Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has nominated President Donald Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize. At a White House meeting in which he presented Trump with the letter nominating him, Netanyahu said, “He’s forging peace as we speak in one country, in one region after the other. So I want to present to you the letter I sent to the Nobel Prize Committee. It’s nominating you for the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s well deserved, and you should get it.” In his letter to the committee, Netanyahu wrote, “President Trump has demonstrated steadfast and exceptional dedication to promoting peace, security and stability around the world.” 

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Netanyahu is not the only one to nominate Trump. Some congressional Republicans have also nominated him, but even so, actually winning the award is an uphill battle. Only four American presidents have ever received the award, and only one of them has been a Republican.

That Republican was Theodore Roosevelt, who won the award in 1906 for his efforts to resolve the Russo-Japanese War. 

Roosevelt was one of the award’s first recipients, the first head of state to win the award, the only person to win the Nobel and the Congressional Medal of Honor, and the first (and to this day only) Republican president to win. The award, which is displayed in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, was created when there was a widespread sense that world peace was possible and perhaps even imminent. The rest of the 20th century would disabuse humanity of that notion.

Less than a decade after Roosevelt’s win, Europe was embroiled in a bloody world war. The United States was reluctant to enter, but it did after Woodrow Wilson won reelection, an election in which Wilson had run on keeping the U.S. out of the war. After the Allied victory, Wilson went to Europe, where he helped negotiate the Treaty of Versailles and create the League of Nations. The U.S. Senate, however, did not agree to approve the treaty or join the league. The Senate rejection complicated matters, but Wilson won the award anyway. In addition, the treaty itself was a failure, but the Nobel Committee did not know that at the time. Wilson’s wife Edith donated his award to the Library of Congress, which holds it in its Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

Following Wilson’s Nobel Peace Prize, U.S. presidents underwent a long Nobel Peace Prize dry spell. In fact, by this point, half of the U.S. presidents who would ever win the award had won, and there would be no other U.S. presidential winners for the rest of the century. But this does not mean that there weren’t any contenders. Thirteen more 20th-century American presidents were nominated but did not win, including seven who were nominated multiple times. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was our longest-serving president, was nominated six times but never won. He died in 1945, but before World War II ended, which would have been his best opportunity to win. Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull, did win in 1945 for his efforts in creating the United Nations.

The closest a U.S. president came to winning a Nobel Prize in the 20th century after Wilson was the fictional president Josiah “Jed” Bartlet on TV’s The West Wing. According to the show, Bartlet had won the Nobel Prize in economics before entering politics and becoming governor of New Hampshire before winning the presidency.

Another close call, this one back in the real world, came in the Jimmy Carter presidency. Carter helped broker peace between Israel and Egypt, hosting the Camp David talks in September 1978 that led to the Camp David Accords. Carter developed a close relationship with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and an antagonistic one with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. As Lawrence Wright wrote in his history of the Camp David Accords, “Begin’s main fear was that Carter and Sadat were conspiring against him. He had reason to be concerned.” Later, when Begin and Sadat shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts, Carter seemed miffed about not being included. Carter noted the joint prize award in his diary, adding sniffily, “Sadat deserved it.”

Decades later, we would learn that one of the reasons Carter did not win was a technicality: He had not been nominated for the award. In 1998, the New York Times reported that the five-person prize committee wanted to include Carter as one of the recipients, but the committee had not received any nominations for him. According to Norwegian Nobel Institute Director Geir Lundestad, “Carter would otherwise have won the prize.” In addition to providing some insight into the secretive ways in which the prizes get awarded, the incident provided evidence that Carter was annoyed at not being selected. Stig Ramel, former director of the Stockholm-based Nobel Foundation, recalled a conversation in which Carter told him he “felt sure he would have been reelected if he had won.” Gas lines, U.S. hostages in Iran, and general malaise suggest otherwise.

The man who defeated Carter in 1980, Ronald Reagan, also had a strong claim to win a Nobel Peace Prize. Reagan helped bring about better relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union by pursuing a peace through strength policy that led Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to change directions and initiate glasnost and perestroika. The demise of what Reagan had called “the evil empire” followed a few years later, shortly after Reagan had left the presidency.

Reagan was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times, in 1985, 1988, and 1989. The latter two times, he was nominated jointly with Gorbachev for their efforts to end the Cold War. Although favored to win in many quarters, the Reagan-Gorbachev duo came up short both times, losing to U.N. peacekeeping forces in 1988 and to the 14th Dalai Lama in 1989. The next year, with Reagan out of office, Gorbachev won the award on his own.

