President Donald Trump has been nominated for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for his role brokering a peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Fox News reported on Wednesday, noting that the nomination was submitted by Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a right-wing member of the Norwegian Parliament.
Tybring-Gjedde had previously submitted a nomination for Trump in 2018, following the President’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, but the award that year was bestowed upon Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege and Iraqi human rights activist Nadia Murad.
Tybring-Gjedde, a four-term member of Norway’s parliament had in 2006 nominated Islam-critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali for the peace prize and has previously courted controversy for comparing Muslim women in hijab to the Ku Klux Klan.
“For his merit, I think he has done more trying to create peace between nations than most other Peace Prize nominees,” Tybring-Gjedde told Fox News.
As per the Nobel Peace Prize’s website, nominations may be submitted by any person who fits the criteria laid out by the award committee which includes politicians, academics, previous award winners among others.
The letters of nominations and list of nominees for a given year are not disclosed until 50 years have elapsed but the website mentions that 318 candidates have been nominated for the 2020 award.
Trump did not congratulate Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed after he won the award in 2019 after claiming that he— not Ahmed—deserved the award for brokering peace in Ethiopia.
Tybring-Gjedde, also praised Trump for withdrawing U.S. troops from the Middle East, “Indeed, Trump has broken a 39-year-old streak of American Presidents either starting a war or bringing the United States into an international armed conflict. The last president to avoid doing so was Peace Prize laureate Jimmy Carter,” the Fox News report added.
The Nobel Peace Prize nomination process for the subsequent year begins in September as the Nobel Committee prepares to receive nominations submitted by elected legislators, governments, academics, previous Nobel laureates and other qualified individuals as laid out by the committee. February 1st is the deadline for all submissions following which the committee assesses the candidate’s work and prepares a final shortlist of nominees by March. Between March and August, the shortlist is reviewed by advisers and eventually in October the Nobel Committee chooses the winner through a majority vote. Only names of the winners are made public as the Nobel Foundation’s statutes restrict the disclosure of information about nominations for 50 years.
Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama won the award in 2009 just after becoming president. In 2019, Trump had complained, “I would get a Nobel prize for a lot of things, if they give it out fairly, which they don’t,” adding that even though Obama got the prize in 2009, “he had no idea why he got it. You know what? That was the only thing I agreed with him on.” Tybring-Gjedde also hit out at the former U.S. president, who he said had done “nothing” to deserve the prize.
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