A former aide to President Donald Trump stunned his fellow panelists on "CNN This Morning" into silence with his prediction about the Nobel Peace Prize.
The U.S. president has openly campaigned for the award since returning to office in January, just days before the deadline for submission for this year's prize, and he's also made it quite clear that he covets the medallion because his longtime nemesis Barack Obama won it during his first year in office.
"My colleague actually asked President Trump yesterday about the Nobel Peace Prize and whether or not he thought that he was going to get it, and he said he didn't know," said Francesca Chambers, White House correspondent for USA Today. "Perhaps maybe they'll give it to him, so he still wants it, though, clearly."
Trump's hunger for the prize has shaped his diplomatic efforts and may have pushed Hamas and Israeli officials to reach a ceasefire agreement just hours before the award is announced, and his onetime White House communications director Mike Dubke told the panel not to count him out.
"The likelihood of Donald Trump getting the Nobel Peace Prize is like having an American pope," Dubke said.
Three seconds passed in silence as the realization dawned on panelists that the American-born Pope Leo XIV was elected earlier this year, and Dubke continued.
"My point on this is he deserves it," Dubke said. "No, I mean, if not Donald Trump, who... There's multiple places where there has been peace in the last six months because of Donald Trump. This is a award that was created by the inventor of dynamite, Donald Trump authorized the bombing of Iran, which I would make the argument without that the others in the Middle East wouldn't have come to the table for yesterday's peace deal."
Trump frequently claims to have ended up to seven wars in his nearly nine months back in office, although other world leaders are less generous in their credit, and another former White House aide joked the committee might as well give him the prize to shut him up.
"I would say give it to him so we can stop talking about it, because it is so obnoxious that he thinks he should get it," said Meghan Hays, who served as special assistant to the president and director of message planning for Joe Biden. "I mean, we could go through all the number of reasons why he shouldn't get it. He's going to invade Greenland, the rights he wants to take away from press."
Host Audie Cornish stepped in to say that Trump had not actually discussed invading Greenland, although the Danish prime minister said as recently as this week that the U.S. president was still interested in somehow obtaining the territory, and she discussed his primary motivation for winning the prize.
"The villain origin story of this is when Obama won the Nobel Prize and the perception on the right was he did not deserve it," Cornish said.
Hays went on to list Trump's attacks on civil liberties and other reasons she doesn't think he deserves the prize, and Dubke argued that Obama didn't deserve his award, either.
"All of your reasons have nothing to do with [what] the prize is given for," Dubke said. "It's like somebody goes into the hall of fame, but we're not going to put them in the hall of fame for their actions on the field because of their personal life. It's not all-encompassing for their entire."
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