President Donald Trump was caught on a hot mic during a recent political meeting, boasting about his self-described peacemaking record while again expressing frustration over not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize earlier this year.
Trump welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a delegation to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Monday, Dec. 29, for discussions on a proposed peace plan for Gaza. As the group settled in for a luncheon, Trump leaned toward Netanyahu and made an offhand remark about one of his recent diplomatic efforts.
“Do I get credit for it? No,” Trump, 79, said.
Reiterating his frequent claim that he has ended “eight wars” since beginning his second term in January, he continued, “They gave the Nobel—” before stopping mid-thought.
“How about India and Pakistan? So I did eight of them. And then I’ll tell you the rest of it,” he added, before the conversation was cut short by an interruption from elsewhere at the table.
Netanyahu, 76, formally nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize in June. In the months that followed, the U.S. president openly campaigned for the honor, repeatedly highlighting what he described as major global conflicts he had helped resolve.
While Trump did play a role in facilitating ceasefire agreements between Israel and Iran, as well as Cambodia and Thailand, his involvement in several other conflicts he cites remains contested.
Indian officials have declined to credit him with easing tensions between India and Pakistan, saying the two militaries handled the situation directly. In eastern Congo, fighting continues among rival forces, some backed by the Democratic Republic of Congo, contradicting claims of a resolved conflict there.
Elsewhere, long-standing tensions between Egypt and Ethiopia over access to the Nile River persist, though they have not escalated into open warfare. Analysts also note that, despite heightened tensions, there was no active war between Serbia and Kosovo for Trump to end, despite his assertions to the contrary.
Trump did help mediate tensions between Azerbaijan and Armenia in the fall, but he soon undercut that moment by mistakenly referring to Armenia as “Albania,” a slip that sparked a viral clip of world leaders mocking the error.
Ultimately, Trump’s claimed diplomatic victories were not enough to secure the Nobel Peace Prize. This year’s award went to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, 58, who was honored for her “tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela” and her efforts toward a peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.
Machado dedicated her award to Trump, praising what she described as his “decisive” actions that helped weaken Venezuela’s current regime. She also thanked the U.S. government for assisting her travel to Oslo, Norway, to accept the prize, as she remains in hiding.
Trump, meanwhile, continues to portray himself as a global peacemaker, recently criticizing the United Nations for what he called its lack of effectiveness. In a Truth Social post on Dec. 28, he wrote that with the conflicts he claims to have resolved over the past eleven months, “perhaps the United States has become the REAL United Nations,” adding that the organization “must start getting active and involved in WORLD PEACE!”
