It has now been two weeks since the announcement by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awards the Nobel Peace Prize, that President Trump had been nominated for the 2021 prize. Considering that he received a second nomination from the Committee exactly three days later for brokering an entirely unrelated economic  agreement, one would have thought that the media would still be abuzz with chatter about the President’s double nomination for one of the most prestigious awards in the entire world.

Certainly this was exactly the case throughout most of 2009, when newly elected President Barack Obama was nominated for the same award in February of that year after having been in office less than two weeks! Why he was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, quite frankly no one could figure out at the time. Many casual readers thought the whole thing a joke for several months, but to pundits the glaringly political nature of Obama’s nomination was obvious from the outset. Nevertheless, we were repeatedly assured by the left wing media that the Committee was sufficiently apolitical to award the prize honestly.

Now to be clear, the Committee is allowed to consider a nominee’s accomplishments after the February nominating cutoff date. One who was sufficiently naive could perhaps believe that Obama’s nomination was simply a highly unusual bet by the Nobel Committee members on his future success. But when the award was finally announced many months later, in early October of 2009, a unanimous Committee declared, unconvincingly, that Obama had received the award “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” This for a young president who had by then been in office for all of nine months! In truth, he had done nothing of any great or even middling consequence in the field of foreign relations or peacekeeping since being nominated for the prize.

Yet no Nobel Peace Prize award ever elicited more rapt attention from the American public than Obama’s, albeit as adoration from some quarters and laughing derision from others. And there it sat for several years, until we were unexpectedly enlightened about the Nobel Committee’s thinking at the time Obama’s prize was awarded. You see, the Committee is not supposed to release comments on its nominees for fifty years, but its former secretary found it necessary to publish his tell-all memoir in 2015.

This non-voting but highly knowledgeable insider unsparingly chastised the reasoning behind the award of the prize to Obama, flatly calling the award a mistake. And to Obama’s credit he himself had already admitted publicly that he had not deserved it. According to the Committee’s former secretary, by making the award to Obama, its members had apparently hoped to strengthen his future efforts to make the world a safer place. Now this was a laudable goal certainly, but not a valid reason for awarding a Nobel Peace Prize. As a result Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize has become an embarrassment to all concerned. To this day it represents the modern low point in the award’s prestige.

Fast forward to September, 2020. President Trump received a Nobel Peace Prize nomination on September 9th for his successful efforts to normalize relations between the United Arab Emirates and Israel, in effect a long sought successor agreement to the 1979 Israeli-Egyptian Peace Accords which had eluded every President since Jimmy Carter. Add to President Trump’s list of successes the fact that several days later another Arab country, Bahrain, announced that it would follow the U. A. E. in normalizing relations with Israel, while one of the Middle East’s major players, Saudi Arabia, may soon be on board in also normalizing relations. Furthermore, this agreement greatly relieves the pressure on Egypt, a long-time American ally, while undercutting the influence of our enemies in the Middle East.

To the abject mortification of liberals across this country, on September 12th the President received a second Nobel Peace Prize nomination, this one for brokering an important economic agreement between long-time Balkan rivals Serbia and Kosovo. Mind you, this success happens to be completely independent of his Middle Eastern triumphs.

And what have we heard from the liberal media about President Trump’s Nobel nominations? First consider that the normalization of relations between Israel and several Arab states could well have truly momentous, worldwide consequences for generations to come. President Trump’s push for peace will likely go far towards solving one of the world’s most intractable and dangerous political problems. So what have we heard, indeed?

Crickets…  In fact, almost nothing from the likes of CNN, MSNBC, and vast swathes of our left-wing press. This is in the starkest possible contrast to the adulation heaped upon Obama in 2009 for his admittedly undeserved award. The Atlantic, a once respectable monthly long since taken over by progressives and now reduced to a shadow of its former glory, has actually called for the abolition of the Nobel Peace Prize (established in 1895) just because someone had the temerity to nominate Donald Trump!

Although we will not know the name of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner until October of next year, by any objective standard the President now has several major foreign policy accomplishments to his credit. He certainly merits serious consideration by the Nobel Committee. Perhaps his nominations were simply given short shrift in a hurried news cycle and we should just consider this a “micro-aggression” of some sort? (But let us not even waste our time with this tawdry, made-up word of the Left.)

No, the muted response to the President’s Nobel Prize nominations by the left wing media speaks volumes by its very silence. Let us simply call out this circus for what it has become: a leftist propaganda machine falsely masquerading as the traditional guardian of our freedoms. Shame!

Chalk up on more reason to vote for Donald Trump on November 3rd.

 

Louis Gurvich, Chairman
Republican Party of Louisiana