President Donald Trump made his closing argument for why he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize amid the Iran war ahead of the award’s expected announcement on Friday.
“I settled eight wars, another one is coming,” Trump told the Washington Examiner at the White House on Wednesday. “I got all the hostages [in Gaza] back. I did things that nobody else has ever done. I’m not bragging. I’m just telling you the facts.”
After an announcement regarding the so-called Trump Accounts, tax-advantaged investment and retirement savings accounts created for American children, Trump recalled how Maria Corina Machado, Venezuela‘s opposition leader, provided him with her 2025 award earlier this year after the U.S. strikes against Venezuela and its capture of then-dictator Nicolas Maduro.
“Last time they gave it to a young lady who was a fabulous person, and she said she didn’t deserve it, that I deserved it, and she gave it to me, and I said, ‘Wow, what an honor,’” the president said in the Oval Office.
He added, “When Maria gave me that Nobel Prize, she said, ‘Not only should he get it for this year, but there’s never been anybody in the history of the Nobel Prize that deserves it more.’”
Trump, whose case for the award is considered to have been undermined by the Iran war, defended Operation Epic Fury, contending that he has “stopped maybe the total obliteration of the world because Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, and that’s a positive thing, very positive thing.”
“They have a reputation for maybe not giving it to people like me, but I, whether I get it or not, I’ve done far more, and I think it would be a great discredit to them,” the commander in chief said. “I’m not saying that out of scorn. … Look, [former President Barack] Obama got it, and he didn’t do anything. He still doesn’t know what he got it for. He got it when he got elected, right at the beginning, and he had no idea why he got it.”
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He closed, “But I was very honored to receive it indirectly last time by the recipient, who said nobody in history deserves it more than President Trump? And since then, we’ve done a lot. Since then, I’ve settled, think of it, eight wars and got all the hostages back, and stopped a lot of wars from happening by using the powers of tariffs and lots of other things as a threat against certain countries, so that they did not partake in killing people.”
The Nobel Peace Prize, established by Alfred Nobel, is awarded by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which is appointed by Norway’s Parliament and announces a winner every October based on a majority vote.