Trump says not winning Nobel would be ‘insult’ to U.S.

U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday it would be an “insult” to the United States if he does not receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his self-proclaimed role in solving multiple wars.

Mr. Trump, who has long sought the prize that will be unveiled on October 10, made the latest push for his case a day after he announced a peace plan to end the war in Gaza.

“Will you get the Nobel Prize? Absolutely not. They’ll give it to some guy that didn’t do a damn thing,” Mr. Trump said during a speech before hundreds of top US military officers.

“It’d be a big insult to our country, I will tell you that. I don’t want it, I want the country to get it,” he added.

“It should get it, because there’s never been anything like it.”

Republican Trump has long been irked by the fact that Democrat Barack Obama won the prize in 2009.

In his Tuesday speech, Mr. Trump repeated his recent claim that he has solved seven wars since his return to office in January.

Mr. Trump said that if the Gaza plan he unveiled alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Monday works out, “we’ll have eight, eight in eight months. That’s pretty good.”

Hamas has yet to respond to the plan.

Slim chances

But the chances of Mr. Trump winning the Nobel Peace Prize this year are regarded as close to zero in Oslo, where the prize is based.

“It’s completely unthinkable,” Oeivind Stenersen, a historian who has conducted research and cowritten a book on the Nobel Peace Prize, told AFP.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has also insisted it cannot be swayed by Mr. Trump’s campaigning for the prize.

“Of course, we do notice that there is a lot of media attention towards particular candidates,” the secretary of the committee, Kristian Berg Harpviken, told AFP recently. “But that really has no impact on the discussions that are going on in the committee.”

Mr. Trump’s administration recently listed the seven wars it said he has ended as being between Cambodia and Thailand; Kosovo and Serbia; the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda; Pakistan and India; Israel and Iran; Egypt and Ethiopia; and Armenia and Azerbaijan.

But while Trump has been quick to claim credit for some, for example, announcing a ceasefire between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan in May, many of the claims are partial or inaccurate.