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Donald Trump has been nominated for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize.

Whilst a large number of people hearing the news instantly thought “sorry, what now?”, it’s actually not that big of a deal.

In 2020, there were at least 318 candidates nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, with the winner still to be announced, so this should be taken in context.

Trump was nominated by Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a Norwegian right-wing politician who also nominated POTUS for the same prize back in 2018.

In the past, Tybring-Gjedde has drawn criticism for suggested that Muslims were more aggressive than Norwegians and comparing traditional children wearing a hijab to a Ku Klux Klan hood.

Ah yes, it’s becoming slightly clearer now.

Tybring-Gjedde says that Trump deserves the nomination due to his role in the recent peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, and added that “the [Nobel] committee should look at the facts and judge him on the facts – not on the way he behaves sometimes”.

Definitely don’t judge him on the fact that he downplayed the threat of COVID-19, despite knowing full well that it would claim thousands and thousands of American lives.

Don’t take the word of his sister, who called him cruel, or his niece, who said, “if he is afforded a second term, it would be the end of American democracy”.

What do they know?

Instead, let’s trust Telegraph journalist Douglas Murray, who says that “there are good reasons to nominate Trump for the prize. And if you stand back and survey them they are obvious.”

Off we go:

The first is the fact that we are still here. When Trump took office his opponents in the Republican party, as much as among its opposition, claimed that the President was going to get everybody on earth killed several times over…

His high-risk to-and-fro with Kim Jong-Un did not lead to a nuclear exchange but to one of diplomacy’s strangest friendships. Although North Korea remains an international pariah, and the President walked away when the North Koreans pushed too hard, the initiatives and search for peace were considerable and historic.

The meetings with Kim Jong-Un achieved nothing, other than legitimising one of the world’s most oppressive regimes, and sparking a bromance for the ages:

Melania was said to be relieved.

Back to Murray:

Of course it is not enough to simply avoid conflict; one of the criteria for being awarded the Nobel must surely be to prevent, stop or reconcile conflicts. In all of these areas Trump and his administration have had notable successes. Just last week his diplomats brokered a historic agreement between Kosovo and Serbia. The deal normalised relations between the two countries for the first time since the bitter war of the Nineties.

But perhaps the achievement that is most historic, and over which the Nobel Prize should most seriously be considered, is the Trump administration’s brokering of another historic normalisation deal. That is the agreement signed last month between Israel and the United Arab Emirates – the most significant diplomatic success since the 1994 peace treaty signed between Jordan and Israel.

You can read more on that agreement here.

To finish, Murray points to the fact that Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize less than eight months after being sworn in as president, “before he had actually done anything”.

When awarding Obama the prize, the Nobel Committee said it was for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between people”.

Geir Lundestad, the former Nobel secretary, later expressed regret for the selection.

By Murray’s reckoning, “the award to Trump might be unlikely, but in the long history of Nobel prizes it would be far from being the most undeserved.”

Strong finish there, guy. Past Peace Prize awards have been flawed, so let’s just carry on the trend!

Here’s more on 2019’s winner via the Nobel website:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2019 to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali for his efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation, and in particular for his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea.

Under Murray’s article, one of the top-rated comments reads:

The more than 196 000 Americans who have thus far died from COVID-19 could not be reached for comment.

[sources:telegraph&nobel]