{"id":117932,"date":"2025-10-12T19:40:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-12T19:40:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/117932\/"},"modified":"2025-10-12T19:40:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-12T19:40:07","slug":"nobel-prize-not-designed-for-someone-such-as-donald-trump-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/117932\/","title":{"rendered":"Nobel Prize not designed for someone such as Donald Trump \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is one piece of gold that US<\/a> president Donald Trump<\/a> is never going to get his short, stubby fingers on: an 18-karat gold medal with three naked men embracing, awarded to those who promote peace, democracy and human rights.<\/p>\n

The Nobel Peace Prize<\/a> has been given to some beauts \u2013 such as Henry Kissinger, for helping end the Vietnam War he perpetuated to aid Richard Nixon\u2019s re-election.<\/p>\n

But the prize was not designed for someone such as Trump. The Norwegian Nobel Committee would no doubt discontinue the award before it would give it to him.<\/p>\n

His longing is partly inspired by his jealousy of Barack Obama<\/a>, who absurdly got a Nobel Peace Prize after only eight months in office for just being a cool dude. Our 79-year-old president admitted recently that he also envies Obama for the way he airily bopped down the stairs of Air Force One, while he himself has to slowly creep down, grasping the railing, worried that he\u2019ll fall and look as unsteady as Joe Biden.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always thought we were lucky that Trump was not more prone to invasions, \u00e0 la his fellow draft dodger Dick Cheney, given his belligerent persona, vengeful nature, fascination with military trappings and UFC macho bluster. He insisted on having a military parade in Washington in June, and he\u2019s planning a UFC fight next June on the White House South Lawn for the country\u2019s 250th birthday.<\/p>\n

Even though most liberals have tried to paint Trump as a deranged hawk at heart, the former real estate developer always seemed, blessedly, more drawn to the art of the deal than shock and awe. While he bombed Iran\u2019s nuclear facilities, threatens Venezuela and strikes alleged drug boats off its coast, he more often seems to consider war a waste of time and money that could be better spent building a beachfront property in North Korea or the Gaza Strip<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnlike other candidates for the presidency, war and aggression will not be my first instinct,\u201d he said in his first foreign policy speech in Washington during the 2016 race. He added, \u201cA superpower understands that caution and restraint are really, truly signs of strength.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Who is Nobel Peace laureate Mar\u00eda Corina Machado?Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Even though he tepidly supported the invasion of Iraq, amid the rah-rah patriotic push to punish somebody, anybody, for 9\/11, he would later call it \u201cthe single worst decision ever made\u201d.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Trump snub shows Nobel committee placed \u2018politics over peace\u2019, says White HouseOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

In May, he denounced the debacles of \u201cneocons\u201d and \u201cinterventionists\u201d, vowing a future \u201cwhere people of different nations, religions and creeds are building cities together, not bombing each other out of existence\u201d.<\/p>\n

If Trump can untie the Gordian knot of the Middle East, it will be a spectacular feat \u2013 although it will have been accomplished by accommodating Binyamin Netanyahu<\/a>\u2019s brutal annihilation and starvation of Gaza. And, of course, there\u2019s probably some money in it for him and his family somewhere.<\/p>\n

But the region is a graveyard of peace deals. As David Sanger wrote in the New York Times: \u201cMuch could go wrong in coming days, and in the Middle East it often does. The \u2018peace\u2019 deal Mr Trump heralded on Truth Social on Wednesday evening may look more like another temporary pause in a war that started long before Israel\u2019s founding in 1948, and has never ended.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Tom Friedman pointed out, it is Trump\u2019s moral indifference to the human rights transgressions of his partners in the peace plan that allows him to break through old paradigms.<\/p>\n

That is the same moral indifference that will prevent him from ever getting a Nobel. You can\u2019t get a medal for promoting democracy when you tried to overthrow the democracy you were running.<\/p>\n

He has shown utter disdain for the US constitution and the laws that have made the country the greatest democracy in the world.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Keith Duggan: You go to bed dreaming of a Nobel Peace prize and wake up to find a guy with latex glovesOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Once in 2016, I asked him about the violence that was breaking out at his rallies. He said he thought it added some excitement to the proceedings.<\/p>\n

Trump is constantly posting cruel, nasty images on Truth Social. He loves gladiatorial combat, the scenes of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers roughing up people, even if they have their American passports in their pockets.<\/p>\n

What sort of person \u2013 much less a president \u2013 does not object to headlines such as this in The Hill: \u201cTop DHS Official Defends ICE Officer Who Shot Pastor With Pepper Ball\u201d?<\/p>\n

The Rev David Black was protesting peacefully at an ICE facility in a Chicago suburb, hands out, offering to pray with officers, when an ICE officer on a roof shot him in the head with a pepper ball.<\/p>\n

While Trump may have sparked dancing in the streets in the Middle East, he\u2019s sparked danger in the streets in America. He is siccing American troops on blue cities, distorting the National Guard\u2019s largely humanitarian mission and turning it into, as the New York Times\u2019s John Ismay put it, \u201ca partisan strike force at the whim of the president\u201d.<\/p>\n

Trump expressed another chilling whim to the generals recently when he said he had told Pete Hegseth<\/a>: \u201cWe should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even as he says he should have won the Nobel five times over for his work solving foreign conflicts, he is creating conflicts in America, concocting perilous crises in American cities.<\/p>\n

Gov Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma, the Republican chair of the National Governors Association, told the New York Times that the president was violating states\u2019 rights: \u201cOklahomans would lose their mind if Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration.\u201d<\/p>\n

While he\u2019s freeing hostages in Gaza, Trump is seizing some here. He\u2019s forcing Pam Bondi to play the tortured servant Renfield to his dark, narcissistic Dracula. She is scurrying around eating insects, doing the president\u2019s dirty work of indicting his foes and purging anyone who worked with them. The Department of Vengeance, n\u00e9e Department of Justice, has indicted James Comey, the former FBI director, and Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, and more Trumped-up vindictive indictments are surely coming.<\/p>\n

Nixon had an enemies list, but he didn\u2019t do much with it. He could only dream of doing the kind of stuff Trump has got away with.<\/p>\n

Trump seems oblivious to the paradox of enforcing peace abroad and disrupting it badly at home, of soothing violence overseas and inflaming it here.<\/p>\n

While he\u2019s rechristened the Pentagon the chesty \u201cDepartment of War\u201d, he\u2019s bragging about forming a Board of Peace \u2013 with himself, of course, the chief peacenik \u2013 to oversee Gaza\u2019s new governing body.<\/p>\n

The contradiction is hard to square. It\u2019s not going to win our president a peace prize.<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared in The New York Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is one piece of gold that US president Donald Trump is never going to get his short,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":117933,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[4750,9,10,356,18,13,14,3761,6,19,17,11,12,15,16,5,20500,51692,20658,7,8,384],"class_list":{"0":"post-117932","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-barack-obama","9":"tag-breaking-news","10":"tag-breakingnews","11":"tag-donald-trump","12":"tag-eire","13":"tag-featured-news","14":"tag-featurednews","15":"tag-gaza-strip","16":"tag-headlines","17":"tag-ie","18":"tag-ireland","19":"tag-latest-news","20":"tag-latestnews","21":"tag-main-news","22":"tag-mainnews","23":"tag-news","24":"tag-nobel-prize","25":"tag-pete-hegseth","26":"tag-richard-nixon","27":"tag-top-stories","28":"tag-topstories","29":"tag-united-states"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117932\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}