Did Trump pressure the Nobel Peace Committee in his quest for the prestigious prize? Here’s what committee’s chairman Frydnes said on US president

US President Donald Trump’s hopes of receiving a Nobel Peace Prize and joining the elite list of former American presidents who have been honored with the prestigious award ended on Friday after opposition activist María Corina Machado of Venezuela was awarded the prize.

Although Trump failed to bag the Nobel Peace Prize despite jockeying from his fellow Republicans, various world leaders, and most vocally himself, there are four US presidents who won the prize in the past, namely Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said it was honoring Machado “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”


Trump, who has long coveted the prestigious prize, has been outspoken about his desire for the honor during both of his presidential terms, particularly lately as he takes credit for ending conflicts around the world.

The US president has expressed doubts that the Nobel committee would ever grant him the award. “They’ll have to do what they do. Whatever they do is fine. I know this: I didn’t do it for that. I did it because I saved a lot of lives,” Trump said Thursday.

What did Frydnes, Nobel Peace Committee's chairman, say about Trump?

After Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize, Jørgen Watne Frydnes was asked about the pressure from the US president himself and some in the international community to earmark the prize for Trump. He was also asked whether this pressure had any sort of impact on the work of the committee in deliberating.

Replying to the queries, Frydnes said that "in the long history" of the Nobel Peace Prize, the committee has seen campaigns and "media tension," and it receives thousands of letters each year from people who say "what for them leads to peace," as reported by the BBC. "We base our decision only on the work and the will of Alfred Nobel," he said in conclusion.

Although Trump received several nominations for the prize, many of them occurred after the February 1 deadline for the 2025 award, which fell just a week and a half into his first term, according to the news agency AP. His name was, however, put forth in December by Republican Rep. Claudia Tenney of New York, her office said in a statement, for his brokering of the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states in 2020.