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He’s a winner in his own mind

The White House prepared a nice little binky for the baby president:

It is full of many lies, but this one is especially bold:

I think he has convinced himself that he actually won it:

In recent rallies, President Donald Trump has repeatedly conflated winning a Nobel Peace Prize with being nominated for one, and has wrongly faulted the media for ignoring his nomination after making former President Barack Obama’s nomination in 2009 “the biggest story I’ve ever seen.”

The media attention for Obama came after he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump has been nominated, but that’s not the “big thing” he makes it out to be. There are 318 candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize for 2020 — 211 are individuals and 107 organizations.

Any one of thousands of people can nominate someone for the prestigious award. And two people have come forward saying they nominated Trump.

But on its website, the Nobel committee warns not to attach too much importance to a nomination.

“Any person or organization can be nominated by anyone eligible to nominate,” the committee states. The Norwegian Nobel Committee has no input into submissions, though it decides who actually wins the prize. “To simply be nominated is therefore not an endorsement or extended honour to imply affiliation with the Nobel Peace Prize or its related institutions,” the committee states.

Nonetheless, Trump has touted the nomination repeatedly at campaign rallies, on Twitter and in TV ads.

On Sept. 9, Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a far-right Norwegian politician, announced on Fox News that he had nominated Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize.

“For his merit, I think he has done more trying to create peace between nations than most other Peace Prize nominees,” Tybring-Gjedde said.

In his nominating letter, Tybring-Gjedde cited Trump’s role in establishing relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. He also cited Trump’s “key role in facilitating contact between conflicting parties and … creating new dynamics in other protracted conflicts, such as the Kashmir border dispute between India and Pakistan, and the conflict between North and South Korea, as well as dealing with the nuclear capabilities of North Korea.”

Two days later, Magnus Jacobsson, a member of Sweden’s Parliament for the Christian Democratsannounced via Twitter that he, too, had nominated Trump for the award, along with the governments of Kosovo and Serbia “for their joint work for peace and economic development.”

Nominations for a Nobel Peace Prize can be made by any one of perhaps hundreds of thousands of eligible people, including, according to the Nobel website, “university rectors or chancellors, professors of political and social science, history, philosophy, law and theology; leaders of peace research institutes and institutes of foreign affairs; members of national assemblies, governments, and international courts of law; previous Nobel Peace Prize Laureates; board members of organizations and institutions that have received the Nobel Peace Prize; present and past members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee; and former advisers of the Norwegian Nobel Institute.”

The Nobel committee does not provide a list of the nominees. In fact, the names of nominees, and who nominated them, are not released by the Nobel committee for 50 years, and only leak out when people make them public, as Tybring-Gjedde and Jacobsson did.

The Nobel committee does, however, release the number of nominations. This year, there are 318 candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize — 211 individuals and 107 organizations. That’s the fourth highest number of candidates in the award’s history. The five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee narrows the list of nominees to a small group and then picks a winner.

According to the Nobel Prize website, simply being nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize is “not an endorsement or extended honour to imply affiliation with the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Indeed, some of history’s most vilified figures have been nominated for the prize. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was nominated twice: in 1945 for his effort to end World War II and again in 1948 by a professor from the Czech Republic. And fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was nominated in 1935 by two law professors, one from Germany and the other from France. (Adolf Hitler was nominated in 1939 — the nomination was later withdrawn — by “an anti-fascist member of the Swedish parliament who never intended his submission to be taken seriously,” according to Nobel archives.)

This is not the first time Trump has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Tybring-Gjedde, who nominated Trump this month, and another far-right politician, Per-Willy Amundsen, said in June 2018 they had nominated Trump for the honor following Trump’s nuclear weapons summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

In February 2019, Trump claimed in a White House press conference that Japan’s prime minister Shinzo Abe wrote him a letter in which he said he had nominated Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize, also related to his negotiations with North Korea. Abe declined to confirm that, though the Asahi Shimbun newspaper “cited an unnamed government source as saying the nomination came in response to an ‘unofficial’ U.S. request,” according to the Washington Post. Other than publicly disclosing the letter, though, Trump did not otherwise publicize the nomination, and he did not win the prize that year.

But Trump has insisted he will win a Nobel Peace Prize, or at least that he should.

Trump’s talk on the trail about this was just pathetically cringeworthy:

“Can you believe it, in one week they nominated me, not for one, but for two Nobel prizes,” Trump said at a rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on Sept. 19. “But you know, you have a president, you love your president, and your president gets honored, because I’m not being honored, you’re being honored with the Nobel Peace Prize, for Israel, what we did with Israel.”

(He wasn’t nominated for two Nobel prizes; he was nominated by two people for the same prize. And, of course, he was not honored — at least not yet — with the prize.)

Trump went on relate a story about how he went home to watch the network news with his wife in hopes of hearing about his nomination.

“This is going to be big,” Trump said he told First Lady Melania Trump. “This is going to be big tonight. We just got honored, this is big. Nobel Peace, can you imagine?”

But to his embarrassment, he said, “I wasn’t covered. I got the Nobel Peace Prize nomination, a Peace Prize, Nobel nomination. And they didn’t cover it.”

And, naturally he whined like a little baby that ir wasn’t faaaaaiiir:

“I think I’ll get a Nobel Prize for a lot of things,” Trump said during a press conference on Sept. 23, 2019. “I think I’m going to get a Nobel Prize for a lot of things, if they gave it out fairly, which they don’t.”

I expect going forward that Trump will just claim he did win it and his cult will believe that anyone who says otherwise is fake news. I’d imagine there will be a lot of that.



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