As the Reagan story suggests, the Nobel Committee was getting increasingly political toward the end of the 20th century, but things got even worse in the 21st century. George W. Bush, who was not popular among European elites, won a close presidential election in 2000 over Al Gore, and three of the recipients in the first decade of the 21st century seemed to be given awards as implicit rebukes to Bush. The first of these awards went to Carter, who had been close to winning the award in 1978. Carter was ostensibly given the prize for his post-presidential work on global health and human rights, but he was also an open critic of Bush. In the summer of 2001, Carter complained to the New York Times about Bush, saying, “I have been disappointed in almost everything he has done.” Some of Carter’s critiques of Bush in that article have not aged very well, including calling Bush’s goal of missile defense “technologically ridiculous.” Without both U.S. and Israeli missile defense technologies, the 2025 Israel-Iran war would have been far worse.

In reporting on Carter’s award, the New York Times even wrote that “the Nobel Committee used the occasion to send a sharp rebuke to the Bush administration for its aggressive policy toward Iraq.” This was months before the U.S. invasion of that country. Carter received the award in Oslo in December 2002, which also predated the 2003 U.S. invasion. Country singer Willie Nelson, known for smoking marijuana, “a big fat Austin torpedo,” at the White House during Carter’s presidency, sang “Georgia on My Mind” at the ceremony. The award is housed at the Carter Presidential Library and Museum.

The next anti-Bush Nobel Peace Prize went to Bush’s opponent in the 2000 election, Gore. Gore won for his work warning about climate change, but also because the committee disliked Bush. Reuters called the award “a double slap to the Republican president, marking the second prize to a leading Democratic critic during Bush’s administration.”

In 2009, then-President Barack Obama completed the trifecta of anti-Bush Nobel Peace Prize selections by winning the award in his first year in office. Given that the nominations have to be received well in advance of the October award announcements, Obama was selected before he really did anything at all in office, a fact that was widely noted and even mocked. Saturday Night Live joked that Obama won the award “for not being George Bush.” 

Making matters worse was that White House staff had to awaken Obama early in the morning to tell him he had won, a move usually reserved for some kind of crisis or emergency. After press secretary Robert Gibbs woke Obama at 6 a.m. to notify him of the decision, a sleepy Michelle Obama said, “That’s wonderful, honey,” and went back to sleep. White House speechwriters Jon Favreau and Ben Rhodes then began working on an Obama speech to acknowledge the honor. Putting together the speech took longer than expected, leading Time to note, “Reporters joked among themselves that the President needed another half hour to actually accomplish something before accepting the prize.”

In retrospect, and even at the time, awarding the prize to Obama so early in his presidency was not just ridiculous, but it was also unwise. In 2015, Lundestad, former secretary to the Nobel Committee, acknowledged in his memoir that the committee regretted the decision, noting, “Even many of Obama’s supporters believed that the prize was a mistake. In that sense the committee didn’t achieve what it had hoped for.” Obama, for his part, seemed to agree. In 2016, when comedian Stephen Colbert asked Obama what he had done to deserve the award, Obama quipped, “To be honest, I still don’t know.” 

As for Trump, given the committee’s politics, he seems unlikely to win. Yet that failure may even be a badge of honor. Washington Examiner senior writer David Harsanyi, noting the foreign policy failures of Wilson, Carter, and Obama, has joked that Trump’s foreign policy is too successful to win the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Even if winning the award is unlikely, Trump would genuinely love to beat the odds and get the prize. Trump seemed thrilled to get the Netanyahu letter, something that Netanyahu probably anticipated. Trump said in reaction to the letter, “Thank you very much. This I didn’t know. Wow. Coming from you, in particular, this is very meaningful. Thank you very much, Bibi.” 

THE PRESIDENTS AND IRAN, A HISTORY 

Others noticed his excitement as well. Chris Cillizza, with over 500,000 followers, posted, “Donald Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize like Gollum wants the precious.” 

Trump clearly wants to win, but he also knows the score. As he told reporters, “I should have gotten it four or five times. … They won’t give me a Nobel Peace Prize because they only give it to liberals.” History suggests he is right, but then again, history would not have predicted a Trump presidency.

Washington Examiner contributor Tevi Troy is a senior fellow at the Ronald Reagan Institute, senior scholar at Yeshiva University’s Straus Center, and a former senior White House aide. He is the author of five books on the presidency, including, most recently, The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry.