Medical dramas are a dime a dozen on American TV, but few ever touched the sheer genius of House MD. You had Hugh Laurie, a quintessential British humourist, playing a misanthropic American doctor based on Sherlock Holmes — inception-level wall-breaking, because Arthur Conan Doyle modelled Holmes on a doctor. Like Holmes, House wrestles with substance addiction, and the only thing stopping him from a full-blown addiction is his compulsion to solve impossible medical puzzles that double as philosophical riddles tormenting his team. One such riddle comes from a philosopher named Mick Jagger, who once sang: “You can’t always get what you want… but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.”We all have things we want, but right now, it is unlikely any individual wants something with the same vehemence as Donald Trump — who wants the Nobel Peace Prize as much as House wants his next fix.
Trump’s Nobel Prize Obsession
Trump is obsessed with the Peace Prize.He mentions it at rallies, he hounds his allies, he discusses it with enemies, he literally demands world leaders nominate him for it and even threatens Norway with tariffs if Oslo doesn’t give him one.Take this year’s UN General Assembly, where Trump, while complaining about escalators and teleprompters, claimed he had “stopped seven wars” — Israel–Iran, India–Pakistan, Armenia–Azerbaijan, Congo–Rwanda, Serbia–Kosovo, Egypt–Ethiopia, and even Thailand–Cambodia.Some weren’t full-scale wars, some haven’t stopped at all, and Trump’s role was often peripheral at best. Belligerents like India flatly denied Washington played a role. Independent fact-checkers have repeatedly concluded that his boasts are exaggerated at best and misleading at worst.And yet for a man obsessed with many things, the Nobel Peace Prize appears to be unique. In some ways, he even sees it as a metaphorical stairway to heaven, an astral plane that he thinks will be blocked to him like New York’s social scene. As a young up-and-coming real estate developer, Trump was always peering into that scene, where he somehow didn’t feel welcomed — or even if he was there, it was like Anakin Skywalker granted a seat but not given the title of master.During his first term, Trump ostensibly kept the peace by angry tweeting, and he is of the view that the world went to hell in a handbasket after he left. He had promised to end all wars since he came back and is now fixated on it. But more than that, Trump’s obsession with the Nobel is rooted in Barack Obama — the man who birthed him — getting the prize eight months into his presidency.In 2009, Obama walked into the White House and within eight months walked out with a Nobel Peace Prize — not for what he did, but for what he symbolised. For Trump, this was the ultimate insult: the “Chosen One” of the liberal elite had been canonised for charisma and promise, while he, the dealmaker, was denied recognition.Every time Trump demands the medal, he isn’t just competing with history — he’s competing with Obama’s ghost. The man who got the Nobel for existing stands as Trump’s eternal yardstick, the rival whose acceptance into the halls of Oslo became the exclusion Trump cannot forgive. His obsession with the prize is not only about the medal. It is about rewriting the story: proving that if Obama was the “Chosen One,” then Trump deserves to be the avenging one.
Why the Committee (and Experts) Don’t Think He Will Get It
For all the noise, the consensus in Oslo is firm: Trump will not be adding “Nobel laureate” to his list of titles. The reasons are as much about process as they are about principle.First, the record. Alfred Nobel’s will is explicit: the prize should go to those who “advance fellowship among nations.” In practice, this means not just preventing conflict but strengthening the institutions that keep peace alive. Trump has done the opposite. He pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accord, cut funding to the World Health Organization, launched tariff wars against allies, and cheered on strongmen. Historian Asle Sveen summed it up: “He has no chance to get the Peace Prize at all,” pointing to Trump’s support for Israel in Gaza and his overtures to Vladimir Putin.Second, the style. The Nobel Committee detests lobbying, and to butcher the Bard: “The gentleman doth lobby too much, methinks.” He mentions the prize in UN speeches, urges allies to nominate him, and grumbles about bias whenever it’s awarded to someone else. But as Asle Toje, deputy leader of the committee, explained: “These types of influence campaigns have a rather more negative effect than a positive one. Some candidates push for it really hard and we do not like it. We are used to work in a locked room without being attempted to be influenced.” The louder the pitch, the colder the response.Third, the optics. The committee has been singed by its choices in the past. Kissinger in 1973, Obama in 2009, Suu Kyi in 1991 — each turned into an albatross around its neck. Handing the medal to Trump, a man who openly campaigns for it, would risk turning the Nobel into a punchline. As Nina Graeger of the Peace Research Institute Oslo put it: “That is not exactly what we think about when we think about a peaceful president.”And finally, the alternatives. The likelier winners are not presidents or populists but aid workers, UN agencies, or journalists in war zones. The UN Refugee Agency, UNICEF, the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, or local mediators in Sudan and Darfur all have stronger claims. The committee wants to highlight those who shield the vulnerable, not someone who treats peace as a campaign slogan. As committee chair Joergen Watne Frydnes said: “All politicians want to win the Nobel Peace Prize. We notice the attention, but outside from that, we work just the same way as we always do.”In short, Trump’s lobbying proves the opposite of what he intends: why he wants it so badly is exactly why Oslo won’t give it to him.
