No. The backlash to Obama’s win may have made the Norwegian Nobel Committee even more hesitant to make a controversial pick. The Committee’s former secretary Geir Lundestad later said that the decision to award Obama “didn’t achieve what [the committee] had hoped for.”
It’s widely believed that Nobel voters will be turned off by Trump’s open campaigning. And three of the five voting members have publicly criticized him for other reasons, as the Washington Post reported in August:
The chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, in December decried “the erosion of freedom of expression even in democratic nations,” calling out Trump by name.
“Trump launched more than 100 verbal attacks on the media during his election campaign,” said Frydnes, 40, who has also served as the head of PEN Norway, a group that promotes freedom of expression.
… “After just over 100 days as president, [Trump] is well underway in dismantling American democracy, and he is doing everything he can to tear down the liberal and rules-based world order,” wrote Kristin Clemet, a former center-right Norwegian education minister and another of the five committee members, in May.
A third member of the committee — and thus potentially the lock on a Trump-skeptic majority — posted several messages critical of the president during his first term. In a photo on Facebook posted the day before the 2020 election, the committee member, Gry Larsen, was wearing a red “Make Human Rights Great Again” baseball hat.
Larsen, a former center-left politician, also wrote in a 2017 Twitter post that “Trump is putting millions of lives at risk,” criticizing a decision to reduce U.S. foreign aid.
The other two committee members don’t have a clear history of criticizing Trump. One of them, academic Asle Toje, wrote sympathetically about Trump’s legal travails during the Biden administration.
The two other committee members have not publicly criticized Trump, and “One of them, academic Asle Toje, wrote sympathetically about Trump’s legal travails during the Biden administration.”
When asked about Trump’s pressure campaign hours after the 2025 prize went to Machado, Norweigen Nobel Committee chair Jørgen Watne Frydnes essentially said Trump didn’t get the prize because he lacks “courage and integrity”:
