Barack Obama has won it. So did Jimmy Carter, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
Now, Donald Trump’s supporters are pushing for him to be the next US leader to win the Nobel Peace Prize, as per a report on AP.
Even though Trump remains unpopular around the globe, but that’s not stopping a growing list of champions from pushing the Nobel committee to consider Trump for the world’s most coveted diplomatic prize.
“I’ve been talking about this for months,” said Indiana Rep. Luke Messer, praising the success of what he called Trump’s “Twitter diplomacy.”
He’s one of 18 Republican lawmakers who penned a letter to Norwegian Nobel Committee chairman Berit Reiss-Andersen last week to nominate Trump for 2019 peace prize “in recognition of his work to end the Korean War, denuclearise the Korean peninsula, and bring peace to the region.”
As is customary, lawmakers in the Nordic region where the Nobel is awarded refrain from commenting on possible nominees.
But in Copenhagen, Denmark, there was little appetite for the prospect of a Trump win.
The push comes as Trump is preparing for an historic summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, which will serve as the highest-stakes diplomatic test to date for a president whose unconventional approach to foreign policy has also prompted fears of nuclear winter.
It remains far from clear, however, whether the North will ultimately agree to give up its nuclear weapons and allow independent inspectors to verify their compliance.
Polling has shown Trump and many of the policies he’s championed to be broadly unpopular around the globe.
The Pew Research Center has also found that the public’s trust in the US president to do the right thing when it comes to international affairs has plummeted since Trump took office.
And Sweden saw the largest drop from former President Barack Obama, who won the Nobel in 2009 less than a year into his presidency, to Trump, with 93 per cent confident in Obama and just 10 per cent in Trump.
But Trump supporters, including British politician Nigel Farage, argue that Obama won after having accomplished far less.
“He got the Nobel Peace Prize for what he might do,” Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence Party, said on a London talk radio station last month.
Farage, who campaigned alongside Trump, said Trump deserved the prize “for managing to get... talks going with North Korea, something that no US president has ever, ever managed to do.
As a member of the European Parliament, Farage is among those who can nominate people for the prize, and said he would be setting up a petition to bolster Trump.
Nominations can come from university professors, directors of peace research and international affairs institutes, and former recipients, as well as members of national assemblies and national governments, among others.
To be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize of the year, nominations must be sent to the Norwegian Nobel Committee before Feb. 1 of the same year. There are currently 330 candidates for the 2018 prize, including 114 organizations. Nominations are required to be kept secret 50 years.