This Thursday, there was only one possible question in Washington: “Will Donald Trump receive the Nobel Peace Prize?” The answer came at 5:00 a.m. Friday (11:00 a.m. in Oslo and mainland Spain). And the answer was: “No.”

The US president believed she deserved it, having publicly stated this for months, if not years, lobbying for it, but the Norwegian Prize Committee opted for another nomination: Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado.

The promoters of the idea, a varied list of candidates, Republican prime ministers, chancellors or congressmen as apparently interested in world peace as in entertaining the occupant of the White House, thought that after Trump's own announcement on Wednesday, 36 hours before the award was given, that Israel and Hamas had agreed to enter the first phase of Washington's peace plan for Gaza, the award had to be given by its own weight.

But he didn't fall. And it was also for reasons more in keeping with the demands of a competition's foundation than purely political ones. The Nobel Peace Prize, awarded every October since 1901 (with the logical exceptions of the two world wars), values the efforts of the previous year's candidates, even though they have sometimes broken that rule. And in 2024, Trump was not yet president of the United States, much less had he ended the"seven wars" ("eight, including Gaza," he said this Thursday at the White House) that he repeatedly claims to have ended, despite the exaggeration that this represents.

📺LIVE TV | The president of the Norwegian Committee, on Trump's pressure:"This committee sits in a room surrounded by the portraits of the laureates, and full of courage and integrity. We based our decision only on Alfred Nobel's wishes." https://t.co/Nv8wzs6qTj

— EL PAÍS (@el_pais) October 10, 2025

In reality, in those conflicts to which the Republican usually refers, from the one between India and Pakistan to that between Sierra Leone and the Congo, they are disputes in whose resolution, for the most part, his Administration played a minor role and which are still unresolved.

The White House criticized the Nobel Committee's decision, speaking on Twitter, through spokesman Steven Cheung, who said in a message on X:"President Trump will continue to sign peace agreements, end wars, and save lives. He has a humanitarian heart, and there will never be anyone like him, capable of moving mountains with sheer force of will." According to Cheung,"The Nobel Committee has shown that it puts politics before peace."

“Unfortunately for Trump,” wrote the authors of Politico’s Playbook newsletter, perhaps the most influential in Washington, early Thursday, “the Norwegian judges made their decision weeks ago. But next year’s award? Honestly, who knows?”

The Washington Post's editorial, for its part, argued that the announcement that “Israel and Hamas have agreed on Trump's plan to end the two-year war in Gaza could be the greatest diplomatic achievement of his second presidency.” “In fact,” the newspaper argued, if the deal “goes through,” which we must not forget refers to a first phase (points 3, 4, 5 and 7 of a 20-year plan) and is not yet the “lasting and permanent peace” that its promoter yearns for, the Republican “can legitimately reinforce his claim to be a pacifist worthy of the Nobel Prize.”

In fact, the committee chairman already hinted this week that this year's honoree was decided on Monday, so Wednesday's events could not have influenced the mood of the five voting members. The writers of Politico and The Washington Post also seem to forget that, contrary to Norwegian opinion, the"peacemaker" Trump disdains multilateral organizations and the fight against climate change, that he has ordered the deployment of troops against his own citizens and has asked the military to use cities like Portland and Chicago as"training camps." And that he has been launching extrajudicial military operations in Caribbean waters for weeks, as part of a"war" against drugs and Venezuelan criminal gangs that he himself declared, without consulting Congress.

An old aspiration

This Thursday, in his second press appearance of the day, Trump was asked if he thought this Friday he would finally fulfill his dream of being honored with the award, a dream he has cherished more or less since 2019, when he traveled to North Korea, given that his first predecessor, Barack Obama, received the award in 2009."They gave it to him without having done absolutely anything, except destroy our country," he replied.

It's true that Obama received it after only a few months in office. Jay Nordlinger writes in perhaps the definitive book on the history of the Nobel Prize (Peace, They Say, 2012) that the committee awarded it to him because he came onto the scene as"the president their members dreamed of, just as George W. Bush represented their worst nightmare. The award was like a sign of relief, because Bush was no longer in charge. It was a way to bless a new beginning."

Trump doesn't seem to have the same reputation as Obama in Oslo, although Nordlinger explains that when he has accumulated"sufficient achievements," the committee will award him,"no matter how controversial the decision." It's also worth noting that in 1973, along with North Vietnamese diplomat Le Duc Tho, it was awarded to then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, —who ordered bombings in Cambodia, East Timor, and Vietnam that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. That was, Nordlinger acknowledges, the most controversial decision in the history of the prize.

Trump has spoken about the Nobel Prize at least a dozen times since returning to the White House, his argumentative tone ranging from indignation to resignation. In a speech before hundreds of generals in Quantico, Virginia, he said a couple of weeks ago: “They’re going to give it to someone who did absolutely nothing, someone who wrote a book about the mind of Donald Trump and how he managed to resolve so many wars. We’ll see what happens. [If they don’t give it to him] It would be a great insult to our country, I assure you. I don’t want it. I want the country to receive it.”

On Thursday night, Trump, who is preparing to travel to Egypt in the coming days to witness the signing of the agreement he brokered between Israel and Hamas, concluded another busy day by reposting two articles on his social media platform and thanking their authors “Thank you!!!” One, by a Post columnist, was titled: “Yes, Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.” The other, from Newsmax, a media outlet further to the right than Fox News, had the following headline: “A group of Jewish Republicans: ‘Trump shouldn’t just get the Nobel; they should rename the prize after himself.’”

For all of this, the president will have to wait. There are 61 days until this year's laureate receives his award, which comes with a prize of 9 million kroner. It will be, as Alfred Nobel's will dictates, on December 10th at Oslo City Hall.