Donald Trump was today snubbed by Nobel Peace Prize judges – who instead awarded the coveted prize to a Venezuelan politician, despite the president brokering peace in Gaza.
The Nobel Committee selected opposition leader María Corina Machado for this year’s award.
She was honoured ‘for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy,’ said Jorgen Watne Frydnes, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo.
The announcement came as Israel’s military declared the Gaza ceasefire agreement had now come into effect, following a vote in the the cabinet last night.
The US President’s name, heavily floated in the media in recent weeks, did not make the final cut.
In the months leading up to the decision, Trump had vigorously pitched himself as a peacemaker. He offered himself as a bridge builder, pointed to his 20-point Gaza peace plan, and repeatedly insisted he had ended multiple wars.
The two-time US President had been on a not-so-subtle Nobel Prize campaign since his first term in office when he claimed ‘many people’ thought he had earned it.
Speculation he could win the award this year began after he brokered the historic peace agreement between Israel and Hamas to end the two-year war in Gaza.
Both sides have agreed to the first phase of Trump’s plan to pause fighting and release hostages, a deal that could open the way to ending a brutal conflict that has killed tens of thousands of people and unleashed a humanitarian catastrophe.
Machado was lauded for being a ‘key, unifying figure in a political opposition that was once deeply divided – an opposition that found common ground in the demand for free elections and representative government,’ said Frydnes.
‘In the past year, Miss Machado has been forced to live in hiding. Despite serious threats against her life, she has remained in the country, a choice that has inspired millions.
‘When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognise courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist,’ he said.
President Nicolás Maduro’s government routinely targeted its real or perceived opponents ahead of last year’s presidential election.
Machado was set to run against Maduro, but the government disqualified her. Edmundo González took her place. He had never run for office before.
The lead-up to the election saw widespread repression including disqualifications, arrests and human rights violations.
The crackdown on dissent only increased after the country’s National Electoral Council, which is stacked with Maduro loyalists, declared him the winner despite credible evidence to the contrary.
The Nobel Peace Committee’s chairman was quizzed by reporters about the impact of Trump’s campaign to win the distinguished prize, and the mounting speculation surrounding whether he’d be successful.
‘What does the Chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee think of this, and how has this campaign-like activity by the president and his supporters, domestically and internationally, affected the deliberations and the thinking in the committee?’
Frydnes responded diplomatically, batting the question away.
‘In the long history of the Nobel Peace Prize, this committee has seen [every] type of campaign,’ he said. ‘We receive thousands and thousands of letters every year, of people wanting to say what, for them, leads to peace.’
‘We base our decision only on the work and the will of Alfred Nobel,’ he said.
The US president emerged unsuccessful following a series of obstacles, including that nominations for this year’s award – of which there were 338 – closed at the end of January, not long after Trump returned to the White House.
The prize honours actions carried out in 2024, which was the year in which he was elected but not yet in office.
However, over the course of his two terms in the Oval Office Trump had been nominated for the award more than 10 times – by Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Manet, a Ukrainian politician, as well as legislators from the US, Sweden, and Norway.
But a nomination alone does not guarantee someone will be a candidate and the prize committee does not publish a list of candidates before the winner is announced.
It is not clear if any of Trump’s nominations came before the January deadline.
Trump’s name swirled in the media as a potential winner after his groundbreaking brokering of the peace agreement between Hamas and Israel.
The accord, if fully implemented, would bring the two sides closer than any previous effort to halt a war that had evolved into a regional conflict that has reshaped the Middle East.
The deal was struck under pressure from the US president who made no secret of the fact that he believed he is worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Trump has previously said that it would be a ‘big insult’ were he not to receive the prize and has put pressure on the Norwegian Nobel Committee, claiming to have ‘solved’ seven wars.
‘I’ve done six wars, I’ve ended six wars,’ he said on 18 August, during his summit with Ukrainian and European leaders.
‘If you look at the six deals I settled this year, they were all at war. I didn’t do any ceasefires.’
The following day, in an interview with Fox News, he revised the number to seven wars. It’s a claim he went on to repeat last month, saying that no one had ‘ever done anything close to that’.
