Donald Trump accepting someone else’s Nobel Peace Prize is not just stupid, it’s operatic stupidity, stupidity with a proscenium arch and a full orchestra warming up in the pit, stupidity that clears its throat, adjusts its cufflinks, and announces it would like to be admired from multiple angles. This is stupidity with ambition. Stupidity that hired a man to rip open a red curtain slick with hand oil, body heat, and whatever leaked out of the last act, whispering, hands inside the vehicle at all times, please enjoy the show.
And we all know this shit didn’t happen in a vacuum. It arrived riding a clown car of chaos: an invasion of Venezuela that hopped over Congress like it was a flimsy satin rope at a back-alley peep show, a kidnapped leader who immediately went on a two-day fashion parade like geopolitics had been rebranded as Project Runway: Coup Edition, and a global pause where everyone politely pretended this wasn’t unhinged and asked who was supposed to be in charge now, as if we were drawing names out of a Solo cup.
With Trump, international law is just a suggestion box he uses as kindling. Countries are props. Leaders are contestants. Power is a greasy little stress ball he palms mid-confusion, squeezes too hard, and then insists climaxed entirely on its own.
This is a decades-long tantrum because Barack Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize and Donnie Two Scoops did not, and Trump has been dry-humping that resentment ever since like it owes him money. Obama earned one. Obama deserved one. Obama received one because, for a brief moment, history made a decent choice and then immediately went back to freebasing chaos.
Trump doesn’t want peace. He wants the receipt. The object. The weight. The glow. The moment where everyone has to shut up and look at him like he finally finished something. He’s a trophy-hoarding grievance weasel, a spray-tanned covet parasite pacing the halls of his own ego, convinced that if he just stares at someone else’s achievement long enough, it will legally become his.
In the Oval Office, he’s holding a framed Nobel Peace Prize he did not earn, did not receive, did not deserve, already sealed behind glass like evidence. He grips it with both hands, elbows tucked, shoulders tight, the posture of a man guarding a ham sandwich in prison.
His face has that lost-but-entitled look of a man posing beside the lifeless body of an endangered sheep he forced some small country’s leader to let his eldest spawn shoot for sport. Eyes glassy and slack, blinking too slowly, wearing the solemn pride of someone who doesn’t know what he’s looking at but is absolutely certain it belongs to him. A deep, spiritual belief that proximity equals accomplishment, like if he just stands there long enough history will taxidermy itself around him.
The Nobel was framed. Already framed. Behind glass like a hostage note at a museum. Matted, centered, sanctified, hanging there with the anxious stiffness of something that knows it’s being used in a lie. Not presented. Not awarded. Immobilized. Peace, flattened and sealed like a bug pinned to velvet so it couldn’t crawl back to its rightful owner. The frame did the talking. The frame did the laundering. The frame whispered, don’t look too closely.
It plays like a third-grade awards assembly gone sideways, folding chairs screeching, parents filming, and Lil Donnie Piggy Pie waddling onstage to accept Suzy’s penmanship ribbon because it looked official and nobody stopped him in time.
And then he said it.
He stood there in front of a sloppy-seconds, gently loved, pre-owned Peace Prize he was not awarded and said he deserved it more than anyone. Ever. Anyone. In the entire course of history.
We are talking about the man who incited a deadly attack on the Capitol to stay in an office he had been voted out of.
The convicted felon, business-fraud adjudicated rapist who bragged openly about sexually assaulting women said he deserved that prize more than anyone who has ever lived — more than Martin Luther King Jr., more than Nelson Mandela, more than people who actually risked their lives to bend history toward justice instead of trying to mug it for jewelry.
Only two people have ever taken someone else’s Nobel Prize.
One was Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi who engineered propaganda to normalize genocide, incited pogroms, cheered book burnings, helped ignite Kristallnacht, and used lies to grease the machinery of mass murder.
The other one was Donald J for Genius Trump.
That’s the list.
That’s the company.
Taking something magically turns you into the person who earned it, at least in his imagination. Proximity becomes accomplishment. Touching becomes doing. So if I took Tom Brady’s Super Bowl rings and slid them onto my fingers like mood jewelry, I’d apparently have to be recognized as a seven-time champion, despite throwing a football with the grace and accuracy of someone angrily returning a loaf of bread to the grocery store.
It’s Ralph Macchio handing Donnie Two Scoops his karate trophy and Trump immediately deciding he knows karate now. No class. No mat. No kick. Just entitlement and a white-knuckle grip on something shiny. It’s Jabba sliding Han Solo across the table in carbonite and Trump crowning himself the hero because he was closest to the body when it stopped moving.
Kristi Yamaguchi’s gold does not give you a triple axel. Taylor Swift’s Grammy does not give you pitch. Spielberg’s Oscar does not make you Spielberg. Colson’s Pulitzer does not make you literate. Bebe Neuwirth’s Tonys and Emmys do not turn you into a dancer or Lilith Sternin-Crane. And stealing Little Jimmy’s blue ribbon from the county fair still does not make you a prize pig farmer, even if you frame it and cry.
Machado brought it because she thought shiny equals power, because in this circus it usually does. Big enough toy. Heavy enough frame. Enough eye contact. Maybe the universe hands you a country. Instead she walked out with global embarrassment and a bag of Trump swag, which is what happens when you trade a Nobel for access and the access Venmos you nothing but a made-in-China trucker hat that smells like plastic, cologne, and a warehouse fire, maybe a Burger King crown if supplies were low.
And he genuinely thinks this was a win. In his head, that was enough. Touch equals earn. Hold equals deserve. Frame equals fuckin’ married. A Nobel for a tote bag. Peace for polyester. Achievement transferred by friction. In the damp crawlspace of that skull, fireworks went off, a choir sang, and history nodded politely while backing toward the exit.
The shark didn’t just get jumped. It got jumped again, missed the landing, slid into the orchestra pit, took out a trombone player, and the audience stood up clapping anyway because nobody knows when to stop anymore. The writers are unconscious. The set is on fire. And the lasting image is a man fondling a prize he didn’t earn like it’s proof of virility, insisting it counts because he touched it and everyone was watching.
That’s it.
That’s the whole stupid story.
And no amount of framing, squeezing, or wishful thinking is ever going to make that shit orgasm into legitimacy.
I love you guys!
Stay sane(ish), stay strong, stay safe, and keep your trophies away from the orange asshole.
💙 Jo
