Donald Trump’s nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize has led to some humorous overreactions. Many Trump fans are acting as if this cinches reelection, forgetting that Jimmy Carter’s far more substantial peacemaking in the Middle East did nothing to shield him from the Reagan tsunami. On the other end of the Trump spectrum, the Never Trump Atlantic was so horrified at the mere nomination of Trump for a prize that he will never win that it ran an article calling for the abolition of the Nobel Peace Prize.
What this amusing diversion brought to my mind, though, is how much has changed since the last Nobel Peace Prize won by an American president. Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize early in his first term, before he had the chance to do much of anything on the international stage. He received the prize, at least in part, because so many saw the election of a man of African descent as President of the United States as an epochal event.
How far away that is from 2020, when the growing elite consensus is that America is so shot through with a pervasive, systematic racism that the country may well be irredeemable. In the real world, Americans put Obama in the White House twice. In the fantastical, Woke world of 2020, we act as if they had elected David Duke instead.
