Donald Trump’s thuggish campaign to bully his way to the Nobel peace prize should not be the cause for the committee to reject him. There are many more substantial grounds that render him patently unqualified to receive the award.Among the numerous reasons that make him one of the least deserving people in the world who should be honored, he has single-handedly destroyed the United States Agency for International Development, which has saved hundreds of millions of people from hunger and disease, and promoted democracy and the rule of law around the world. In an executive order issued on his inauguration day, 20 January, Trump slandered USAID as “not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values” and claimed that its workers “serve to destabilize world peace”.That act of malice by itself should be sufficient to erase Trump from the longest long list.Clearly, the worthiest candidate for the Nobel peace prize, whether its name was submitted before the deadline or not, is USAID. Since its founding under John F Kennedy in 1961, USAID has supported extensive programs on global health, food security, education and democratic development that, by addressing the root causes of instability and poverty, had promoted a more free, peaceful and prosperous world for 64 years until Trump destroyed it.As a general rule, there should be no shame attached to an organized effort to win the prize by Trump or others. Trump’s lobbying, though, is stained, as is much else about him, by perverse statecraft that has fostered conflict where none previously existed and his unquenchable need for cult-like worship.Several world leaders, such as Benjamin Netanyahu, have written in support of Trump’s nomination at his behest, cynically calculating that it would curry favor for their own often nefarious and warlike purposes. Trump personally pressured India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, to write a letter based on the lie that it was Trump who had “solved” a recent military conflict with Pakistan. Modi was alienated by the improper request. After his refusal to submit a false statement, Trump imposed a 50% tariff on India, which sent Modi flying into the arms of China. There is no existing international prize for this sort of willfully destructive behavior.The encomiums from Trump’s closest aides hailing him as the best candidate are symptoms of the sycophancy that is the eternal mark of authoritarian regimes. Fitting the historical pattern, obsequiousness within a cult of personality substitutes for honesty, fact and evidence. Trump punishes and purges forthright counsel, suppresses factual intelligence and expert information that is not falsified or distorted to achieve predetermined results, and dismisses evidence regarding medicine, the environment and energy derived from the scientific method.The tenor of unctuous servility was perfectly voiced by Steven Witkoff, Trump’s all-purpose international representative, speaking at an August cabinet meeting. “There’s only one thing I wish for,” he said, “that the Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since this Nobel award was ever talked about.”The phrasing of Witkoff’s praise is eerily reminiscent of the words uttered in the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate by the character of Major Ben Marco, played by Frank Sinatra, who has been brainwashed as a prisoner of war held by the North Koreans. He repeats over and over again his admiration for an army sergeant from his unit who has been programmed to be a political assassin on behalf of both the communists and the American far right. “Raymond Shaw,” says Major Marco, “is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.” In the movie, Shaw is awarded a prize – the Congressional Medal of Honor – based on the brainwashed testimony of his fellow soldiers.“No matter what I do, they won’t give it up and I’m not politicking for it,” Trump said. He suggested the efforts to grant him the prize were spontaneous: “I have a lot of people that are.” When he was handed a nomination letter that Netanyahu had submitted, Trump said: “They will never give me a Nobel peace prize. I deserve it.”But Trump’s ludicrous hypocrisy about not pulling levers behind the curtain to solicit nomination also is not a conclusive reason to deny him the prize.Trump’s rancor about not receiving the prize that has not yet been awarded is exactly the same as his resentment that he did not get an Emmy for his reality TV show The Apprentice. For years he ranted: “Should have gotten it.” “I got screwed out of an Emmy.” “The Emmys are all politics.” “Con game.” “Irrelevant.” Then, like the Emmy, he claimed the 2020 presidential election was “rigged” and organized an insurrection to overthrow the democratic result. In his paranoid chain of things wrongly denied him, now it’s the Nobel. Fill in the blank.Trump’s longing for the prize also reflects his anger that Barack Obama received it. Trump’s animus against Obama about the Nobel followed his viciously contrived birther campaign. “Affirmative action,” said Trump. “Rigged.” “He had no idea why he got it.” “If I were named Obama, I would have had the Nobel prize given to me in 10 seconds.”The diplomatic and political friction that Trump has gratuitously produced between the US and Norway with his offensive remarks should also not be the decisive issue that affects the judgment of the committee. In 2018, Trump said: “Why do we want all these people from Africa here? They’re shithole countries … We should have more people from Norway.” His comment evoked nationwide disgust in Norway. “On behalf of Norway: thanks, but no thanks,” tweeted a politician representing Norway’s Conservative party.Trump’s recent 15% tariff levied on Norway, despite its insignificant trade deficit, has damaged its fishing industry. His antipathy toward renewable forms of energy, throwing the entire wind power industry into chaos, has cost the Norwegian state-owned energy company Equinor, which had an ongoing wind project off New York, about $1bn. In July, Trump called the Norwegian finance minister, Jens Stoltenberg, the former head of Nato, “out of the blue”. “He wanted the Nobel prize – and to discuss tariffs,” a Norwegian newspaper reported. But none of these offensive, obnoxious and even malign actions should be dispositive in whether Trump receives the prize.The reasons for denying him the award are much more fundamental and salient. His disqualification for the Nobel is not that he an inveterate liar, transparent faker and bungling schemer. It is that he meets other much more germane and dangerous criteria that were engraved for humankind epochs before the peace prize was ever conceived.Within mere months since reassuming office Trump has become a harbinger across the globe of war, famine, disease and death. The standards by which he should be judged are those described in the Book of Revelation (6:1–8) by the appearance of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Trump rides or presumes