Ohio, said.
Arafat, a former chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was part of a trio of Nobel Peace Prize winners in 1994, along with Israeli leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, who were awarded “for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East.”
“I think Trump sees what he’s doing as peacemaking,” Dole said. “This is not a war in Venezuela. This was a law enforcement action. I think he intends to be in Venezuela with some allies to stabilize that nation and to provide them the freedom that the people there obviously want. So I think as we look back, I think that won’t look war-like, I think that will look peaceful.”
In the immediate aftermath of the Maduro operation, Trump said the U.S. will “run” Venezuela even as acting president Delcy Rodriguez has — at least publicly — resisted American oversight. He has also signaled a willingness to send U.S. military forces into Colombia, Greenland, and Mexico and warned that Cuba would “fall” in the aftermath of Maduro’s capture.
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While speaking to House Republicans at the newly named Trump-Kennedy Center on Monday, the president appeared unrepentant about his actions in Venezuela. “We had a lot of boots on the ground, but it was amazing,” Trump said. “And think of it, nobody was killed. And on the other side, a lot of people were killed. Unfortunately, I say that.”
Other Trump comments bragging about American military weaponry are not likely to help his case for a peace prize either. “Nobody has our weapons. Nobody has the quality of our weapons,” Trump told Republicans. “The problem is we don’t produce them fast enough. We’re going to start producing them much faster.”
Trump has estimated that the U.S. could stay in Venezuela for 18 months and said the Latin American nation’s elections won’t take place in 30 days in an interview with NBC News. Meanwhile, Venezuela’s opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, appeared to flatter Trump with praise during an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News’s Hannity.
“Because this is a prize of the Venezuelan people, certainly we want to give it to him and share it with him,” Machado said about the Nobel Prize.
Machado’s comments come after Trump reportedly ruled her out to succeed Maduro due to his consternation that she received the peace prize instead of him. The president said on Saturday that Machado “doesn’t have the support within, or the respect within, the country,” to follow Maduro, but “she’s a very nice woman,” despite her support of U.S. opposition to Maduro.
The Trump administration remains adamant that the president “deserves the Nobel Peace Prize many times over,” in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
“His direct involvement in major conflicts, leveraging tools from America’s military might to our superior consumer market, has brought peace to decades-long wars around the world,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said. “The President’s legacy is already cemented as Peacemaker-in-Chief, so it is no surprise that he is being nominated left and right. However, as the President has said, he doesn’t care about the recognition — only saving lives.”
The key to winning the Nobel prize
Political experts claimed that if Trump can reach a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia and enforce the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that would bolster his chances for the prize.
“I don’t think it risks his Nobel Peace Prize, because, in fact, if he does bring about peace in Ukraine or Gaza, I think he might get a Nobel Peace Prize,” Philip Brenner, a professor emeritus at American University, who studies U.S.-Latin American relations, said. “But it’s not going to happen while he’s waging a war in South America. And in fact, if he tries to send troops in, it is … a 20-year, 15-year war, the way it was in Afghanistan and Iraq. And so this is exactly what he promised he wouldn’t do.”
Brenner also pointed to the former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 with his counterpart Le Duc Tho, ending the Vietnam War. “He bombed Vietnam. It was merciless, and he caused millions of casualties. A million Vietnamese died during that war in North Vietnam, and yet he won the Nobel Peace Prize,” he added. “But he did so after the fighting stopped. While the fighting stopped, no person has ever won the Nobel Peace.”
Trump’s “undeniable” efforts to reduce the level of violence in Gaza are a notable peace-related accomplishment for the president, Christopher Gelpi, director of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at the Ohio State University, said.
But the Venezuela operation has faced widespread claims that the U.S. violated international law, and the legality of the mission has not been definitively settled.
“It is difficult to see how the Nobel committee would give the prize to someone who shows such contempt for international law,” he said. “Moreover, Trump has not made any attempt to support the actual winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Machado, in the process of this operation. Instead of installing a legitimately elected leader, Trump says that he will “run” Venezuela himself. Again, this is not something the Nobel committee is likely to honor.”
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Trump’s threats to take Greenland from Denmark’s territory to U.S. territory would upend the NATO alliance, Denmark Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has warned, and the possibility of more U.S. strikes on Iran would likely thwart any chance of a Nobel prize. It also contradicts Trump’s America First ideology that he campaigned on during the 2024 presidential race.
“This is a very stark change from what Trump ran on. He said he doesn’t want to have these foreign entanglements. He doesn’t want the U.S. to be the policeman of the world,” Jonathan Hanson, a political scientist at the University of Michigan who studies the role of democracy and authoritarian regimes, said.
“But yet, we take this action in Venezuela, and he’s talking about similar kinds of actions in other places,” he continued. “That is a complete about-face from the kinds of policies that Trump promised.”
Republicans claimed it was more important for Trump to focus on taking the right actions on foreign policy over awards, citing the opposition Trump has long faced from the mainstream.
“The president deserves credit for a lot of things from 2017 to 2021 and over the last year that he doesn’t get credit for, because the powers that be that make those decisions are aligned against his worldview,” Dole said. “And I think he’s frustrated by that, and I think he has a right to be frustrated by that. So I don’t know that he gets the Nobel Peace Prize. He may have to settle for the FIFA Peace Prize. But of course, the important thing, and I know he knows this too, is doing the right thing in the first place.”