Trump nominated for Nobel prize by anti-immigrant extremist

Donald Trump bragged on Wednesday about receiving a second Nobel Peace Prize nomination from a far-right Norwegian politician.

Trump retweeted several congratulatory messages to himself, including from two Republican candidates linked to the dangerous QAnon conspiracy movement.

Another was from his own senior campaign adviser Jason Miller, highlighting a Fox News story. Miller’s tweet noted only that Trump had been “nominated for Nobel Peace Prize by Norwegian official, citing Israel-UAE peace deal.”

Miller did not mention that the nomination came from Christian Tybring-Gjedde, an Islamophobic member of Norway’s parliament and a far-right opponent of immigration.

In 2010, Tybring-Gjedde denounced “Islamization that is happening right before our eyes” and compared children wearing a hijab to parents dressing their children in Ku Klux Klan robes. He likened the garb to “a religious straitjacket” and demanded a ban on girls wearing them in schools.

Tybring-Gjedde has also lamented “multicultur[al]” society, and said in 2009 that immigration to his country “should be reduced dramatically.”

Because the 2020 nomination deadline was in February, Trump’s nomination is for the 2021 prize.

Tybring-Gjedde and a colleague also unsuccessfully nominated Trump in 2018 for his ill-fated attempts to bring peace to the Korean peninsula.

While winning a Nobel Peace Prize is rare, receiving a nomination is significantly less so. According to the Nobel Foundation’s rules, nominations can come from a wide array of individuals, including any member of “national assemblies and national governments (cabinet members/ministers) of sovereign states as well as current heads of states,” as well as all “university professors, professors emeriti and associate professors of history, social sciences, law, philosophy, theology, and religion; university rectors and university directors (or their equivalents); directors of peace research institutes and foreign policy institutes.”

Previous nominees have included Vladimir Putin, Czar Nikolai II, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, and even Adolf Hitler — though none of them won the prize.

Some 211 individuals and 107 organizations received nominations for the 2020 award. This year’s winner will be announced next month, but the identities of the other nominees will be kept private for 50 years.

Last September, Trump boasted, “I think I’ll get a Nobel Prize for a lot of things. I think I’m gonna get a Nobel Prize for a lot of things — if they gave it out fairly, which they don’t.”

He then mocked 2009 laureate Barack Obama as an undeserving recipient.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.