The Atlantic floats idea of getting rid of Nobel Peace Prize after Trump nominations

A staff writer at The Atlantic argued in the publication’s “ideas” section Friday that the Nobel Peace Prize should be scrapped now that President Donald Trump has received nominations for the honor, saying that “it’s better to shut it down” altogether than to allow “wacky nominations like Trump’s.”

What are the details?

President Trump was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize earlier this week for brokering a peace treaty between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, and was graced with a second nomination Friday for overseeing an economic agreement between Kosovo and Serbia that also included Kosovo — a mostly Muslim nation — recognizing Israel.

In reaction, The Atlantic staff writer Graeme Wood wrote a piece calling for an “end to the Nobel Peace Prize,” claiming “the Trump nomination shows that peace had its chance, and blew it.”

Wood dismissed Trump’s diplomatic achievements, and pointed to a number of winners of the esteemed award who received the honor because of similar agreements that later fell apart.

He concludes:

All of this points to one of two conclusions: The Nobel Committee can either give the prize to do-gooder organizations such as the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders (and play things extra safe), or it can keep the prize locked away for a while, and reevaluate its reasoning for a modern era. I suspect that that reevaluation will end, if the committee is honest, with the admission that peace can be recognized only by its fruits, which take decades to mature, and not by its seeds. To keep giving awards for the seeds is to court embarrassment, and to make yourself hostage to wacky attention-seeking nominations like Trump’s. Better to shut it down, before the trolls do first.

Anything else?

Wood’s piece comes just days after The Atlantic published a controversial and disputed report citing four anonymous sources claiming that the president referred to fallen U.S. soldiers as “losers” and “suckers.” The outlet was accused of bias and its reporter was lambasted for poor journalism for basing the story on the accounts of nameless individuals.

Other outlets, including Fox News, also cited unnamed sources who purportedly backed up some of claims made in The Atlantic’s report, but no one has yet gone on record. Several current and former Trump administration officials — including former national security advisor John Bolton and former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders — have said the claims made in the story are false.

The timing of left-leaning magazine publishing a piece arguing for getting rid of the Nobel Peace Prize over Trump being nominated after publishing the anonymously-sourced story blasting the president was not lost on social media users.

Benny Johnson, chief creative director for conservative group Turning Point USA quipped on Twitter, “Trump has officially broken @TheAtlantic.”