This, of course, comes with the “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” label.
The Post headline truly is despicable. Despite the entire world clamoring for an end, however temporary, to the Gaza war and the abject failure of the U.N. or anyone else to achieve the release of the Israeli hostages, the Post spins the looming success of President Trump’s diplomatic efforts as merely another example of his narcissistic quest for personal acclaim. This is Big Lie of the Resistance #8: Big Lie #8: “Trump Only Cares About Himself, Not the Country.“
It is one of the most persistent of the Big Lies that emerged during his first term: two friends repeated it just yesterday. The smear is a great default excuse to refuse ever giving this President credit for anything, even achievements that are impressive, important and remarkable. It is an especially ethically obtuse smear: motives don’t make an action ethical, the conduct does, and the right thing done for the wrong reasons is still the right thing. In this case, the motive used to minimize Trump’s diplomatic triumph is a weak one, for I can’t imagine why Trump would want a Nobel Peace Prize, so thoroughly has that honor been debased by the flagrant politicizing of the award process.
[Aside: Of the 10 Big Lies I compiled through 2023, only #1 (“Trump is just a reality TV star”) and #9 (“Trump’s Mishandling Of The Pandemic Killed People”) have largely been retired from the Axis of Unethical Conduct and the Trump Deranged mob list of justifications for reviling the President of the United States.]
In fact, I hope that Trump, should he be awarded a Peace Prize (he won’t be) reject it as William Saroyan rejected the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for his play “The Time of Your Life,” decreeing that the award had no integrity and was awarded by hacks. When it was bestowed on Barack Obama for simply existing after going to terrorist Yassir Arafat in 1996, the Nobel Prize was disgraced for all time.
The Post headline marks the paper as incapable of fair reporting, at least when Donald Trump is involved. I hope, by now, you already knew that, but it is a stark reminder.
I must also mention that, as the Arafat prize should remind us, there is no guarantee, and indeed past events suggest the opposite, that if Trump’s deal for Hamas and Israel goes through that a genuine peace in the regions will survive.
Ethics Alarms 
Praying that this truly becomes a positive step forward toward ending this disaster for Israel and the people of Gaza (not including Hamas, of course!).
Of course there will be headlines minimizing progress and speculating it won’t last (legacy media thrives on doom casting!), but any steps in the right direction are to be lauded. Let’s get those hostages released to their families and all those desperate kids fed.
The evidence of starving kids in Gaza is weak at best. Greta Thunberg has been using a photo of a starving Israeli hostage as proof of this starvation, for example. 2) Assuming the kids are starving, the responsible and humane solution to that is for the party that started the war to surrender. The burden is on the aggressor, and the combatant whose people’s suffering is intolerable. Not the other side. This is why Sherman said, “War is Hell.”
I’ll believe Hamas will lay down their arms and leave Gaza when I see it. This is just a strategic retreat. Plus, they will be receiving thousand of their fighters from the exchange.
thousands
So, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Barack Obama and Joe (and Jill!) Biden aren’t narcissists. Don’t you have to be one to run for president?
And FDR! I’m reading Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War by Frank Costigliola. If I weren’t already convinced he was as as “cold as ice” (as Interior Secretary Harold Ickes described him), I would be now. Americans expect certain performances from their Presidents. Roosevelt played the part very well. Trump plays it less well. But, regardless of whether or not they portray paternal warmth, we expect them to lead.
Thanks, AM. You’re such a diligent student.
Oh, no doubt Trump wants the Nobel Prize. He wants to wave it around and go, “Nyah, nyah, nyah!”and rub it in people’s noses because that’s just who he is. The prize being sullied by ideologues over the past few decades isn’t sufficient proof for him, if he even pays attention to nuances like that.
That doesn’t mean he will get it.
I can’t imagine the Nobel committee bringing itself to award him the prize. I am reminded of the meme that’s going around conservative circles of a hysterical female face agonizing to the caption, “But I don’t want peace! I just want to hate Trump!”
But as to your final thought:
“I must also mention that, as the Arafat prize should remind us, there is no guarantee, and indeed past events suggest the opposite, that if Trump’s deal for Hamas and Israel goes through that a genuine peace in the regions will survive.”
You are exactly right. I know you and I do not agree on this, but we are moving inexorably closer to the End of History. Not at a drip. Not at a slow rumble down a hill. We are racing toward it. Whether it happens this year, 10 years from now or after I’m dead and buried makes no difference. The Middle East will not remain at peace for long.
I’ve pretty much concluded Jew hate is a principal tenet of Islam. As long as there are any Jews anywhere, the Islamists will not rest. Next up: non-Islamist hate!
I’m pleased to see some dedicated lefty commentators willing to credit Trump.
So sometimes reality actually DOES break through the blinder of partisan bias. That gives me hope.
From Josh Marshall post entitled Has Trump Brought Peace to Gaza?:
“Trump was and is uniquely positioned to do this [i.e., force both sides to come to an agreement]. The reasons he’s so well-positioned are themselves very bad. But only he is really in a position to do this. And he is doing it. I think that speaks for itself.
let us not forget that islamists lie, and islamist terrorists lie. this acceptance of peace will last untiul they get their 1000 terrorsit out of jail. This should have been a call for unconditional surrunder within a specific time frame. Once that time frame elapsed, the rest of Gaza should have been demolsihed.