Netanyahu publicly nominated Trump in July, saying he was ‘forging peace as we speak’ in ‘one country and one region after the other’.
It came after Trump took credit for stopping Iran and Israel’s ’12-day war’ the month prior.
Prior to his victory, Trump even phoned Jens Stoltenberg, the former head of NATO and now Norway’s finance minister, to lobby for the prize, according to Norwegian media.
His feat is the peace plan in Gaza, which will see Hamas release all 20 living hostages in the coming days in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, while the Israeli military will begin a withdrawal from the majority of Gaza.
Netanyahu said the ‘great efforts of our great friend and ally President Trump’ had helped them reach ‘this critical turning point’.
The Israeli military said on Friday that the Gaza ceasefire agreement went into effect at midday local time.
‘Since 12.00am, IDF troops began positioning themselves along the updated deployment lines in preparation for the ceasefire agreement and the return of hostages’, the Israeli military said.
Israel and Hamas agreed to Trump’s peace plan late on Wednesday – a day after the second anniversary of Hamas militants’ cross-border attack that triggered Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza.
But the deal announced by Trump was short on detail and left many unresolved questions that could still lead to its collapse, as has happened with previous peace efforts.
Successful completion of the deal would mark a significant foreign policy achievement for the Republican president, who had campaigned on bringing peace to major world conflicts but has struggled to swiftly deliver, both in Gaza and on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
‘I am very proud to announce that Israel and Hamas have both signed off on the first Phase of our Peace Plan,’ Trump said on Truth Social.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a written statement, referring to the hostages held by Hamas: ‘With God’s help we will bring them all home.’ He said he would convene his government on Thursday to approve the agreement.
The Nobel Peace Prize creator Alfred Nobel previously said the award should be given to the person who has done the ‘most or best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses’.
However several experts around the world did not believe that Trump had fully lived up to this criteria.
‘He has withdrawn the US from the World Health Organisation and from the Paris Accord on climate, he has initiated a trade war on old friends and allies,’ Nina Graeger, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, told Sky News.
‘That is not exactly what we think about when we think about a peaceful president or someone who really is interested in promoting peace,’ she added.
However, Graeger believes that if his peace plan for Gaza materialises and holds, Trump could be a contender next year.
During Trump’s second term, he had also proposed measures that critics argued will hamper education and scientific research – two areas that are considered pillars of the Nobel Prize.
They included slashing the budget for the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, and plans to dismantle the Department of Education to shrink the federal government’s role in education in favour of more control by the states.
Ylva Engstrom, vice president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards three of the six Nobel prizes – for chemistry, physics and economics – said she believed Trump’s changes are reckless and could have ‘devastating effects’.
‘Academic freedom… is one of the pillars of the democratic system,’ she said prior to his defeat.
The Trump administration denied stifling a academic freedom as they argued its measures will cut waste and promote scientific innovation.
Trump critics also noted his controversial US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, through which the president has been sending troops to a string of Democratic-led cities to enforce his immigration laws.
It comes after Netanyahu posted an AI image of himself presenting Trump with a Nobel Peace Prize medallion on the Israeli prime minister’s official X account.
It shows Trump lifting his hands in the air as he sports an oversized medal and is showered in confetti in front of a cheering crowd waving Israeli flags.
The US president is stood under a banner reading ‘peace through strength’.
‘Give [Donald Trump] the Nobel Peace Prize — he deserves it,’ the post is captioned.
Previous to the announcement of this year’s winner, Russia said it would back the US president’s candidature for the prestigious prize, state news agency TASS quoted Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov as saying on Friday.
And on Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Kyiv would nominate Trump in exchange for Tomahawk missiles, the American-made subsonic precision weapon that launches from ships and submarines.
Machado won the prize for being one of the most ‘extraordinary examples’ of civilian courage in Latin America in recent years.
The election results announced by the Electoral Council last year sparked protests across the country to which the government responded with force and ended with more than 20 people dead.
They also prompted an end to diplomatic relations between Venezuela and various foreign countries, including Argentina.
Machado went into hiding and has not been seen in public since January.
A Venezuelan court issued an arrest warrant for González, who moved to Spain and was granted asylum.
