President Donald Trump appears to be backing away from his once-relentless push for a Nobel Peace Prize as his war with Iran intensifies.
In a striking shift for a president who has long complained about being overlooked for the prestigious award, Trump said on Thursday he had “no idea” whether the conflict would help him secure the prize and insisted he was no longer focused on it.
“I don’t know,” he told the Washington Examiner when asked if the conflict could “get him over the finish line” with committee members.
“I’m not interested in it.”
The comments represent a notable change in tone. For much of the past year, Trump and his allies openly argued that he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for various conflicts he claims to have “solved.”
These included conflicts between Cambodia and Thailand (where fighting has recently broken out again); India and Pakistan (which India disputes), and Rwanda and Congo (where the war is far from over).
In January, the president even lashed out at America’s NATO allies over his failure to secure the prize, fuming that his peacemaking skills had not been given enough credit.
“I single-handedly ENDED 8 WARS, and Norway, a NATO Member, foolishly chose not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize,” he wrote in a furious Truth Social tirade.
“But that doesn’t matter! What does matter is that I saved Millions of Lives.”
The rhetoric now sits uneasily alongside the escalating conflict with Iran.
The war, which Trump described Wednesday as “a little excursion”, began 13 days ago after U.S. forces launched major strikes aimed at dismantling Iran’s nuclear capabilities—the same program he boasted had been “obliterated”.
Trump described the campaign as a “massive and ongoing operation” and later demanded the Iranian government’s “unconditional surrender.”
Instead, Iran has dug in, with its new supreme leader using his first statement on Thursday to threaten ongoing oil chaos for Americans as he seeks to “avenge the blood” of his family being killed in U.S.-Israeli strikes.
Pentagon figures released this week also show that at least seven U.S. service members have been killed since the start of the war, and roughly 140 American troops have been wounded, with eight suffering severe injuries requiring extensive medical treatment.
About 1300 Iranians have also been killed, many of them civilians.
Among them are about 175 people, most of them children, who died in a strike on an elementary school in Iran, most likely from a U.S. Tomahawk.
However, Trump has tried to distance himself from U.S. accountability, initially claiming Iran bombed itself, then saying he didn’t know enough about the matter, but an investigation was underway.
“Whatever the report shows, I’m willing to live with that report,” he said.
Trump’s apparent shift on the Nobel Peace Prize comes four months after it was awarded to Venezuelan democracy advocate and opposition leader María Corina Machado.
The announcement prompted claims from allies that Trump was “robbed” and that the committee had chosen “politics over peace.”
Since then, Machado has visited Trump in the White House, where she presented her prize to him, even after he declared she did not have the respect or support to govern Venezuela and that he would instead work with captured dictator, Nicolas Maduro’s second-in-command.
It also comes a few weeks after Trump’s inaugural meeting of his so-called Board of Peace, a group he set up to rival the UN, giving himself sweeping powers to appoint members, veto all decisions, and intervene in “hotspots” around the world.
During that meeting, Trump quipped that he briefly thought an announcement from Norway might finally be about awarding him the Nobel Prize before realizing it was about a separate event.
“But I don’t care,” Trump added.
“I don’t care about the Nobel Prize. I care about saving lives, just so you understand…. I don’t want to see people killed from parts of the world that are very far away from the United States.”
