Trump claims he deserves the Nobel Prize: "They gave one to Obama"

On Monday, September 23, while speaking to the United Nations General Assembly, United States President Donald Trump, that is, the Leader of the Free World and all that jazz, asserted that he was without a doubt worthy of a Nobel Prize. The only reason he wouldn't win one? Because the Nobel Prize committee was obviously dead set against him. He affirmed, "I think I'm going to get a Nobel Prize for a lot of things, if they gave it out fairly, which they don't." Always sticking to true Trump fashion, he, of course, decided to compare himself to former President and political adversary Barack Obama in a sad attempt to invalidate the institution of the esteemed Nobel Prize, CNN reports.

Trump was in conversation with Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan. During the talk, a reporter said, "Now if you can solve this outstanding issue of Kashmir very likely and definitely you will be deserving a Nobel Prize on that." India and Pakistan have been embroiled in a territory war over disputed area Kashmir, at present a union territory of the former country. In response to this assertion, Trump declared, "I think I’ll get a Nobel Prize for a lot of things.  I think I’m going to get a Nobel Prize for a lot of things, if they gave it out fairly, which they don’t."

He continued, "They gave it out — well, they gave one to Obama immediately upon his ascent to the presidency, and he had no idea why he got it.  And you know what?  That was the only thing I agreed with him on." The President is not wrong to question why Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize. After all, it was hotly debated when Obama first received the accolade in 2009, after he won the 2008 Presidential elections and began his first term as POTUS. At the time, many believed he had not really made a deep enough impact to warrant the award, whereas others suggested it was an important acknowledgment of the direction Obama was leading the United States in and a recognition of his uphill battle as a Black politician in White America.

The problem, unfortunately, as Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-Large, asserts in his op-ed, is not that Trump believes he is deserving of a Nobel Prize. Rather, it is the fact that he does not trust the Nobel Prize committee and has thus attempted to separate himself from the otherwise elite group - all while refusing to acknowledge that he, too, belongs to such an exclusive class of people. Cillizza writes: Remember that Trump, in his own mind, has always been on the outside looking in... When Trump came to Washington in 2011 while considering a bid for elected office, he was mocked and laughed at... His election in 2016 and the way in which he has approached the Presidency is rightly understood as a sort of revenge-seeking against the so-called elites who have wronged him over the years." Therefore, when the President claims that the committee is unfair, he is yet again pushing this same ideology, winning over conservative voters and retaining his fans. While Trump's legacy as President is nothing short of political disaster and objectively unworthy of a Nobel Prize, his rhetoric, as always, remains just strategic enough.