to ride all of those dreaded emblems of destruction, which do not foretell any glorious coming of peace, a new heaven and new earth, or prophesy a cleansing moment for repentance, but instead carnage followed by dictatorship and plagues without end.Specifically, rather than biblically, Trump has been an enabler of war. By his actions, he has supported Netanyahu’s offensive war for the complete ethnic cleansing and destruction of Gaza. Through his refusal to put conditions on $17.8bn in military assistance, Trump has made it possible for Netanyahu to ignore the advice of the Israeli army and intelligence leadership not to continue and expand that war.Trump has called for the US to “take over” and “own” Gaza to turn it into a “Riviera of the Middle East”. This entity would generate profits through a US-led trusteeship, private investment in mega-construction projects and the “voluntary” relocation of Palestinians. Trump has held a White House meeting about a plan dubbed the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust – or “Great Trust” – that envisions building the “Gaza Trump Riviera and Islands” and the “Elon Musk Manufacturing Zone” and paying Palestinians $5,000 to relocate. Under this plan, Trump would personally profit in violation of the emoluments clause of the constitution.On Ukraine, Trump initially agreed to the European proposal for a ceasefire that would result in new sanctions if Vladimir Putin did not comply. But as soon as he was face to face with Putin at their summit in Alaska, Trump crumbled to take Putin’s side. The consequence has been the intensification of Russian bombing of Ukrainian civilian targets – as well as the European Union headquarters in Kyiv. Trump’s undermining of the ceasefire initiative was his latest gesture toward Putin of admiration and deference.The Trump White House has said it will “not rule out” military action to seize Greenland, a semi-independent territory of Denmark, a Nato member. Meanwhile, Denmark reports that Trump has deployed political personnel close to the White House to Greenland to agitate for a US takeover and to prepare for possible US military operations there. On 28 August, Denmark’s foreign minister summoned the top US diplomat to warn the Trump administration against its covert influence operation.Trump has repeatedly laid claim to the territory of the Panama Canal Zone and threatened to use military force to seize it. These threats were apparently made in part to pressure the government of Panama to reduce or eliminate the bill for taxes on Trump Organization properties that they were accused of evading there. In 2017, a joint Reuters-NBC News investigation reported that the Trump Ocean Club International hotel and tower in Panama City was a front for international money laundering for narcotics trafficking, dubbed Narco-a-Lago. The Trump Organization asserted it bore no responsibility for the activity within its units.Trump has also repeatedly laid claim to the entire nation of Canada, another Nato member, to be occupied by and added to the United States as a single state. The White House has refused to rule out the use of military force for that purpose.On 21 June, Trump ordered Operation Midnight Hammer, a surprise, coordinated air strike on Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, Isfahan and other locations. The mission involved B-2 bombers dropping massive ordnance penetrator (MOP) “bunker buster” bombs on the Fordow site and other weapons against the other facilities. When Lt Gen Jeffrey Kruse, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, reported a preliminary intelligence assessment that Iran’s nuclear capability had not been “obliterated”, as Trump had boasted, he was summarily fired.Trump has claimed to have brokered a peace agreement between Azerbaijan and Armenia, after the parties came to the White House for a ceremony to sign a peace treaty. Both governments, however, subsequently acknowledged that this was a publicity stunt designed to help Trump with his campaign for the peace prize and that no peace agreement was actually concluded.Trump’s claim to have brokered a peace agreement between India and Pakistan was yet another stunt to burnish his credentials for the prize. When he was snubbed by Modi, Trump used it as a pretext for imposing a punitive tariff. His claim to have brokered a peace agreement between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the withdrawal of Rwandan forces from DRC soil was similarly false. Rwanda-controlled M23 rebels remain on DRC soil, committing massacres in 14 villages in July, and the peace agreement is a fiction.Trump has also enabled the Netanyahu government’s campaign of famine against the population of Gaza, granting Netanyahu impunity for his starvation project, while ordering the US representative to the United Nations not to sign a statement from all 14 other members of the security council that the famine in Gaza is a “man-made crisis” and in violation of international law.A huge famine also rages in Sudan, connected in significant part to the proxy war fought there by a US ally, the United Arab Emirates. Trump’s decision to stop all USAID relief operations as part of his administration’s wholesale demolition of the agency has made the Sudan famine far more acute. As a result, more than 80% of emergency food kitchens have shut down. The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and the International Rescue Committee (IRC) have stated that the funding cuts are directly contributing to deaths from starvation and disease. The NRC warned that inaction has allowed Sudan’s crisis to worsen “beyond measure”.Besides creating the conditions for famine, Trump’s decision to terminate USAID could lead to more than 14 million additional preventable deaths globally by 2030, according to an authoritative July 2025 study in the British medical journal the Lancet – “a staggering number of avoidable deaths”.According to the report, “USAID funding was associated with a 65% reduction in mortality from HIV/Aids (representing 25.5 million deaths), 51% from malaria (8 million deaths), and 50% from neglected tropical diseases (8.9 million deaths)”, among significant decreases in many other diseases. But Trump has wiped out all these programs.At home, Trump has eviscerated the National Institutes for Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and withheld $2.6bn from Harvard University in federal funds including for medical research on cancer and other diseases. After an armed man with a semi-automatic rifle opposed to vaccines fired 150 rounds into the CDC headquarters in Atlanta and murdered a police officer, Trump said absolutely nothing. He has been a stalwart against any restriction on guns, which are almost without exception the weapons used in school massacres, mass shootings and violent crime.“I looked,” reads the Book of Revelation, “and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death.”
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist More
