Donald Trump’s desperate hopes of being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize may be severely hindered, as the majority of the committee that decides who gets the honor has publicly condemned the president.
At least three of the five members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee panel, which selects the recipients of the prestigious award, have spoken out against Trump for his attacks on the press and concerns he is “dismantling” U.S. democracy in his second term, The Washington Post reported.
President Trump has made no secret of his desire to be handed a $1 million Nobel Peace Prize, insisting he has stopped multiple wars since January, including conflicts between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and Israel and Iran. Speaking to reporters at the Oval Office on Friday, Trump took credit for having “settled” seven wars, claiming the number increases to 10 if you include “pre-wars.”
One major hurdle for Trump is that members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee do not appear to be big fans of the president. Jorgen Watne Frydnes, chairman of the panel, mentioned the president by name while decrying “the erosion of freedom of expression even in democratic nations” during 2024.
“President Donald Trump launched more than 100 verbal attacks on the media during his election campaign,” Frydnes told PEN Norway, a group that promotes freedom of expression, last December.
Another panel member, a former Norwegian minister of education, Kristin Clemet, offered a more scathing attack on the first 100 days of Trump’s return to the White House.
“No one can deny that some of the problems Donald Trump has said he will do something about are real. But many of the solutions he chooses, and the way he proceeds, are deeply disturbing,” Clemet wrote for the liberal think tank Civita in May.
“After just over 100 days as president, he is well underway in dismantling American democracy, and he is doing everything he can to tear down the liberal and rules-based world order.”
A third committee member, Norway’s former state secretary in the foreign ministry, Gry Larsen, has also been a public critic of the president for years.
A day before the 2020 election, she uploaded a photo to Facebook wearing a red “Make Human Rights Great Again” hat, parodying Trump’s MAGA merchandise. She also posted on X in 2017 that Trump was “putting millions of lives at risk” by expanding a U.S. foreign aid ban to target international abortion services.
It is unclear whether the other two panel members share similar strong objections to Trump, but one of them, academic Asle Toje, did express some sympathy for Trump during the constant legal issues that occurred during the Biden administration, The Post noted.
Frydnes was coy about whether he would be willing to hand Trump a Nobel Peace Prize when reached for comment by the newspaper, but said that awarding it to a head of state is “perhaps often the most controversial.”
“Both because if you’re a head of state, you have power. You have power, and you’ve used power. You often have blood on your hands if it’s a conflict. But you also have the power to do things afterwards, which complicates the picture,” Frydnes said.
The Norwegian Nobel Institute did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
