Opinion
Maureen
Dowd
Peace in
Trump’s Time — Except Here
Oct. 11,
2025
Maureen
Dowd
By
Maureen Dowd
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/opinion/trump-nobel-peace-prize.html
Opinion
Columnist, reporting from Washington
This is
one piece of gold that President Trump is never going to get his short, stubby
fingers on: an 18-karat gold medal with three naked men embracing, awarded to
those who promote peace, democracy and human rights.
The Nobel
Peace Prize has been given to some beauts — like Henry Kissinger, for helping
end the Vietnam War he perpetuated to aid Richard Nixon’s re-election.
But the
prize was not designed for someone like Trump. The Norwegian Nobel Committee
would no doubt discontinue the award before it would give it to him.
His
longing is partly inspired by his jealousy of Barack Obama, who absurdly got a
Nobel Peace Prize after only eight months in office for just being a cool dude.
Our 79-year-old president admitted recently that he also envies Obama for the
way he airily bopped down the stairs of Air Force One, while he himself has to
slowly creep down, grasping the railing, worried that he’ll fall and look as
unsteady as Joe Biden.
I’ve
always thought we were lucky that Trump was not more prone to invasions, à la
his fellow draft dodger Dick Cheney, given his belligerent persona, vengeful
nature, fascination with military trappings and U.F.C. macho bluster. He
insisted on having a military parade here in June and he’s planning a U.F.C.
fight next June on the White House South Lawn for the country’s 250th birthday.
Even
though most liberals have tried to paint Trump as a deranged hawk at heart, the
former real estate developer always seemed, blessedly, more drawn to the art of
the deal than shock and awe. While he bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities,
threatens Venezuela and strikes alleged drug boats off its coast, he more often
seems to consider war a waste of time and money that could be better spent
building a beachfront property in North Korea or Gaza.
“Unlike
other candidates for the presidency, war and aggression will not be my first
instinct,” he said in his first foreign policy speech in Washington during the
2016 race. He added, “A superpower understands that caution and restraint are
really truly signs of strength.”
Even
though he tepidly supported the invasion of Iraq, amid the rah-rah patriotic
push to punish somebody, anybody, for 9/11, he would later call it “the single
worst decision ever made.”
In May,
he denounced the debacles of “neocons” and “interventionists,” vowing a future
“where people of different nations, religions and creeds are building cities
together, not bombing each other out of existence.”
If Trump
can untie the Gordian knot of the Middle East, it will be a spectacular feat —
although it will have been accomplished by accommodating Bibi’s brutal
annihilation and starvation of Gaza. And, of course, there’s probably some
money in it for him and his family somewhere.
But the
region is a graveyard of peace deals. As David Sanger wrote in The Times: “Much
could go wrong in coming days, and in the Middle East it often does. The
‘peace’ deal Mr. Trump heralded on Truth Social on Wednesday evening may look
more like another temporary pause in a war that started long before Israel’s
founding in 1948, and has never ended.”
As Tom
Friedman pointed out, it is Trump’s moral indifference to the human rights
transgressions of his partners in the peace plan that allows him to break
through old paradigms.
That is
the same moral indifference that will prevent him from ever getting a Nobel.
You can’t get a medal for promoting democracy when you tried to overthrow the
democracy you were running.
He has
shown utter disdain for our Constitution and the laws that have made us the
greatest democracy in the world.
Once in
2016, I asked him about the violence that was breaking out at his rallies. He
said he thought it added some excitement to the proceedings.
Trump is
constantly posting cruel, nasty images on Truth Social. He loves gladiatorial
combat, the scenes of masked ICE officers roughing up people, even if they have
their American passports in their pockets.
What sort
of person — much less a president — does not object to headlines like this in
The Hill: “Top DHS Official Defends ICE Officer Who Shot Pastor With Pepper
Ball”?
The Rev.
David Black was protesting peacefully at an ICE facility in a Chicago suburb,
hands out, offering to pray with officers, when an ICE officer on a roof shot
him in the head with a pepper ball.
While
Trump may have sparked dancing in the streets in the Middle East, he’s sparked
danger in the streets in America. He is siccing American troops on blue cities,
distorting the National Guard’s largely humanitarian mission and turning it
into, as The Times’s John Ismay put it, “a partisan strike force at the whim of
the president.”
Trump
expressed another chilling whim to the generals recently when he said he had
told Pete Hegseth: “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training
grounds for our military.”
Even as
he says he should have won the Nobel five times over for his work solving
foreign conflicts, he is creating conflicts in America, concocting perilous
crises in American cities.
Gov.
Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma, the Republican chairman of the National Governors
Association, told The Times that the president was violating states’ rights:
“Oklahomans would lose their mind if Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to
Oklahoma during the Biden administration.”
While
he’s freeing hostages in Gaza, Trump is seizing some here. He’s forcing Pam
Bondi to play the tortured servant Renfield to his dark, narcissistic Dracula.
She is scurrying around eating insects, doing the president’s dirty work of
indicting his foes and purging anyone who worked with them. The Department of
Vengeance, nee Department of Justice, has indicted James Comey, the former
F.B.I. director, and Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, and more
Trumped-up vindictive indictments are surely coming.
Richard
Nixon had an enemies list, but he didn’t do much with it. He could only dream
of doing the kind of stuff Trump has gotten away with.
Trump
seems oblivious to the paradox of enforcing peace abroad and disrupting it
badly at home, of soothing violence overseas and inflaming it here.
While
he’s rechristened the Pentagon the chesty “Department of War,” he’s bragging
about forming a Board of Peace — with himself, of course, the chief peacenik —
to oversee Gaza’s new governing body.
The
contradiction is hard to square. It’s not going to win our president a peace
prize.
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