White House slams Trump’s perceived Nobel peace prize snub as ‘politics over peace’

The White House has denounced the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to award the Nobel peace prize to someone other than Donald Trump.

Following Friday’s announcement that Venezuelan opposition politician María Corina Machado had been awarded the prize, senior aides to the US president attacked the Norwegian committee as politicised while Norway braced itself for a potential diplomatic response from the White House.

“The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace,” wrote Steven Cheung, a Trump aide and the White House’s director of communications.

Trump will “continue making peace deals, ending wars, and saving lives”, he wrote. “He has the heart of a humanitarian, and there will never be anyone like him who can move mountains with the sheer force of his will.”

Trump had openly, if disdainfully, campaigned for the prize, pushing through a Gaza peace deal before the Friday announcement by the Norwegian Nobel Committee – a factor that diplomats and former negotiators said played a role in his timeline for a ceasefire.

The US leader had also lobbied senior Norwegian officials and was backed for the prize by his political allies, who took to the airwaves this week to demand that the committee award Trump for his efforts in Gaza.

In its announcement, the Norwegian committee attacked the growing wave of authoritarianism in Venezuela and in countries around the world. The sentiment was quickly seized upon by Trump’s critics, who saw it as a not-too-subtle dig at the US president’s use of the military in American cities and pressure on his political enemies at home.

“When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognise courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist,” the committee wrote. “Democracy depends on people who refuse to stay silent, who dare to step forward despite grave risk, and who remind us that freedom must never be taken for granted, but must always be defended – with words, with courage and with determination.”

Christopher Sabatini, a senior fellow for Latin America at the Chatham House thinktank, suspected Trump would be “peeved” by the decision.

“He had lobbied shamelessly for this peace prize, even exaggerating his contribution to peace globally. He has mobilized significant [military] resources at great political cost to him, quite frankly, off the coast of Venezuela. And then the thing he most coveted gets snatched away from him by the person he is supposedly defending. I can’t see how this will sit well for a person who wears personal grievance on his sleeve.”

Sabatini believed Nicolás Maduro’s administration would be angry about Machado’s award. “[But] it may even be – given Donald Trump’s likely personal reaction to this – that it could even play a little bit to their advantage.”