He has built lavish clubs and gold-encrusted skyscrapers. He won the White House not once but twice. He has leveraged his power to exact retribution on political opponents, corporate executives and world leaders.
And yet, one accolade has eluded President Trump, and the leader of the free world has made no secret about how irritated he is by what he sees as a snub.
“They will never give me a Nobel Peace Prize,” Mr. Trump said last month during a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in the Oval Office. “It’s too bad. I deserve it, but they will never give it to me.”
For nearly a decade, Mr. Trump has publicly and privately complained that he has yet to win the prestigious prize. He has mentioned the award dozens of times in interviews, speeches and campaign rallies dating back to his first term. And as he presses for cease-fire deals in Ukraine and the Middle East, current and former advisers say the award is looming large in his mind.
“The Nobel Peace Prize is illegitimate if President Trump — the ultimate peace president — is denied his rightful recognition of bringing harmony across the world,” Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, said in a statement.
In many ways, Mr. Trump’s public jockeying for the prize reflects his focus on accolades, praise and acceptance — and a burning desire to best his predecessors. President Barack Obama won the prize less than eight months after taking office in 2009 for confronting “the great climatic challenges,” a decision that elicited worldwide controversy.
In accepting the award, Mr. Obama noted that his “accomplishments are slight” compared with other winners. Mr. Trump has not forgotten that, and he is still waiting for his invitation to Norway.
“The center of his public life is the greater glory of Donald Trump, and the Nobel Peace Prize would be a nice thing to hang on the wall,” said John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser who had a falling out with the president late in his first term.
“He saw that Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize and felt if Obama got it for not doing anything, why should he not get it?” Mr. Bolton said of Mr. Trump. (Less than 12 hours after being sworn in for his second term, Mr. Trump revoked Mr. Bolton’s U.S. Secret Service protection.)
In the final months of his 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump repeatedly invoked Mr. Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, complaining that he did not deserve the award.
“If I were named Obama, I would have had the Nobel Prize given to me in 10 seconds,” Mr. Trump said during a speech at the Detroit Economic Club in October.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Obama declined to comment.
Any individual can nominate someone for the prize, and Mr. Trump has received multiple nominations from supporters over the years. Last year, Representative Claudia Tenney, a Republican from New York, nominated Mr. Trump for his work on the Abraham Accords, which established ties between Israel and four Arab countries, and earlier this month, Representative Darrell Issa, a Republican from California, said he was nominating Mr. Trump for his work to secure peace in the Middle East.
Some of Mr. Trump top aides have also supported the president’s campaign for the award, often bringing it up unprompted in venues where the president is likely to hear, like Fox News or the Conservative Political Action Conference.
In his inaugural address, Mr. Trump said his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.”
Amid the flurry of executive orders he has signed to dismantle federal agencies, speed up deportations and impose tariffs, the president has attempted to bolster that legacy. He has negotiated the release of Americans in Russia, Belarus and Afghanistan, moved closer to a broader cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine and tried to work to end the conflict in the Middle East.
Last week, Mr. Trump helped broker an agreement between President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine for a mutual pause in attacks on energy targets for 30 days.
But critics say Mr. Trump’s effort to secure peace comes at a cost, arguing he is often aligning himself with aggressors. After a contentious meeting last month with Mr. Zelensky in the Oval Office, for example, Mr. Trump temporarily suspended the delivery of all U.S. military aid to Ukraine.
“I am very critical about what America is doing just now about Russia and Ukraine,” Magnus Jacobsson, a member of the Swedish Parliament who nominated the government of the United States for the award in 2020, said in an interview from Lviv, Ukraine. “He’s not working for peace between Russia and Ukraine. He’s working for more conflict, a more complicated situation, and we in Europe, probably nobody is really happy now.”
In 2020, Mr. Trump called Mr. Jacobsson to thank him for the nomination, which Mr. Jacobsson submitted for the United States, Kosovo and Serbia. The Trump administration had helped negotiate an economic mobilization deal between Kosovo and Serbia, two formerly warring countries. But Mr. Jacobsson said Mr. Trump’s approach to the war in Ukraine was not deserving of the prize.
Juan Manuel Santos, the former president of Colombia who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016, seemed skeptical of Mr. Trump’s case for the award — at least right now.
“We still don’t have peace, so I don’t think right now there are many arguments in favor of this desire,” he said in an interview.
He added: “I don’t think he or anybody will win the Nobel Peace Prize simply by working to earn that prize. People throughout history have won the Nobel Peace Prize because of what they do and because of their real motivations to have peace. I hope that is the circumstance here. If he succeeds, then he might be a good candidate for the peace prize.”
Dylan Freedman contributed reporting.
