Will Trump finally get his Nobel Peace Prize this year?

At least four people, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have nominated President Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize this year. 

Mr. Trump thinks he deserves it, and he isn’t shy about telling everyone. But the president also believes he won’t receive the international honor. 

“I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize no matter what I do,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media last month.

The president promised to be a peacemaker and a unifier in his January inaugural address. He’s pledged to end the Russia-Ukraine war, make nuclear peace with Iran and settle the Israel-Gaza war.

During his first term, he struck the Abraham Accords, a 2020 agreement that normalized relations between Israel and other countries in the Gulf region. Any one of those achievements, Mr. Trump says, merited the peace prize.

“I should have gotten it four or five times,” he said last week.

For years, Mr. Trump has coveted the prize and questioned why others have received it instead of him.  One winner hits especially close to home — former President Barack Obama.

“If I were named ‘Obama,’ I would have had the Nobel Prize given to me in 10 seconds,” Mr. Trump said during his reelection campaign last October. “He got the Nobel Prize. He didn’t even know what the hell he got it for. Remember, he got elected. Well, so did I. He got elected and they announced he was getting the Nobel Prize.”

The Nobel Committee awarded the prize to Mr. Obama on Oct. 9, 2009, after he had been in office less than nine months, for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” The committee cited his efforts to fight climate change and to stop nuclear proliferation. 

Only two other presidents have won a Nobel Peace Prize while in office. President Theodore Roosevelt won in 1906 for his effort to end the war between Japan and the Russian Empire. President Wilson won in 1919 for helping launch the League of Nations, a precursor to the United Nations, at the end of World War I.

President Carter won the award in 2002 – more than 20 years after he left office –  for his decades-long promotion of democracy, human rights and mediating disputes.

Presidential historian Craig Shirley said that Mr. Trump’s accomplishments overshadow those of both Mr. Wilson and Mr. Obama when they were awarded the prize.

He said the League of Nations was never that powerful, and the U.S. didn’t join it because the Senate rejected the idea over national sovereignty concerns. Mr. Shirley also noted that Mr. Obama won the award early in his presidency, with few concrete accomplishments.

“Obama won it for being Obama,” Mr. Shirley said.

Mr. Obama’s Peace Prize was widely criticized by conservatives and liberals alike, with even Nikolas Kristoff, a liberal columnist for The New York Times, calling the award “premature.”

Geir Lundestad, who was secretary of the Nobel Committee when Mr. Obama won the prize, later said he regretted giving it to him. He added that even Mr. Obama was shocked that he received the award and debated skipping the ceremony because of the controversy.

“Even many of Obama’s supporters believed that the prize was a mistake,” Mr. Lundestad told the Associated Press in 2015. “In that sense, the committee didn’t achieve what it had hoped for.”

However, Mr. Shirley did agree that Mr. Roosevelt’s talks to end the Japan-Russia war were worthy of winning a Nobel Peace Prize.

Currently, the betting website Oddschecker has Mr. Trump as the second favorite choice behind Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Alexei Navalny, a vocal critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin for decades who died in prison in February 2024.

The website has Mr. Trump with an implied probability of roughly 32%, and Ms. Navalnaya with nearly 35%. Behind Mr. Trump are Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelenskyy, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and climate activist Greta Thunberg, among others.

Still, Mr. Shirley said Mr. Trump is unlikely to win the Nobel Peace Prize, accusing the prize committee of a bias against conservatives. In his view, the committee’s two biggest snubs in history – General Douglas MacArthur for overseeing the post-World War II occupation and reconstruction of Japan, and President Reagan for ending the Cold War – were because of their conservative views. Of the four U.S. presidents who’ve won the Nobel Prize, three were Democrats.

“No one deserved a peace prize more than Douglas MacArthur, and he was passed over because he was conservative,” he said. “There are five U.S. embassies in Israel because of Trump’s work. He implemented the Abraham Accords. He stopped a war between India and Pakistan.”

