This Monday (Feb. 1) was the Nobel Committee’s deadline for accepting nominations for its annual Peace Prize. As usual, it didn’t take long for rumors to start circulating about the nominees, including US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
The brazen businessman is best known these days for his proposals to wall off the US-Mexico border and ban Muslims from entering the country. Some have called his presidential run a “moral emergency” for the United States. UK lawmakers recently debated banning him from their soil.
Thousands of people, including university professors and members of national governments, are all eligible to submit Nobel Peace Prize nominations. That has led to some other laughable candidates in the past, including genocidal dictators like Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin.
Trump’s name was leaked by Kristian Berg Harpviken, the director of Oslo’s Peace Research Institute, who told the AFP that he’d received a copy of the nomination letter, which cites Trump’s ”vigorous peace through strength ideology, used as a threat weapon of deterrence against radical Islam, ISIS, nuclear Iran and Communist China.”
Harpviken told the Telegraph: ”“I have committed not to reveal the identity of the nominator, but what I can say is that the nominator has shared a copy of his nomination letter directly with me, that the nominator has a position which gives him the right to nominate, and that I consider it valid.” Harpviken, for his part, thinks Edward Snowden is the most likely winner of this year’s prize, which will be awarded in October.