California congressmember pushes Trump for Nobel Peace Prize
Above: Nexstar Media Wire video on Trump’s joint address to Congress.
A San Diego congressional representative is pressing the Norwegian committee who awards the prestigious Nobel Prizes to consider President Donald Trump to be the 2025 recipient of the peace prize.
U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, a longtime ally of Trump, announced Tuesday he wrote a letter to the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee encouraging “close and careful consideration” of his nomination for the prize — a fixation of the president’s since he first took office in 2017.
Trump was confirmed as an individual nominee for the prize in November, put in consideration by Oleksandr Merezhko, an MP from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s party.
As The Kyiv Independent reported at the time, the MP said it was his belief that the president had made “considerable contributions to world peace,” contrary to the sentiment held by other leaders in the country who had criticized his proximity to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump was also nominated by a Norwegian lawmaker who threw the president’s hat in the ring twice during his first term.
In a statement Wednesday, Issa likened Trump’s representation of the “national resolve of peace through strength” on the world’s stage as unlike anything seen since Ronald Reagan and demonstrated “the fundamental case for a world without war.”
“Remarkably, it was the 2024 election of Donald Trump – more than 10 weeks before his swearing in – that tangibly kickstarted the cause of peace in numerous regions of the world, and we are already seeing the benefits,” he continued.
Specifically, Issa points to the 2019 Abraham Accords, which normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and three of its Arab neighbors, in his letter as a key accomplishment — something he asserts Trump has not been adequately recognized for.
He also said in the letter that the president has presided over “cooling tensions, establishing dialogue, and encouraging the flourishing of freedom … on behalf of the cause of peace,” since reassuming the White House.
Notwithstanding these statements, opinions of Trump’s foreign policy actions in his second term thus far are a little more mixed.
Since his inauguration, Trump has overseen a seismic realignment of U.S. foreign policy, upending decades of hawkish stances on long-standing adversaries towards a more conciliatory relationship with them.
According to foreign policy experts, nowhere is that more evident than Trump’s efforts to wind down the ongoing war in Ukraine, in which the U.S. has appeared to shift its support behind Moscow and Putin in defiance of its alliance with Kyiv.
Merezhko, who put Trump up for the Nobel Peace Prize, has expressed dismay over some of these recent moves made by the president that has caused a fraying in the relationship between the U.S. and Ukraine.
“When you treat your ally worse than you treat Putin, this is amazing. I couldn’t imagine anything like it in my worst nightmares,” the MP, who chairs the Ukrainian Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, said in an appearance on CNN after the cataclysmic Oval Office spat between Trump, Zelenskyy and Vice President J.D. Vance.
Four American presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize in its history: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Barack Obama for their actions in office, and Jimmy Carter for his work after leaving the White House.
Whether Trump joins them to receive the honor may just end up hinging on the specifics of a ceasefire deal between Ukraine and Russia, should he be able to wrangle such a truce.
According to the Nobel Prize Committee, its panel is currently in the process of whittling down the pool of nominees, which had to have been submitted between October of last year and Jan. 31, across all of their prizes to a short list.
The committee will then review the short list over the next few months, announcing the winners — called Nobel Prize laureates — in October 2025.