NewsBeat
Trump claims he is no longer interested in Nobel Peace Prize and doesn’t know if Iran war will hurt his future chances
Donald Trump says he is no longer that interested in a Nobel Prize, despite openly campaigning for one throughout much of his second term.
The president is also unsure how the ongoing Iran war will impact his future chances of getting one.
Speaking with the Washington Examiner, Trump said he had “no idea” if the Iran conflict would “get him over the finish line” with the Nobel committee.
“I don’t know,” he added. “I’m not interested in it.”
The U.S. is already facing heavy scrutiny over its conduct in the two-week conflict.
A Pentagon probe reportedly has reached preliminary findings that a U.S. missile struck an Iranian elementary school, killing around 175 people, mostly children.
The president has said he’s unaware of those alleged findings and that the incident is under investigation.
Elsewhere in the interview, President Trump said the subject hasn’t come up with foreign leaders he’s interacted with about the ongoing conflict, which has killed seven U.S. troops and an estimated 1,348 people in Iran.
“No, I don’t talk about the Nobel Prize,” Trump said.
The comments would come as a surprise to the Donald Trump of a few months ago, who regularly spoke about how he deserved the high diplomatic honor.
Throughout 2025, the president claimed he had stopped at least eight wars since taking office, though an Independent fact-check underscored how many of these claims were inaccurate, exaggerated, or premature.
That didn’t stop nations and institutions seeking favor with Trump from playing into the president’s well-known interest in a Nobel Prize, which reportedly is fueled in part by his anger that President Barack Obama won one first.
In January, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado symbolically gave her Nobel Prize to Trump during a White House meeting, though the prize organizers say she remains the sole holder of that year’s honor.
The prior month, the international soccer organizing body FIFA gave Trump a newly created peace prize, which it announced weeks after Trump was snubbed for a Nobel and came as FIFA prepares to host the World Cup in North America in 2026.
Whatever Trump’s present interest in the Nobel is, there are few doubts that his administration has scrambled global relations with an oftentimes aggressive and unilateral approach.
The administration has tariffed enemies and allies, kidnapped the leader of Venezuela, launched a soft war on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, assassinated the leader of Iran, and threatened the military takeover of Greenland, despite it being a NATO ally.
It has also failed to definitively end crises that the president confidently claimed he would solve, such as the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza wars.