Donald Trump was briefly caught on a hot mic complaining to Israel’s prime minister about how he supposedly never gets any credit for his efforts to halt conflicts around the world.
Trump, who met with Benjamin Netanyahu at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on Monday, completed a brisk two days of negotiations with the Israeli leader as well as Volodymyr Zelensky, who visited him on Sunday. He also spoke with Vladimir Putin twice over the phone.
But the president couldn’t point to solutions that he’d been able to iron out with any of the involved parties as the two days came to a close, and on Monday, his frustration was evident as he spoke to Netanyahu at a luncheon, which featured a brief press availability. The moment occurred as reporters were still walking into the room and getting set up for what’s known as a “pool spray”, where Trump briefly made remarks to the press.
"Do I get credit for it? No,” Trump complained as the audio kicked on mid-sentence into the president’s rant about one conflict. “I did eight of them.” He can be heard beginning another sentence, griping about the Nobel Peace Prize being won by a Venezuelan opposition figure: “They gave the Nob[el]...”
As he eyed reporters entering the room, the volume of the president’s voice dropped slightly and he told the Israeli prime minister in the clip: “And then I’ll tell you the rest of it [later].”
The revealing look into Trump’s hangup on his loss of the Nobel Peace Prize comes just weeks after the announcement of the 2025 prize going to Venezuelan dissident María Corina Machado. Trump’s longtime U.S. political rival, Barack Obama, was awarded the prize in 2009.
On Monday, Trump used the meeting with Netanyahu to press his often-repeated declaration that he halted as many as eight wars upon becoming president.
Critics say that the total is inflated, however, and exaggerates both the severity of some conflicts as well as Trump and the U.S.’s roles in solving them.
Israel’s conflict with Iran is one of the eight wars Trump claims to have stopped. The Israeli military and Iran traded barrages on multiple occasions after October 7, 2023, and erupted into broader hostilities in June of this year. A U.S.-brokered ceasefire ended those hostilities, and the U.S. assisted in efforts to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
He, along with the leaders of two other countries, nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize as part of the U.S. president’s unsuccessful campaign this year.
On Monday, the prime minister said that he would award his country’s highest cultural honor, the Israel Award, to Trump.
The president was also awarded a “peace prize” by the president of FIFA, the world soccer federation, after his Nobel bid collapsed.
