The Nobel Peace Prize winner is set to be named on Friday, with Donald Trump and his administration having made clear more than once that they think the US president deserves the award.
The two-time president has been on a not-so-subtle Nobel Prize campaign for years, starting in his first term in office, when he said “many people” thought he deserved it.
In February this year, during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, he said: “They will never give me a Nobel Peace Prize. I deserve it, but they will never give it to me.”
But why does he think he should win, who has nominated him and how likely is it?
Why does Trump think he should get a Nobel Prize?
Mr Trump has suggested on several occasions that he has been instrumental in stopping multiple wars.
“I’ve done six wars, I’ve ended six wars,” he said on 18 August, during his summit with Ukrainian and European leaders. “If you look at the six deals I settled this year, they were all at war. I didn’t do any ceasefires.”
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The following day, in an interview with Fox News, he revised the number to seven wars. It’s a claim he went on to repeat last month, claiming that no one had “ever done anything close to that”.
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Read more: The seven wars Trump claims to have ended
Dr Samir Puri, director of the Centre for Global Governance and Security at Chatham House, previously told Sky News: “There’s an absurdity to Trump’s claims, but like many of his claims, within the absurdity there are sometimes grains of truth.”
He suggested there was a “huge difference between getting fighting to stop in the short-term and resolving the root causes of the conflict,” and that Mr Trump’s interventions often amount to “conflict management” rather than conflict resolution.
Has Trump been nominated?
He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize more than 10 times – by Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Manet, a Ukrainian politician, as well as legislators from the US, Sweden, and Norway.
Mr Netanyahu nominated him in July, saying Mr Trump was “forging peace as we speak” in “one country and one region after the other”.
It came after Mr Trump took credit for stopping Iran and Israel‘s “12-day war” the month prior.
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Could Trump actually win?
Experts such as Nina Graeger, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, have suggested successfully pressuring Russia to end the war in Ukraine or Israel to stop its war in Gaza would make Mr Trump a viable candidate.
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But while Mr Trump says indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas over his 20-point peace plan are “very serious,” it looks unlikely anything will be agreed before the prize is handed out on Friday.
Experts suggest Mr Trump is an unlikely winner for other reasons.
Alfred Nobel’s will, the award’s foundation, says the award should go to the person “who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations”.
That is something Trump is not doing, according to Ms Graeger.
“He has withdrawn the US from the World Health Organization and from the Paris Accord on climate, he has initiated a trade war on old friends and allies,” she said.
“That is not exactly what we think about when we think about a peaceful president or someone who really is interested in promoting peace.”
Anyone can be nominated for the prize, but its website cautions that with “no vetting of nominations”, “to simply be nominated is therefore not an official endorsement or honour and may not be used to imply affiliation with the Nobel Peace Prize or its related institutions.”
Only people who meet certain criteria can nominate someone, including heads of state, members of government, former Nobel winners, and university professors.
The Nobel committee, a panel of five experts appointed by the Norwegian Storting (supreme legislative body), shortlists candidates, which are then further scrutinised by external consultants. These include permanent advisers to the committee, Norwegian and international experts in the field.
Once this information is shared with the committee, the final decision is made and the winner announced each October.
In 2025, there were 338 candidates, including 244 individuals and 94 organisations.
During his second term, Mr Trump has also proposed measures that critics argue will hamper education and scientific research – two areas that are considered pillars of the Nobel Prize.
They include slashing the budget for the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, and plans to dismantle the Department of Education to shrink the federal government’s role in education in favour of more control by the states.
Ylva Engstrom, vice president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards three of the six Nobel prizes – for chemistry, physics and economics – says she believes Mr Trump’s changes are reckless and could have “devastating effects”.
“Academic freedom… is one of the pillars of the democratic system,” she says.
The Trump administration denies stifling academic freedom, arguing its measures will cut waste and promote scientific innovation.
Asle Toje, the deputy leader of the present Norwegian Nobel Committee, has suggested Mr Trump’s lobbying campaign for the prize may have had an opposing effect on his chances of winning.
“These types of influence campaigns have a rather more negative effect than a positive one, he says. “Because we talk about it on the committee. Some candidates push for it really hard and we do not like it.
“We are used to working in a locked room without being attempted to be influenced. It is hard enough as it is to reach an agreement among ourselves, without having more people trying to influence us.”
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Who could win the prize?
The prize committee does not publish a list of candidates before announcing a winner, but they have said there are 338 candidates nominated this year, of which 244 are individuals and 94 are organisations.
That’s up from last year, when there were 286 candidates.
Bookmakers have Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy as one of the potential frontrunners, along with Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died after allegedly being poisoned in a Russian jail.
Humanitarian organisations like Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms and Doctors Without Borders also have high odds.
The committee could give the award to UN institutions such as the International Court of Justice, or the UN as a whole, which is marking its 80th anniversary this year.
It could also reward the Committee to Protect Journalists or Reporters Without Borders, to mark a year in which more media workers than ever before were killed, predominantly in Gaza.
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And while Mr Trump’s war negotiations are not expected to be enough to secure the prize, it could go to local mediators negotiating ceasefires and access to aid in conflicts, such as peace committees in the Central African Republic, the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding or the Elders and Mediation Committee in El Fasher, Darfur.
Have US presidents won the prize before?
Four US presidents have won it in the past: Theodore Roosevelt (1906), Woodrow Wilson (1919), Jimmy Carter (2002) and Barack Obama (2009).
All of the presidents won the award while in office, except for Mr Carter – though the Nobel committee said he should have won it in 1978, while president, when he successfully mediated a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel.
Mr Obama won the prize just nine months into his presidency for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”.
In his acceptance speech, he acknowledged the surrounding controversy, saying: “Compared to some of the giants of history who’ve received this prize – Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela – my accomplishments are slight.”
It’s a fact Mr Trump has taken issue with.
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In 2019, he said: “They gave it to Obama. He didn’t even know what he got it for. He was there for about 15 seconds and he got the Nobel Prize.
“With me, I probably will never get it.”
At a rally ahead of his second election win in 2024, he told supporters in Detroit: “If I were named Obama I would have had the Nobel Prize given to me in 10 seconds.”
