Trump railed against Obama before he was passed over for Nobel Peace Prize

After months of public campaigning, President Donald Trump did not receive a Nobel Peace Prize as he had hoped hours after railing against his predecessor and longtime political foe, former President Barack Obama, who received the international honor while in office.

The Norwegian Nobel Institute announced on Friday that it was awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machada, which was seen as a snub to the U.S. president among his MAGA faithful.

“The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace,” said White House Communications Director Steven Cheung after Friday’s announcement.

Just hours before the award was publicly announced, President Trump railed against Obama, whom he and other conservatives have repeatedly said didn’t deserve the Nobel, particularly in comparison to Trump.

“They gave it to Obama for doing absolutely nothing but destroying our country,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday.

“He was not a good president. The worst president was Sleepy Joe Biden, but Obama was not a good president. How many months after he won the election, then they gave [him] the Peace Prize? My election was a much more important election.”

President Obama received his Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, just eight months into his administration. The Norwegian Nobel Committee honored America’s first Black president for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” particularly for his outreach to the Muslim international community.

For years, dating back to his first term in office, Trump has vented about Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize and the fact that he had not received one of his own.

Former Obama White House aide Michael Blake told theGrio, “Trump is a fascist and he is a weak man who has been jealous of President Obama his entire career. The president actually pursued and implemented peace, while Trump continues to implement hate.”

Blake, who is the CEO of KAIROS Democracy Project, added, “It’s no surprise at all why Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize and Trump continues to be in envy.”

During his second term, Trump and administration officials have argued that he should receive the honor for helping to tamp down several wars, including between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, Serbia and Kosovo, India and Pakistan, and even the Abraham Accords peace agreement his first administration brokered between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain.

Most recently, the White House has touted Trump’s role in striking a tentative peace deal between Israel and Hamas to end the two-year deadly conflict in Gaza that has killed more than 68,000 Palestinians.

President Trump previously argued that the Norwegian Peace Institute should have honored him “four or five times” for his peace dealings.

“They won’t give me a Nobel Peace Prize because they only give it to liberals,” he said.

Blake slammed Trump for being “supportive of a genocide in the Middle East” and “attacking democratic institutions.”

“He is consistently invoking the National Guard unnecessarily. You don’t ever deserve to win a Nobel Peace Prize when you are promoting hate and fear,” he argued.

Norwegian Nobel Committee Chairman Jørgen Watne Frydnes defended this year’s Nobel Peace Prize decision, praising Machada as a “brave and committed champion of peace” who “keeps the flame of democracy burning during a growing darkness.”

“This committee sits in a room filled with the portraits of all laureates, and that room is filled with both courage and integrity. So we base only our decision on the work and the will of Alfred Nobel,” he explained.