The Nobel Hypocrisy
Of course, awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Donald Trump would be perfectly on-brand. This is, after all, a medal named after Alfred Nobel, a man who made his fortune from dynamite. From the very beginning, the Peace Prize has been less about peace and more about paradox.Consider the roll call. Henry Kissinger picked up his medal in 1973 for a Vietnam ceasefire signed just months after North Vietnam had been carpet-bombed in the infamous “Christmas Bombings.” His co-winner, Le Duc Tho, had the good sense to refuse it. Yasser Arafat was canonised in 1994 as a peacemaker in Oslo, while many still called him a terrorist. F.W. de Klerk collected his in 1993 for dismantling apartheid after years of enforcing it. Aung San Suu Kyi, sainted in exile, would later defend a regime accused of ethnic cleansing. And Barack Obama was handed his prize after only eight months in office for the crime of being Obama, before proving himself a faithful heir to the Nobel tradition by perfecting drone warfare.The committee’s hypocrisy isn’t just about who they’ve honoured — it’s also about who they’ve ignored. The most glaring omission is Mahatma Gandhi, who never received the Peace Prize despite leading the most successful non-violent struggle of the 20th century. Oslo has tied itself in knots over that one ever since, retroactively admitting it was a historic blunder. That Gandhi could be passed over while Kissinger was feted tells you everything you need to know about the Nobel’s uneasy marriage of morality and politics.By that lineage, Trump would fit right in. A man who torched treaties, coddled strongmen, and treated foreign policy as a campaign prop could join a pantheon of laureates that proves the Nobel often mistakes theatrics for statesmanship. The difference is that where past winners at least signed agreements, dismantled systems, or symbolised a moment of hope, Trump has only his speeches — and the phantom “seven wars” he insists he ended in his head.
Peace Prize – A Branch
And let’s be clear: the Nobel Prize, much like the Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, or Pulitzer, is an extension of WENA’s soft power — Western European and North American imperialism dressed up as moral arbitration. Most winners are those who agree with the consensus of WENA, and very few come from Russia, China, or India unless they conveniently align with that ethos.A prime example in literature is Leo Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, whose novels defined the modern canon but whom Oslo never honoured. The committee has always been more comfortable rewarding symbolism it can control than genius that unsettles empires. China, with its enormous population and scientific output, has barely any laureates — and those few are dissidents who neatly fit the WENA script.Because Trump goes against everything the Nobel and the old WENA consensus hold dear. The Peace Prize, for all its hypocrisies, has always been about affirming the architecture of international cooperation: treaties, institutions, multilateralism, the fiction that rules can bind the powerful. Trump’s politics were the demolition of that architecture. He pulled America out of the Paris Accord, gutted funding to the WHO, launched tariff wars on NATO allies, and turned climate science into a punchline. Where Nobel seeks “fraternity among nations,” he celebrated nationalism. Where Nobel rewards those who expand the space for global dialogue, he revelled in the insult and the exit.Even his self-promotion violates the committee’s unwritten code. Past winners may have been controversial, but they did not campaign for the prize as though it were a brand deal. Trump, by demanding it from podiums and threatening Norway over it, embodies the antithesis of the committee’s aloof mystique. If the Nobel is about rewarding those who consolidate peace within the world order, Trump is about dismantling the order itself. That is why, for all the prize’s flaws, his fantasy of joining its ranks is doomed — because his entire politics runs against the very ideals the Nobel pretends to represent.
Need and Deserve
Much later in the series, a humbled Dr Gregroy House concludes: “People don’t get what they deserve. They just get what they get.” And as far as the Nobel Committee is concerned, there’s nothing Trump can do to get the prize either — no matter how many wars he stops in his head.As Dumbledore told Harry in King’s Cross: “Just because it’s happening inside your head doesn’t mean it’s not real.” For Trump, that may be comfort. But what matters is not what’s real in his head, but what’s real in Oslo’s — and in the invisible levers that make the world go around.
