Of everything President Trump has chased in politics, the Nobel Peace Prize is the one prize that keeps refusing him — and at Port Huron on Sunday the frustration poured out at the country that hosts it. Norway, he told the crowd, has become a "shithouse country." "Norway sucks," he said, adding that he does not want anything to do with the country and is not in love with it, because the prize again went to someone else.
This year's Nobel Peace Prize went to Navi Pillay, the former UN human rights chief. Trump's case, made openly for years, is that the United States — represented by him — should have received it: he points to the conflicts he says he ended and the deals he says he brokered, and argues the Oslo committee discredited its own prize by passing him over. Earlier this month in Syracuse he called the snub an indelible stain on Norway and said America will never forgive it. Sunday's outburst was that grievance at full volume, in front of a Michigan crowd nine days before the midterms.
What made it striking was the timing. Only a day earlier, at Perry in Georgia, Trump had held Norway up — alongside Sweden and Denmark — as exactly the kind of country he wants America's immigrants to come from, and at Port Huron he praised the Danes in the same speech in which he turned on their Norwegian neighbours over Greenland and the prize. One day Norway is the model; the next, because five people in Oslo voted another way, it "sucks." The prize itself is decided by a small committee appointed under Alfred Nobel's will — but for Trump the country and the committee are the same thing, and the country is being punished for the committee's answer.
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