Trump makes late Nobel Prize pitch: ‘Not bragging ... but I settled eight wars’

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Donald Trump re-issued his call for the Nobel Prize committee to award him with the Nobel Peace Prize on Wednesday as he leaned back into talk of his peacemaking efforts.

Those peacemaking efforts, he says, are ongoing and will soon include “another one” — even though there’s no signs yet of meaningful progress in talks between the U.S. and Iran regarding another ceasefire.

The president spoke to reporters at an announcement on his “Trump accounts” for children, after returning to Washington from a spree of campaign appearances across the country.

“I’ve done stuff that nobody else has ever done. I’m not bragging, I’m just telling you the facts,” the president told reporters on Wednesday. “No president has probably ever settled any wars. I settled 8 wars."

He then went after his predecessor, Barack Obama, whom he accused of not knowing why he’d received the 2009 Peace prize. The foundation in charge of awarding the prize gave the 2009 peace prize to Obama, then less than a year into his presidency, for his diplomatic efforts to reestablish ties with the Muslim world after nearly a decade of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan led to a perception held by some that America was at war with the entire Muslim world.

The 47th president said on Wednesday that he was more deserving of the prize than Obama.

“Look, Obama got it, and he didn’t do anything-- he still doesn’t know what he got it for,” said Trump. “He got it when he was elected, right? Right at the beginning.”

“Whether I get it or not, I have done far more [than anyone else],” the president said.

The president frequently cites the “eight wars” statistic as a reference for his supposed peacemaking abilities, but the figure is not true. Several of the “wars” on Trump’s list were not wars at all, such as disagreements between Serbia and Kosovo which never escalated to real armed conflict during either of Trump’s two presidencies. Another one of the eight is the conflict between Iran and Israel, which very much remains ongoing as part of a three-way conflict also now involving the U.S. — that conflict has been ongoing for nearly eight months.

The Iran conflict has largely shattered Trump’s image as a steward of global affairs in the minds of his own supporters, who embraced that depiction of the president during his 2024 campaign for a second term as he hammered Joe Biden and Kamala Harris over Israel’s war against Gaza and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, both of which he pledged to end.

A year and a half after coming to power, Trump has made little to no progress in his efforts to negotiate an end to the war between Russia and Ukraine. A ceasefire exists in the Gaza Strip, where the majority of fighting has died down, but most Gazans remain in appalling conditions with much of the region’s infrastructure and housing destroyed. Israeli strikes continue to be carried out on camps of refugees, with continued civilian casualties.

The president’s touting of his diplomatic credentials also ignore one truth about his 2024 campaign: his promise to stop getting the U.S. into endless wars with murky objectives. His critics, both within and outside of the Republican Party, now accuse him of doing just that as the war in Iran has shifted from an effort to dislodge the Iranian government and take control of its remaining nuclear materials to ending disruptions over shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.

Obama has long been a fixation of Trump’s, however, and the president attacks him nearly as frequently as he attacks Biden, who defeated him in the 2020 election. On Wednesday, he warned that his allies wanted to see the Justice Department wielded against Obama, Biden and Hillary Clinton, but claimed that he was respecting the sanctity of his office by declining.

"I could've done very bad things to Hillary Clinton. I could've done very very bad things to Joe Biden. I could've done very bad things to Barack Hussein Obama,” said Trump.

As he departed the White House for a campaign rally in San Antonio, Texas, the president reiterated his confusing claim that the war in Iran was already “won”, but not yet “over”.

“It's a war that's been won from the standpoint of what we have to do. We have to get rid of-- no nuclear weapons for, as you know, for Iran,” said the president. “We've taken away their nuclear power. If they would have had nuclear power, you would have had problems like you've never had before. So we did this for that reason. We've essentially accomplished that. Their military is now wiped out. Their whole country right now is wiped out. It'll be over very quickly. And when it does, and when it does, oil prices will come tumbling down.”