No, Trump has not been disqualified from the Nobel Peace Prize

Look, we know he’s been going on about it a lot, but US president Donald Trump has not been disqualified from being considered for a Nobel Peace Prize, despite what a fake news release from the Associated Press and one ‘Hans Zeemer’ (yes, really) circulating on social media might have you believe.

The image, which is dated as supposedly being from Thursday (25 September), leads with the headline, “NPC barrs [sic] Trump accolade” – which should not only be a red flag for its blatant spelling error, but also for its misattribution around who actually looks after the Nobel Peace Prize.

It’s not the NPC or ‘Nobel Prize Committee’ – it’s the Norwegian Nobel Committee or the NNC, if we’re using initialisms.

The report, which also gives a Swiss Times email address (that’s Switzerland) and has a location tag of Stockholm (that’s Sweden), reads: “In an unprecedented move that has world leader [sic] praising the prestigious organization, the Nobel Prize committee announced today that Donald J. Trump is permanently disqualified from future awards after his controversial comments in his UN speech on Tuesday, Sept 23, 2025 as well as his decision to rename the U.S. Department of Defense as the ‘Department of War’, which the committee deemed a ‘grave breach of historical gravitas and semantic decorum’.”

The US president sparked controversy in New York this week when he told the UN General Assembly that Britain and Europe are “going to hell” because of immigration and branded climate change the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”.

The fake news release continues: “The committee’s terse statement, issued under embargo until now, asserted that ‘the integrity of the Nobel tradition cannot coexist with a wilful rebranding of global defense institutions into instruments of infringement’, and added that even past laurels remain untouched – but ‘moving forward, no Prizes shall be awarded’.

“The decision, the committee said, is final.”

Except, a webpage on the official website for The Nobel Prize states that the Norwegian Nobel Institute “can never confirm, or disconfirm, whether someone has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize until the full list of nominations is made public after 50 years”. They say it is “as a matter of principle” and in line with the Nobel Foundation’s statutes.

Therefore, it would be quite an unprecedented step for the committee to come out and effectively ‘disconfirm’ a nomination from Trump on a permanent basis.

Said statutes make no mention of disqualifying an individual from the Prize, but we’ve approached the Norwegian Nobel Committee for comment.

You may think all of this and the aforementioned red flags are obvious, but many Twitter/X users have delighted at the prospect of Trump being disqualified, seemingly viewing it as legitimate:

“Let the ranting begin,” commented one.

A similar remark was made by another account, who wrote of an incoming “MAGA meltdown”:

One tweet containing the misinformation even racked up more than 4,000 retweets and 19,000 likes on the platform:

But no, it’s nonsense, and we’ll find out the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize nominee(s) on 10 October.

And yes, an actual fake news story on Trump – we’re aware of the irony.

Why not read…

• There are calls for Melania Trump to get a Nobel Peace Prize - and people aren't happy
• Trump’s latest Peace Prize push contains one catastrophic error

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