It turns out that the funniest thing I heard last week didn’t come from a late night talk show host or the latest Netflix stand up comedy special.
The funniest thing I heard last week came from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Now, there is nothing about Netanyahu’s demeanor that suggests anything remotely associated with funny. But Netanyahu was hysterical when he suggested with a serious face that President Donald Trump should be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize?
President who? A Nobel what?
“I want to present to you, Mr. President, the letter I sent to the Nobel Prize committee,” Netanyahu said in a meeting with Trump. “It’s nominating you for the Peace Prize. It’s well deserved, and you should get it.”
Netanyahu said Trump had played a “pivotal role” in negotiating diplomatic relations between Israel and several Arab states.
“President Trump has demonstrated steadfast and exceptional dedication to promoting peace, security and stability around the world,” Netanyahu said in the July 1 letter addressed to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awards the prize.
Netanyahu must think that no one on the Nobel Committee has CNN.
Surely, someone on the committee was watching on Jan. 6, 2021 when a defeated Trump all but sicced a mob on America, egging on supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol in a bid to overturn the election.
It is no secret in or out of Washington D.C. that Trump has long coveted the peace prize.
But you shouldn’t be able to use the words “obliterate” and “peace” in the same paragraph, as Trump did last month after bombing Iran, and expect that you’re going to get a prize for it.
Whining about not getting it doesn’t help either.
“They will never give me a Nobel Peace Prize,” Trump said during an Oval Office meeting with Netanyahu in February. “It’s too bad. I deserve it, but they will never give it to me.”
Only four U.S. presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.
Roosevelt won in 1906 in recognition of his efforts to broker a peaceful end to the Russo-Japanese War. Wilson won in 1919 for his work to establish the League of Nations.
Carter won in 2002, more than 20 years after he left the White House, for his lifetime of work advancing human rights and world peace.
Obama won the prize in 2009, nine months into his presidential term for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” according to the Nobel committee.
Critics at the time said Obama hadn’t been in office long enough to achieve anything worthy of such a high honor.
Trump, meanwhile, has been in office long enough for us to know that awarding the peace prize to him would be an insult to prizes everywhere.
But don’t tell that to his son. Donald Trump Jr. says Obama only got the award because the racial fix was in.
“Affirmative action is when Barack Obama gets the Nobel Peace Prize instead of Donald Trump,” the son posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.
And ignorance is when a president’s son throws racial shade at a former president because of his own father’s shortcomings.
Are we supposed to believe that every other Black peace prize recipient — including Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. — only won to satisfy some racial quota?
But Trump and his son wouldn’t be the first politicians to politicize peace.
If Trump really wants to achieve peace in the world, he should start by stepping down.
Then they could just give Trump the award, and name it after him.
