The Nobel ‘snub’ suits Trump just fine

Of course, Donald Trump has not won the Nobel Peace Prize. The Scandinavian grandees on the committee wouldn’t dream of honoring him. It was silly to think that they would.

The award has gone instead to María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition figure, so well done to her.

Still, it speaks to the fundamental vanity of our age that the Nobel is today’s big story, as if the complexity of world affairs can be boiled down to a yearly episode of Peace Has Got Talent.

The headlines chirp that Trump has “failed in his bid” to secure the prize. And no doubt America’s Commander-in-Chief would have been thrilled at the honor, just as he was by the royal welcome he received from King Charles in Britain last month.

But Trump and his team are not fools. The Nobel “snub” fits perfectly with the story MAGA wants to tell: Trump is busy stopping conflicts, from Nagorno-Karabakh to Kashmir, Ethiopia and Cambodia. His administration may also be on the brink of pulling off the seemingly impossible and resolving the conflict in Gaza. As if by magic – or careful PR orchestration – Israel declared the Trump-brokered ceasefire. It came into effect moments after the Nobel Committee announced the prize winner.

And yet the old liberal world order still refuses to acknowledge Trump’s good work. The stuffy global elite is simply too self-congratulatory and prejudiced to recognize that their time is over and a new world order is being born, based not on “international norms” but on national interests.

This Trumpian narrative has the advantage of containing more than a kernel of truth. Trump’s visit to the Middle East this week will also show the contrast between his effective action and all the liberal warbling about protecting democracy. The fact that the Nobel committee chose Machado, a Venezuelan, also looks a lot like a pointed dig at Trump’s military assertiveness (i.e., not peace) in the Western Hemisphere. Trump’s Defense Department, now referred to as the Department of War, has been conducting military strikes on the drug cartels in and around Venezuela.

But the Nobel is a joke and has been for some time. The late Tom Lehrer was right to say: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize” in 1973, after Kissinger had, among other things, bombed Cambodia to smithereens. The Nobel honored Barack Obama just for winning a presidential election – a particular annoyance for Trump, as is widely noted.

We are indeed now in a time beyond satire, a world of AI-reality, in which realpolitik plays second fiddle to the comedy of news. Trump will be quite happy to ham up the role of sore loser in the coming days. Because he knows he’s winning.