President Trump used his address at Mount Rushmore on the eve of the nation's 250th birthday to lodge a familiar complaint: that he has not been awarded a Nobel Prize. The remark came as he was listing American achievements in science, music, sports, and culture.
“Americans have won the most Olympic medals of any country in the world, by far the most Nobel Prizes,” Trump said, before adding, “Well, they haven’t given me one.”
The president has long been fixated on the prize, often claiming he deserves it for his diplomatic efforts. During the speech, he repeated his exaggerated assertion that he has “settled eight wars.”
The United States leads globally with more than 420 Nobel laureates, recognized for contributions that have “conferred the greatest benefit to humankind” in fields including physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace.
Trump's obsession with the Nobel has been a recurring theme of his second term. In January, he publicly lobbied for the Peace Prize, declaring he “can’t think of anybody in history” more deserving. The 2025 prize was awarded to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who symbolically gave her medal to Trump. The Nobel committee quickly clarified that the gesture carried no official weight.
“The prize itself – the honour and recognition – remains inseparably linked to the person or organisation designated as the laureate by the Norwegian Nobel Committee,” the committee said at the time. “Regardless of what may happen to the medal, the diploma, or the prize money, it is and remains the original laureate who is recorded in history as the recipient of the prize.”
White House insiders say Trump views the Nobel as “the ultimate capstone to how history will remember him,” according to a former aide from his first term. Only two sitting U.S. presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize: Woodrow Wilson in 1920 and Barack Obama in 2009.
In a recent jab, Hunter Biden, son of former President Joe Biden, joked on social media that he was nominating Trump for the Peace Prize because the president had ended the war with Iran “at least 38 times.” Hunter Biden wrote, “No President in History has ended the same war so many times. And he is nowhere near finished ending it. It’s a record worthy of the Nobel committee’s recognition.”
Trump’s Mount Rushmore address came amid heightened security for the 250th anniversary celebrations, with tightened security on the National Mall. The event also highlighted deep national divisions, as explored in a recent analysis of America's 250th.
