With 11 days to go until Election Day, Donald Trump can’t stop obsessing about former President Barack Obama having been awarded a Nobel Prize in 2009, a little more than eight months after taking office.
At a campaign stop in Las Vegas on Thursday, the former president bombarded the audience with false claims about, among other things, hordes of undocumented “animals” entering the United States, widespread voter fraud, and the size of the crowd there to see him at the UNLV Thomas & Mack Center, insisting there were 29,000 people inside the 19,522-capacity arena. (Earlier this week, Trump claimed 29,000 people had turned out to watch him briefly work a McDonald’s drive-thru window in a Pennsylvania town with a total population of 24,657.)
But amid his rambling, digressive remarks, Trump — who has nursed a grudge against the nation’s first Black president ever since Obama roasted him in a speech at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner — relitigated his personal opposition to Obama’s Nobel win a decade-and-a-half ago.
Trump insisted that he in fact deserved a Nobel more than Obama did, and bemoaned how unfair it was that “anybody else” but him would have been honored with one.
“They gave Obama the Nobel Prize,” Trump told the Vegas attendees. “He didn’t even know why the hell he got it, right? He still doesn’t. He got elected and they announced he’s getting the Nobel Prize. I got elected in a much bigger, better, crazier election, but they gave him the Nobel Prize.”
Mockingly affecting an “official” voice, Trump went on: “Ladies and gentlemen, the Nobel Prize will be won by Barack Hussein Obama. Right? Barack Hussein Obama got the Nobel Prize. He didn’t even know what… He actually asked, ‘Why did I get it? Does anybody know?’ Right at the beginning, the early seconds of his administration. And he didn’t do a good job, brought a lot of division and a lot of hatred.” (To be sure, Obama in fact said, “To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize — men and women who’ve inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.”)
Trump’s fixation with Obama’s Nobel, and his own lack of one, is nothing new for the twice-impeached former commander-in-chief
In October 2018, while speaking to the Future Farmers of America, Trump made mention of the Nobel Prize awarded in 1970 to plant geneticist Norman Borlaug, father of the so-called Green Revolution.
“Can you believe it? He won the Nobel Peace Prize,” Trump said. “They probably will never give it to me, even what I’m doing in Korea, and in Idlib Province and all of these places. They probably will never give it to me. You know why? Because they don’t want to.”
In early 2019, Trump interrupted his own remarks at the US-Mexico border to tell those gathered before him that not only did Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe believe he deserved a Nobel Prize, but that “many other people feel that way, too.”
“I’ll probably never get it, but that’s okay,” he said. (Abe nominated Trump for a Nobel that year at the request of the White House, according to reports.)
When a far-right Norwegian lawmaker nominated Trump (and 210 other people) for a Nobel he did not ultimately win, Trump complained to a rally audience in Ohio that the media didn’t give the development enough coverage.
“And when Barack Obama, Barack Hussein Obama, got nominated, no when Barack Hussein Obama got nominated, he didn’t know why he was nominated,” he said. “It was like right at the very beginning. He didn’t do anything. He did nothing. And he got nominated. It was the biggest story I’ve ever seen. But that’s OK. In the meantime, we’re president, and they’re not, right?”
Two weeks ago in Detroit, Trump told a rally crowd that if his political affiliation was different, he would have already won a Nobel for helping to mediate the establishment of ties in 2020 between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
“I’m not saying [I] want [it] or not,” Trump claimed. “I’m not saying. I am just saying, if it was anybody else, a liberal Democrat, they would have had it [earmarked for me] before the damn thing was even signed.”
On Thursday, 23 Nobel Prize-winning economists signed onto an open letter endorsing Harris. Also on Thursday, 82 Nobel Prize-winning physicists, economists, and medical doctors signed a separate open letter lauding Harris for her embrace of science and technology.
“Should Donald Trump win the presidential election,” the Nobel laureates wrote, “he would undermine future U.S. leadership on these and other fronts, as well as jeopardize any advancements in our standards of living, slow the progress of science and technology, and impede our responses to climate change.”
