Irony is lost on President Trump but is a necessity for the rest of us. Today’s headlines feature yet another grievance from Trump about his failure to win a Nobel Prize in 2025 for his totally false claim of having ended eight wars around the globe. He now claims that his obsession with Greenland is less about Greenland than pushing back on his pique about the Nobel. We gain this insight into his thinking thanks to a tweet he sent to the prime minister of Norway holding him somehow responsible for not muscling up on the Nobel committee in his country. You can’t make this up, but I wish this was all made up.

Let’s pretend for a second that Trump really did play a role in ending eight wars. It’s not easy given the fact that the main premise is that he brought a ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. His “peace” means that Israel seems to have unremittingly destroyed another 2500 buildings in Gaza and continued incessant bombing, allegedly trying to destroy Hamas tunnels, but who knows. Whatever it is, it’s not peace. The story of Israel’s army supporting land grabs on the West Bank is equally preposterous. I’ll spare you a recitation about the other wars that continue unabated despite Trump’s claims of peace.

Let’s focus instead on why he will always be denied the Nobel Prize, unless the Norwegian committee has back surgery to remove their spines. Trump is making his name globally as a warmonger, not a peacemaker.

Venezuela is a good place to start, even if you ignore the Maduro extraction of a country’s leader. The boat strikes, supposedly about drug trafficking, but never offering proof or explanation, classifies as an act of war. Refusing to provide assistance to civilians still swimming after a strike and disguising a plane to appear civilian are in fact, if proven and prosecuted, war crimes. Add to this bombing civilians in Nigeria under questionable circumstances, suspect intelligence, and disputed support for alleged mistreatment of Christians. The administration claims that they had permission from Nigerian governmental authorities, but if you really deserve a peace prize wasn’t there another way to handle this problem other than saying “bombs away?”

Bellicosity is not the same as bombs, but threatening to use the military in Greenland, Columbia, Mexico, Iran, and Venezuela, rather than diplomacy or just plain minding your own business, would be the path to peace, rather than threatening war.

Norway can’t ignore the fact that Trump is also involved in an undeclared war domestically, using both his own private armed forces, via the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE, to attack the cities of New Orleans, Washington, Portland, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis. His threats to use the 1800’s Insurrection Act to call up regular military in Minnesota and elsewhere is icing on that cake.

Simply put, you can’t continually threaten war and militarily strike out at countries and your own people and win a peace prize. He’s right that President Obama didn’t earn one at the dawn of his term and certainly was involved in two wars throughout much of his presidency, but that wrong, compounded by his own, doesn’t qualify for any prize. As I said, irony is lost on the president, but the abundant proof of the paradox won’t win any prize for peace.