For Trump world, the focus shifts to next year’s Nobel Peace Prize

WASHINGTON — Wait ’til next year.

The public push to make Donald Trump the winner of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize began within hours of the committee’s announcement Friday that the honoree this year is Maria Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader.

Snubbed by the Nobel selection committee, Trump should be the clear front-runner for the prize next year, given the breakthrough he reached toward ending the war in Gaza, his supporters said.

Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Ga., said Friday he would introduce a resolution in Congress saying Trump deserves the honor.

“He’ll be a strong candidate next year, and he should have been a slam dunk this year, but unfortunately, the committee got it wrong,” Carter said in an interview. “But they made their decision. So, next year they’ll have an opportunity to make up for it.”

Jason Miller, a former senior Trump campaign official, told NBC News: “The legacy of the Nobel Peace Prize will be irreparably damaged if it isn’t awarded to President Trump in 2026. The voices calling for President Trump to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2026 are only going to get louder.”

Few voices were louder than Trump’s in making the case that he’d earned the award this year. The president mounted a rare public campaign to win it based on seven peace deals he says he reached in global hotspots.

He is inching closer to an eighth. A whirlwind bout of U.S.-led diplomacy has culminated in a ceasefire in Gaza. Hamas militants may release the remaining hostages early next week. And Trump plans to fly to the region this weekend to sign the accord and deliver a speech to the Israeli parliament.

Trump has long said he didn’t expect the five-member Norwegian selection committee to give him the award. The betting markets saw it the same way. Early this week, Polymarket, a prediction betting site, had put his odds of winning at 2%.

The deadline for nominating people for the Nobel Prize was Jan. 31 — 11 days into Trump’s new term. Still, the committee was free to consider accomplishments that came later in the year as it winnowed down the candidates, said Nina Graeger, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, who handicaps the top candidates for the prize.

“Will you get the Nobel Prize? Absolutely not,” Trump told an audience of generals and admirals last week. “They’ll give it to some guy that didn’t do a damn thing.”

But he believed it would be advantageous to strike the Middle East peace deal before the committee revealed the winner, a person who has been in meetings with him said. That way, Trump could make the argument that the committee process was “rigged”; a president who ended so many conflicts rightly should have gotten the award that celebrates peace, this person said.

Shortly after the winner was announced, Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, posted on social media that “The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace.”

Much can happen in a year’s time. If the peace deal in Gaza doesn’t hold — if the fighting resumes and more Gazans die in the crossfire — Trump isn’t likely to get credit for raising false hopes that peace was at hand, foreign policy analysts say.

The committee will want to see if the peace deal that Trump describes as an historic triumph is real or ephemeral.

“We don’t know if the peace plan will be sustainable and lasting,” Graeger said. “He definitely should get credit for his efforts to end the war and really engaging with this process. But there are a lot of hurdles in the implementation of the plan.”

A second issue is whether the “America First” president chooses to work more collaboratively with other nations over the coming year. In creating the prize, Swedish inventor and entrepreneur Alfred Nobel held that the winner should be someone who has “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations,” among other criteria.

It doesn’t help Trump’s chances that he threatened to acquire Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal, analysts said. Nor is the committee likely to reward him for pulling out of such cross-border endeavors as the Paris climate agreement or the World Health Organization, they said.

Kåre Aas, Norway’s former ambassador to the U.S., said that Trump would be a “strong contender” for the prize if he ends the Russia-Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas wars. Still, the president wouldn’t be a shoo-in, he added.

Trump’s statements about absorbing Greenland and Canada “would also be considered by the committee,” Aas said. “The committee doesn’t necessarily give him the Nobel Peace Prize if there’s peace in Gaza and Ukraine next year.”