Please stop, news cycle. Please just stop.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe nominated U.S. President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize last autumn after receiving a request from the U.S. government to do so, the Asahi newspaper reported on Sunday.
There. Now that's in your head and you'll never be able to get it out: Team Trump made a quiet request to the Japanese Prime Minister to nominate Donald for the Actual Genuine Nobel Peace Prize, Non-Chocolate Edition after Trump (1) threatened war with North Korea, (2) called the North Korean dictator rude names on Twitter, only to (3) cap it off with a face-to-face meeting that North Korea has been itching for for decades as confirmation of their "world power" status but which has, to date, produced little in the way of measurable progress. Peace!
Can you imagine that conversation? The phone call? The deliberations afterwards? The hilarity of Abe’s top staffers getting together to decide what they’d put on the forms?
"Sure, let’s do it. We’re lucky it’s just a Nobel, and he’s not asking to be nominated to be Burger King or Captain Planet. Make sure we keep a copy of the paperwork, so we can show it to him when he asks. It's probably worth about a billion dollars in new trade deals."
So that's why Donald Trump was muttering the other day about being nominated for the Nobel: His team asked Abe to do it and Abe delivered, complete with handing back a "most beautiful copy" of the nomination for Trump to frame or bronze or spread butter on or whatever he's going to do with it.
At this point the core of U.S. international policy is "make Donald Trump feel good." We insult NATO because it makes him feel good. We're ignoring a Saudi Arabian government-sponsored murder because the Saudi government makes him feel good. We're building a multibillion dollar "wall", with a national emergency declared to do it, because Donald Trump was upset about what people were saying about him on his morning shows. The Prime Minister of Japan is being asked to fill out forms flattering the man.
We have got to find out what administration idiot pestered Abe into an actual Peace Prize nomination. We need a name. There's somebody in the administration who was forced, likely on Trump's own orders, to tuck their tail between their legs and beg a foreign leader to scribble up some documents to make Donald feel good, and we need to know who, precisely, picked that short straw.
