Analysis written by CNN's Aaron Blake
President Donald Trump faces his second straight Nobel Prize loss.
“The United States of America, which I represent as your president, should have received the Nobel Peace Prize, but it did not,” Trump said during a rally in Syracuse, New York, late Friday night. He devoted a remarkably long time to talking about the award given earlier that day to South African human rights pioneer Navi Pillay.
The president called it "an indelible stain on Norway" and said he had never heard of this year's winner.
In a post containing nearly 600 words on the Truth Social platform shortly before midnight, the president continued his attack on Pillay, while falsely claiming that he had ended 8 wars, adding that he had “saved more lives than anyone else in history.”
But Trump's "unrealistic" pursuit of the Nobel Prize - which included actually pressuring last year's laureate to give him her medal earlier this year - was turned into a laughing stock by the new laureate on Friday.
“If you clap a little more, I might share this award with Trump,” Pillay joked to an applauding crowd.
This insult to Trump is the culmination of what is now clearly a losing effort.
But his campaign for the Nobel Prize clearly embodies the problems of his second term: He seeks personal glory, but is too eager to take shortcuts to get there, punctuated by haphazard steps and maneuvers that often backfire.
Bottom line:
He repeatedly raised the issue of the award, in effect launching a lobbying campaign on his behalf.
His main claim as to why he deserves the award - that he has ended more than six wars - is simply false, as CNN pointed out.
Trump highlighted the strangeness of this claim when he repeatedly mismentioned the names of the countries in which he claimed to have ended the wars.
Even Trump did not succeed in convincing a large portion of his popular base. A poll conducted by the Washington Post last year showed that only 22% of Americans and 49% of Republicans thought he deserved the award.
Talk was briefly renewed about Trump's eligibility to win the Nobel Prize when a ceasefire agreement was reached in the first phase in Gaza.
But even at that point, the Trump administration was doing something that seemed deeply problematic: It was killing people — it claimed to be drug traffickers — at sea without due process. Many experts considered these acts to be extrajudicial killings that may amount to war crimes.
Also at that time, Trump had sent the US military to several locations within the country, which in some cases turned out to be illegal.
When Trump did not win the Nobel Prize last year, FIFA created its own Peace Prize and awarded it to him in an apparent attempt to curry favor with the president.
But this whole charade actually fell apart early this year.
At that time, Trump ramped up his talk about seizing Greenland. He did not even rule out the option of seizing it by force, posing a real threat of invasion of a NATO ally.
He has already invaded Venezuela with the aim of arresting Nicolas Maduro. Although the White House may argue that it was a humanitarian mission to liberate the Venezuelan people from an evil and criminal dictator, Trump left the rest of the regime in power, and has since portrayed the invasion as an effective operation to seize Venezuelan resources (oil). Indeed, he summed up the process last month before the United Nations General Assembly with the phrase: “The spoils go to the victor.”
This is a phrase not usually associated with Nobel Peace Prize winners. He reiterated it on Friday night, adding: "We take what we want for ourselves... We deserve it."
Two weeks after the invasion, Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado awarded him her medal, apparently hoping that would persuade Trump to offer stronger support to her cause. But that didn't work.
Then Trump launched war on Iran in February, based on contradictory and highly questionable claims, sparking widespread condemnation around the world. This war, which has now extended for more than 7 months, has almost certainly eliminated any hope Trump had of winning a Nobel Prize.
That's the real story here: Trump is seeking the Nobel Prize in exactly the wrong places, while simultaneously doing himself a disservice.
If the president wanted to receive a Nobel Prize, he should try to adhere more closely to international law and not kill people who are not connected to any armed conflict at sea. Perhaps he should also not have wasted his time suppressing dissent within the United States while threatening or actually carrying out invasions abroad.
After failing to end the war between Russia and Ukraine - which he asserted his ability to end on the first day of his presidency - Trump instead repeatedly exaggerated his role in ending the wars.
When he did not win the Nobel Prize last year, he urged others to give him consolation prizes, and yet in both cases the scene seemed to reinforce the impression of how desperate Trump was.
And of course, he didn't seem too worried about sounding desperate. Just look at his long-standing quest to put his name on institutions like the Kennedy Center.
He seems focused on crafting a look of glory without hard effort or discipline. He exploits his influence in hopes of earning accolades, even if the vast majority of people do not consider them legitimate or deserved.
As recently as this week, Trump said that not receiving the award would be a "huge insult" to the Nobel Committee.
His position was summed up well in an interview with New York magazine last month. Reporter Ben Terris asked the president about Georgia Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff's claim that he seeks to glorify himself because no one else will erect a memorial for him after his death.
"That's right," Trump said. "No one's going to do it after I'm gone. When I leave here, no one's going to do it."
