President Donald Trump has stooped to cold calling Norwegian diplomats in his long-suffering bid to be awarded the country’s coveted Noble Peace Prize.
Norway’s Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg, the former NATO secretary-general, confirmed to Politico that Trump called him to discuss tariffs and economic cooperation between the two countries.
“It is true that President Trump called me a few days before his conversation with Prime Minister (Jonas Gahr) Støre. Several of the president’s staff members also participated in the conversation, including Treasury Secretary Bessent and Trade Representative Greer,” said Stoltenberg.
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However, Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv reported on Thursday that the topic of the Nobel Peace Prize was also raised in their discussions, and it was the second such time that the topic was raised during a call.
Stoltenberg added, “I will not go into further detail about the content of the conversation.”
In recent months, Trump has frequently proclaimed that he believes that he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize much more than the previous four presidents who have received the award—especially more than former President Barack Obama.
“(Obama) didn’t even know why the hell he got it, right? He still doesn’t,” Trump told a Las Vegas audience last year during a campaign stop, The Independent reported. “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.”
In his second term, Trump has publicly ramped up the pressure to get his hands on the award and he has enlisted the help of his MAGA proxies to prove he is Nobel-worthy.
Israel President Benjamin Netanyahu wrote a letter to the Norwegian Nobel Committee praising Trump for his role in negotiating the 2020 Abraham Accords. Laying it on thick, Netanyahu claimed that Trump was “forging peace, as we speak, in one country in the region after another.”
Armenia and Azerbaijan have also publicly come out in support of Trump winning the prize after a successful Aug. 8 summit at the White House saw the two countries walk away with a joint peace agreement to end a 37-year conflict, the Atlantic Council reported.
“I think President Trump deserved to have the Nobel Peace Prize,” Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said at the White House, “and we will defend that, we will promote for that.”
Now all eyes are on Trump’s highly-anticipated meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska as he looks to finally put an end to Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine once and for all, something he promised to do on “day one” of his presidency.
A former aide in Trump’s first term told The Hill “there’s no question the pressure’s on” for the administration to secure the prize.
“Trump sees this prize as the ultimate capstone to how history will remember him,” they added.
Yet even if Trump doesn’t broker peace between Russian and Ukraine, MAGA pundit Geraldo Rivera declared that Trump deserves it anyway.
“If you have a president of the United States trying so hard... for peace, even if he’s not totally successful, just the effort is so, it’s so overt, it’s so public, it’s so aggressive. You know, he deserves recognition at least for that,” Rivera told Newsmax host Rob Finnerty on Wednesday.
“If he does end this war, Geraldo, can they deny him the Nobel Peace Prize?” Finnerty asked.
“Hell no,” Rivera said. “I think that this and/or Gaza would put him on the fast track, and anyone to deny that, I think, would really be putting their partisan politics in front of their logic.”
The Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded at a ceremony on Dec. 10, 2025, in Stockholm, Sweden.
The Daily Beast has contacted White House representatives for comment on Trump’s campaign push for the Nobel Peace Prize.
