Peace Rage

 DONALD TRUMP AND THE NOBEL PRIZE

Pondering how to write about the week’s biggest news story, I’ve found myself in an ethical quandary. Last week I wrote about the inglorious and sometimes farcical history of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The week before that, I wrote about what a rancid old barbarian Donald Trump is.
This week these two positions of mine collided, perhaps irreconcilably, when the Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded to the Venezuelan dissident Maria Machado. 

On the face of it, Machado’s victory seemed well-deserved. Here is a woman who has risked her personal freedom to defend and uphold democratic values in her unhappy native land. “Democracy is in retreat internationally,” said the Nobel Committee, when announcing Machado’s victory. By awarding the prize to Machado, the Committee wanted to give the world a timely reminder that democracy “is the foundation of peace.”

Who could argue with this claim? Who could deny that the Nobel Prize would seem, on this occasion, to have gone to a worthy recipient?

Well, Donald Trump could. In his view, Machado’s victory was a nauseating travesty of justice, because the prize clearly should have gone to someone else – namely, Donald J. Trump himself. After all, Trump has been hailed, by no less an authority than his own White House, as “the peace president”. This is a man who has spent a whole year of his life, off and on, tirelessly and shamelessly angling to win the Nobel, which is more than you can say for Machado. 

Earlier this month, as Nobel season approached, Trump made one last brazen pitch for the prize. On Truth Social, while announcing that he had just masterminded a ceasefire in Gaza, Trump underscored his Nobel credentials by quoting, in all caps and with an exclamation mark, the words of Jesus H. Christ himself. “BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS!” he posted ...

The rest of this article can be found over at my Substack page [click here to read the whole thing].