Trump Makes Bonkers Claim About Nobel Prize Amid Attacks on EU

Donald Trump would like the world to know that he is absolutely not obsessed in any way with the Nobel Peace Prize that he didn’t win.

Speaking with reporters amid a Nobel Prize–fueled social media frenzy Monday evening, the president claimed that he no longer cared about the award.

“I don’t care about the Nobel Prize,” Trump said, on the tarmac beside Air Force One.

“First of all, a very fine woman felt that I deserved it and really wanted me to have the Nobel Prize, and I appreciate that,” he continued, referring to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who gave Trump her award last week.

Despite Machado’s unnecessary kowtowing, Trump snubbed the peacemaker, opting to recognize Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez—kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro’s second-in-command—as the interim leader of America’s latest oil-rich acquisition.

But Trump obviously wasn’t over his loss, noting to the reporters around him that he was still suspicious of what he believes is Norway’s outsize influence on the prize’s outcome.

“If anybody thinks that Norway doesn’t control the Nobel Prize, they are just kidding,” Trump said. “They have a board, but it’s controlled by Norway, and I don’t care what Norway says.

“But I really don’t care about that,” he added before boasting that he had saved “tens of millions of lives.”

Norway, which hosts the Nobel Prize committee, is simply home to the prestigious award ceremony—its government has no involvement in deciding who wins.

It’s no secret that Trump has long pined for the international honor: The U.S. president phoned Norway’s Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg “out of the blue” back in July to inquire about the possibility of acquiring the prize, using tariffs as a cover for their discussion.

Trump has complained for years that his name has not yet been added to the ranks of prize recipients, who span some of the greatest figures of the last century, including Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Theresa, and Malala Yousafzai.

Part of the contention could be that Trump’s perceived political nemesis, former President Barack Obama, received the award in 2009 for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” Three other U.S. presidents have also won a Nobel Peace Prize.

“They gave it to Obama for absolutely destroying our country,” Trump said, during an Oval Office meeting with Finnish President Alexander Stubb in October. “My election was much more important.”

Trump’s long history of coveting the prize on its own undercuts his claim to suddenly no longer care, but his words carry even less weight following a Sunday revelation from Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre.

Støre told The Wall Street Journal he had texted Trump to argue against a series of tariffs the U.S. president plans to impose on NATO allies who sent troops to Greenland for a joint military exercise. Trump responded that the world wouldn’t be safe until the U.S. had “Complete and Total Control of Greenland.”

“Considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS,” Trump wrote back, according to Støre, “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.”

Meanwhile, Trump has gone out of his way to aggress U.S. relations with the European Union over the last several days, publishing private text exchanges with French President Emmanuel Macron and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, flaming Britain for returning an island within its overseas territories to its original nation, all while trudging forward with a preposterous and potentially violent scheme to annex Greenland from Danish control.