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President Trump slipped a familiar grievance into his remarks at Mount Rushmore on the eve of the nation’s 250th birthday, complaining about not having won a Nobel Prize.
The aside came as Trump rattled off a list of inventions and advancements pioneered by Americans, while also touting the country’s dominance in music, sports and culture.
“Americans have won the most Olympic medals of any country in the world, by far the most Nobel Prizes,” he said, before quickly adding: “Well, they haven’t given me one.”
Trump complained about not being awarded the prize despite having “settled eight wars,” an exaggerated claim he often repeats.
The U.S. leads the world with more than 420 Nobel Prize laureates, a group of individuals recognized for their discoveries and achievements that have “conferred the greatest benefit to humankind” in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace.
The prestigious award has long been a fixation for Trump, and he spent much of the early months of his second term publicly lobbying for the Peace Prize.
He said in January that he “can’t think of anybody in history” that deserved the prize more than himself.
The 2025 award was ultimately presented to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who decided in January to give the medal to Trump in what the Nobel Prize committee quickly clarified was nothing more than a symbolic gesture.
“The prize itself – the honour and recognition – remains inseparably linked to the person or organisation designated as the laureate by the Norwegian Nobel Committee,” the committee said in a statement at the time. “Regardless of what may happen to the medal, the diploma, or the prize money, it is and remains the original laureate who is recorded in history as the recipient of the prize.”
The president’s desire to gain recognition for his diplomatic efforts is well known to those around him in the White House.
Last August, a former aide who worked for Trump during his first term said that the president sees the prize as “the ultimate capstone to how history will remember him.”
Only two sitting U.S. presidents have won the Nobel Prize in history: Woodrow Wilson in 1920 and Barack Obama in 2009.
Hunter Biden, former President Joe Biden’s son, joked last week that he was nominating Trump for the Peace Prize because he had ended the war with Iran “at least 38 times.”
“No President in History has ended the same war so many times,” Hunter Biden wrote on the social platform X. “And he is nowhere near finished ending it. It’s a record worthy of the Nobel committee’s recognition.”
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