This deal may see the return of hostages and bodies it certainly will not bring peace. It will aslo see the deiseof Western culture,a s we give the Islamsit more footing
If the peace in Gaza holds, even briefly, say for a year, I think a strong case could be made that Trump deserves the Nobel Prize. And I agree (and so did Obama) that he didn’t deserve it. Also, it’s an ACCURATE headline–Trump is campaigning hard for this, and only a fool would deny it. The article you critique provides facts to support every jot and tittle of their headline. Also, worth noting that the Post published a very sharp column by a leading conservative voice in the paper in the same day, arguing strongly that Trump deserves the prize. If that’s bias, make the most of it.
Thanks for this Jerry; I was hoping an advocate in denial of the news media’s corruption would take up the challenge. Sure the headline was factual: that’s how deceit works. Using the truth to deceive. NO other President in history has seen his accomplishments reported routinely in a negative context, only this one. The story is that our President, through power, influence and diplomatic skill achieves a result that no one had achieved or could achieve. To the Post, the highest priority is to denigrate Trump, so his presumed selfish motives are the focus of the story and the achievement is secondary. It’s despicable, and indefensible. It’s not news that a human being wants recognition for his successes. It’s worthy of a footnote at best. Teddy Roosevelt was a massive narcissist, I have read extensively about his resolution of the Russo-Japanese War, and Teddy’s desire for praise and recognition has literally never been mentioned, because its trivia. Concentrating on that would be bad history, and doing it now with Trump is bad journalism.
Slight correction: Obama didn’t get the prize simply for existing, he got the prize simply for not being named Bush. 3 Presidents have gotten the prize while in office, but only the first two (Teddy Roosevelt for the Treaty of Portsmouth, Woodrow Wilson for the League of Nations) did anything to get it.
Trump won’t get it. Teddy Roosevelt is going to be the only US president with an R next to his name who will ever get the prize. There is no possible way that the rarefied committee (mostly retired Norwegian politicians) will ever consider anyone even vaguely conservative for the prize. That probably shouldn’t come as a surprise, since Norwegian politicians have generally been liberal since the 19th Century, in fact I think Norway might have been one of the first, if not the first nations to have a universal healthcare plan. To them, conservative…or conservative/populist…political figures are simply “that which is not,” and probably automatically considered ineligible.
Europeans, although they pretend not to be, are generally antisemitic to some degree. Almost no one really believes the blood libels anymore, but there is a belief that Jews are behind a lot of the problems: labor unrest, desire to upend the system, and so on. Adolf Hitler’s special hatred for them didn’t come out of nowhere, and Germany wouldn’t have latched onto it so quickly and so intensely if the dislike wasn’t already there. The British were actually driven from the mandate of Palestine by the Hebrews who then proclaimed the State of Israel, so they don’t exactly have the best feelings for them.
I do not know and still grapple with the question of why the Europeans lean toward sympathizing with the Palestinians and other Arabs. The fact is that the Arab peoples have not exactly been friends of the Europeans since the days of the Roman Empire. Heck, they tried to CONQUER Europe in the 700s A.D., before they ran into Charles Martel at Tours-Poitiers and Leo III at Constantinople. They DID conquer some of Europe and it took the Italians (with the aid of the Normans) 200 years, the Portuguese 500 years, and the Spanish 700 years to throw them out. Occasionally they have been reluctant allies, like against the Ottoman Empire in WWI, against the Soviets in the Cold War, and even against other Arabs who stepped out of line like Saddam Hussein, and they have been trading partners since the Arabs possess a huge amount of oil which the rest of the world requires. However, they have definitely not been friends.
The only thing that I can think of is that the Arabs have successfully managed to portray themselves as being oppressed by the Israelis, who the Europeans don’t like anyway. Combine that with recent governments dominated by the left in Europe who seem to be in love with the idea of open borders, and a European academia that loathes anything not from the political left and is very successful in turning out indoctrinated professional protesters, and I think you have it.
The Europeans could care less if Israel stands or falls, and they could care less if any Jew stands or falls. The only thing they would care about is if the war disrupted trade and pushed the prices up on necessary items so that they might not get the free medical care they’ve come to think they are entitled to. They could also care less about honoring any American who doesn’t have a D next to his name and think mostly like them. They can’t stand Trump, they couldn’t stand GWB, and they only grudgingly fell in line with GHWB and Reagan because it was in their best interests that Saddam be thrown out of Kuwait and the Soviets be opposed.
Oh, and one other thing about the Norwegians. Although the vast majority of NATO nations hosted American garrisons and weapons during the Cold War, Norway, one of only two NATO nations during the Cold War to share a common border with the Soviets (Turkey was the other), did not. From 1947 to 1991 not a single American plane, missile, infantryman or listening post was present in Norway. They did allow us to preposition heavy equipment, the thought being that men could come in by air and “mate up” with their equipment to defend Norway. I submit, and a lot of much more practical people submitted, that the Soviets would have rolled right over the Norwegian army (small and overwhelmingly composed of reserves) before even a small Marine force would be mated up with its equipment and ready to fight. The Norwegians were perfectly ok with this state of affairs, risking conquest by communists rather than hosting at least a trip-wire foreign force that might give the Reds pause. That should tell you where their thinking was and is.
yes, if Trump established World Peace, it would be characterized either as a fascist power play by Trump or a vanity project in his part.
-Jut
The prize was awarded to Maria Corina Machado for her opposition to the Maduro government. She thanked Trump:
https://x.com/MariaCorinaYA/status/1976637297618571653
“She thanked Trump“
Lefty to cancel Maduro in 5…4…3………….
PWS