This article is news with liberal commentary.
Trump “complained at a Pennsylvania campaign rally Saturday night that the ‘fake news’ completely skipped reporting his two Nobel Peace Prizes,” Huffington Post reported on Sunday, September 27, 2020 (story here).
FactCheck.org has criticized Trump for “repeatedly conflating winning a Nobel Peace Prize with being nominated for one.” Trump was nominated by a far-right member of Norway’s Parliament (I wouldn’t rule out Trump asking him to.)
Trump wasted no time inflating this into bragging rights, but there’s no chance the prize committee will denigrate the prestige of the Prizes by awarding one to him. He has no accomplishments that merit it anyway.
Trump also was “nominated” in 2017 and 2018 by an identity thief. Those nominations, by an unidentified American, were submitted under the name of a qualified nominator who didn’t make them, and are considered forgeries (read that story here). I wouldn’t be surprised if the forger was the most dishonest man in America himself.
You can read various things into Trump’s ridiculous claim that he’s already won two Nobel Peace Prizes. A partial list is below:
- Trump is insane, or at least delusional
- Trump is a pathological liar
- Trump is insanely jealous of Obama’s actual Nobel Peace Prize
- Trump is a megalomaniac who awards himself prestigious accolades
- Trump is suffering from early-onset dementia
There’s no rule against checking all the boxes above. But I think there’s another explanation.
Historians agree that Hitler rose to power and totally dominated German society by the sheer force of his will. That was his most singular personality trait. Leni Reifenstahl’s famous propaganda film is titled, “Triumph of the Will.” Hitler fervently believed he could create armies, victories, and a Jew-free Europe by willing them into existence. For a while he did, until overwhelmed by more powerful realities, such as B-17s leveling his cities and the Red Army destroying his armies and pushing into Berlin itself, at which point his reality was reduced to an underground bunker and then a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
Trump, too, believes he can will reality into existence, or at least he exploits that technique of demagoguery for his ends. You see this in his proclamations that Covid-19 will “go away,” the economy is “doing great,” and North Korea will give up its nukes. None of these things are true, but he says they’re true in order to make them come true.
This isn’t delusion in the strict sense, because he’s not distorting reality, but rather trying to create it. It isn’t clear how he can will a Nobel Peace Prize into his collection of fake golf trophies, but he doesn’t need to, if he can will it into the minds of his followers to give himself a credibility he doesn’t have or deserve.
Top right: Take a good look at this Nobel Peace Prize, Donald, because a picture is the closest you’ll ever get to a real one.
Unlike Barrack Obama who got a Nobel because of aspirations that generally the former President did not live up to, Trump actually has three treaties in the past year that are actual accomplishments. There maybe more. Yes Trump is likely to join the ranks of Mahatma Ghandi and Eleanor Roosevelt in not receiving a Peace Prize. (Those Norwegians were not a little racist or male centered back in the day.) Trump is going to have to work for any Nobel, (maybe end the Korean war) and he may well be snubbed. The best he may get is to be nominated.
And Chicago has yet to get the summer Olympics. Maybe Trump could help out there. Or not.