Trump: "Norway is a shithole"

Norway has gone through a severe civilizational decline: it didn't award the Nobel Peace Prize to Donald Trump. The American president therefore drew the necessary foreign policy conclusion on October 25, at his campaign rally in Port Huron, Michigan, and declared: "Norway has basically become a shithole country." In the speech delivered ahead of the midterm elections, he also said he doesn't want Norwegian immigrants, justifying this explicitly by the prize not being awarded to him. The president of the world's most powerful country thus told an entire nation to go to hell, because once again no gold medal arrived for him from Oslo.

While talking about immigration, Trump listed which countries he would welcome people from into the United States, and then the personal grievance came up with Norway: "I don't want anyone from Norway." At the same time, there has been no announcement that the administration would actually introduce new immigration restrictions against Norwegian citizens, and there is even less known data or everyday evidence of thousands of Norwegians standing sadly at the harbor because they can no longer immigrate to America - to put it this way, the immigration numbers of Norwegians to the US have always strongly converged to zero, but it is nonetheless a remarkable achievement to link a Nobel Committee decision to the immigration eligibility of millions of people who have nothing to do with that decision in any way.

The story is especially nice when we flip back to January 2018. At that time, Trump was still citing Norway as an example of where America should be taking in immigrants from, while disparaging Haiti and African countries, although many Norwegians didn't show particular enthusiasm for the offer even back then. Eight years later, the same country has landed in the shithole category: the Norwegians apparently failed to adjust their national values in time to match the display case in Trump's living room.

This isn't Trump's first peace-prize tantrum: he had previously called the October decision an indelible stain that will stick to Norway forever, and on Sunday he again claimed that he had settled eight wars, so no one would deserve the recognition more than him. Well, for now nobody knows which eight wars these are, because Demented Donald doesn't bother us with the details, but he also added that two more remain, which he will settle too: the Iranian war, which he started, and which, if he simply stops it, would indeed count as making peace, and then there's the Russian-Ukrainian war, where he's currently about to push Kyiv under the treads of a Russian T-35 tank, which is an odd way of making peace, but it is in fact true that if all Ukrainians get killed, the war will end, so logically speaking, the guy does have a point there. He also brought up Barack Obama's 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, and spoke of this year's laureate as a woman nobody has heard of, and it's unclear what bothers Trump more - that a woman once again took the prize from under his nose, or that he hadn't heard of her - the latter, given that the American president uses essentially no tool for broadening his knowledge besides Fox News, is hardly surprising, but we have bad news for Demented Donald: he doesn't know most of the world, and it keeps functioning just fine regardless. That supposedly unknown woman, by the way, is Navanethem "Navi" Pillay, a South African jurist and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who has also worked as an international judge. The prize, announced on October 9, was awarded to her for advancing peace and international law; the Nobel Committee specifically emphasized her role in holding perpetrators accountable for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Pillay took part in the justice process following the Rwandan genocide, and also played an important role in shaping international criminal law on sexual violence against women. She didn't just stumble into an award ceremony yesterday: what was recognized was decades of legal work.

There's another, small structural problem with holding the Norwegian government responsible: it isn't the Norwegian government that awards the Nobel Peace Prize. The decision is made by a five-member committee whose members are elected by the Norwegian parliament, but the body acts independently in selecting the laureate. A parliamentary appointment doesn't make the prime minister the boss of the committee, just as Oslo doesn't become the White House's customer service desk for handling overdue honors. Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre already explained this to Trump back in January, after the American president linked his Nobel grievance to the demand for American control over Greenland in a message. Støre and Finnish President Alexander Stubb had originally set out to ease tariff threats and international tension, but Trump's response ended up fixated on the peace prize he wasn't awarded. He wrote that because of this he no longer felt obliged to keep peace considerations as his sole priority, and then moved on to why he considers full American control of Greenland necessary. It's hard to illustrate more concisely just how peaceful someone is: if he doesn't get a prize for it, he reconsiders the whole thing.

The country declared a shithole is meanwhile showing signs of total collapse in a rather peculiar way. Norway's state investment fund achieved a 9.4 percent return in the first half of this year, which translated into an investment result of 1,753 billion Norwegian kroner, and by the end of June it was managing assets worth 22,683 billion kroner. These are the fund manager's own figures, and of course they say nothing about who deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, but they do add a rather unusual footnote to the diagnosis of national collapse. The Norwegians have apparently sunk so low that they're even increasing their public wealth.

In Trump's circle, meanwhile, an alternative award supply chain is already up and running: Republican congressional candidate Joe Mitchell presented him with a homemade "Man of the Century" award at an Iowa campaign rally, complete with a certificate in a gold-colored frame, which is undoubtedly a more efficient solution than arguing with an independent committee for years. Print out the right piece of paper, get the frame, praise the president, and you've got decoration befitting a historic achievement, all for no more than 30 dollars, with no actual achievement required.

Trump can of course keep sulking, and his own party can hand him another framed compliment at every single campaign stop, but one of the inconvenient features of the Nobel Peace Prize is that telling everyone else to go to hell still doesn't make it his. Good news to finish on: the midterms are coming up soon, where the Republicans are going to lose as badly as a barn door falling off its hinges, thanks to Trump, and perhaps to sulking like this too.

Ugar