Despite the raft of nominations, some critics argue that Mr. Trump doesn’t deserve the award. They point to his inability to strike deals to end the conflicts between Israel and Hamas, or Russia and Ukraine. They say he’s ignored the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and his bombing of nuclear sites in Iran took lives.

A group of five academics authored pieces in “The Conversation” arguing against bestowing the honor upon Mr. Trump.

Emma Shortis, a professor at RMIT University in Australia, wrote that Mr. Trump is undeserving because he has “deployed the military against American citizens…threatening the United States’ traditional allies with trade wars and annexation.” She also asserted that Mr. Trump’s cuts to USAID will result in the deaths of 14 million people, including 4.5 million children, by 2030.

“Indulging Trump’s embarrassing desire for trophies might appease him for a short time. It would also strip the Nobel Peace Prize of any and all credibility while endorsing Trump’s trashing of the international rule of law,” she wrote.

The Nobel Peace Prize was first awarded in 1901. According to Albert Nobel’s wishes, it’s to be given to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

Since then, 111 individuals and 31 organizations have been recognized with it — some, more than once.

The window for nominations for the 2025 prize closed in January, with a short list of winners currently being prepared, according to the website. A total of 338 candidates were received — 244 individuals and 94 organizations.

The 2025 prize announcement is due to take place on October 10 at the Norwegian Nobel Institute.

Mr. Netanyahu announced he nominated Mr. Trump for the award earlier this week.

“He’s forging peace as we speak, one country and one region after the other,” Mr. Netanyahu said in his letter to the Nobel Committee, which he shared online.

In June, Pakistan announced it nominated Mr. Trump for the honor “in recognition of his decisive diplomatic intervention and pivotal leadership during the recent India-Pakistan crisis.” But the next day, Pakistan condemned the U.S. for bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Pakistan also is one of the many countries that is negotiating a trade deal with the Trump administration to avoid high tariffs.

Rep. Buddy Carter, Georgia Republican, nominated Mr. Trump “in recognition of his historic role in brokering a ceasefire between Israel and Iran” and preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon after Mr. Trump authorized the U.S. strikes.

Republican Reps. Darrell Issa of California and Claudia Tenney of New York also have nominated him.

While most of these were submitted after the nomination deadline passed, Anat Alon-Beck, an Israeli-born law professor at Case Western Reserve University, said she nominated Mr. Trump before the deadline.

She wrote the nomination was for Mr. Trump’s efforts to release the hostages in Gaza along with “standing firm against antisemitism and fostering historic agreements to bring stability to the world’s most volatile regions.”

Oleksandr Merezhko, a Ukrainian politician, said he nominated Mr. Trump in November because the U.S. president made “considerable contributions to world peace.” However, he withdrew the nomination in June, saying he “lost any sort of faith and belief that Mr. Trump could secure peace between Russia and Ukraine.

In his first term, Mr. Trump was nominated by a Finnish member of the European Parliament, a group of Australian professors, a Norwegian lawmaker and former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

The calls for Mr. Trump to receive the award have become a new litmus test for the administration. Foreign leaders and domestic allies have learned it’s a sure way to get Mr. Trump’s attention.

While Mr. Netanyahu was in Washington, he presented Mr. Trump with the letter he sent to the Nobel Prize committee.

On Wednesday, five leaders of African countries were quick to endorse Mr. Trump’s nomination at a White House meeting.

“And so he is now bringing peace back to a region where that was never possible, so I believe that he does deserve a Nobel Peace Prize. That is my opinion,” said Gabonese President Brice Oligui Nguema.

He also said Mr. Trump’s negotiating of a peace deal between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda helped stabilize the Economic Community of Central African States.

Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye chimed in that Mr. Trump would be a worthy recipient.

Mr. Trump’s political opponents say it’s a charade.

“All of them — Netanyahu, Putin, the sultans and princes — have solved the least difficult puzzle to solve on the planet,” former Obama senior adviser David Axelrod wrote on social media. “With Trump, lavish flattery and blandishments will get you everywhere!”