President Donald Trump used his primetime, Fourth of July weekend appearance at Mount Rushmore to whine about not receiving a Nobel Peace Prize.
The 80-year-old president was speaking about “American exceptionalism” on Friday when he ticked through a list of the nation’s accomplishments before turning to what he considers to be a glaring omission.
“Americans have won the most Olympic medals of any country in the world by far, the most Nobel Prizes,” Trump said.
He then paused and added: “Well, they haven’t given me one.”
Trump spent much of 2025 fixated on winning the prestigious award, reportedly cold-calling Norwegian diplomats and repeatedly venting on Truth Social that, despite his claimed accomplishments, the Nobel Peace Prize continued to elude him.
“Settled eight wars,” Trump said in South Dakota. “I still haven’t gotten it, but that’s OK.”
Trump’s latest peace-making tally is one fewer war than the nine conflicts he claimed to have resolved in April—a curious downgrade, given he has continued to tout his June memorandum of understanding with Iran as another diplomatic win.
“It has been my Honor to solve 9 Wars across the World, and this will be my 10th, so let’s, GET IT DONE!” Trump wrote on Truth Social in April, despite the State Department saying it is really just eight.
The president has repeatedly claimed he has brokered peace deals between Armenia and Azerbaijan; the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda; Israel and Iran; India and Pakistan; Cambodia and Thailand; Egypt and Ethiopia; Serbia and Kosovo, and Israel and Hamas.
The reality on the ground in those places is far more contested. “We have names, dreams, and mothers dying without medicine after U.S. funding cuts in 2025,” said a teenager unable to visit her homeland in the Western Sahara due to years of war. “We are human beings, not a deal. Do not forget that.”
Still, even if the president’s claims of peace on the ground are far from accurate, and the Norwegian Nobel Institute has increased transparency around its selection process to rebut accusations of bias leveled by Trump and his supporters, he nonetheless found a way to be honored in some form.
In December, FIFA presented him with its own self-styled “peace prize” ahead of the World Cup.
Trump later appeared to “receive” the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, after she offered it to him in response to his relentless complaining that he was not awarded it himself.
“She is a wonderful woman who has been through so much,” Trump said when Machado offered him her prize. “María presented me with her Nobel Peace Prize for the work I have done. Such a wonderful gesture of mutual respect. Thank you María!”
