China’s Global Times, a government-run propaganda newspaper, reacted with disbelief and outrage to the news Wednesday a Norwegian lawmaker had nominated President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a member of a right-wing party who also represents Norway in the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, said Trump’s contributions to securing a peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, as well as withdrawing American troops from several war theaters in the Middle East, merited the nomination.

The Chinese newspaper disagreed, calling the nomination an “absurdity” and disparaging the Nobel Committee itself for accepting the nomination and similarly award two Democrats, former Vice President Al Gore and former President Barack Obama. The Global Times failed to mention the Nobel Peace Prize win that outraged China the most, however: that of Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who won in 2010 but could not accept the award in person because the Communist Party banned him from traveling.

“Seriously, Trump? Many are mocking this absurdity,” the Global Times claimed. “What he has done to ‘create peace between nations?’ Trump was nominated once in 2018, and now he is nominated again after two years. This nomination seems to have deviated from Nobel Peace Prize’s focus to award those who have, “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

The newspaper went on to declare that Trump “has nothing to do with ‘peace'” and that Trump’s challenges to China’s increasing belligerence on the world stage proved that.

“The prestige of the Nobel Peace Prize has been declining year by year, with its choice often triggering huge controversy in the international community. Compared with natural science prizes, the Nobel Peace Prize is far too political,” the Global Times lamented.

As examples of that declining prestige, the Times noted that Al Gore won the prize in 2007 for his climate change alarmism, despite the fact that it had immediately before condemned Trump for withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, which Gore championed.

“Critics said that he is not a scientist and does not even understand climate change properly,” the Global Times observed.

The newspaper then attacked Obama, claiming that he won the award as “encouragement” to do a good job almost immediately after being elected and that the prize was “useless” in that objective as “Obama has become the US president at war longer than any other U.S. president.”

The Times concluded that “there are too many people who have made substantial contributions to world peace and are more worthy of the peace prize,” but did not name any.

China has long railed against the Nobel Peace Prize for highlighting the work of human rights advocates, though perhaps never as loudly as following Liu’s victory. At the time, Liu had been imprisoned for two years of an 11-year prison sentence for publishing a human rights manifesto against the Communist Party, which fit into the Chinese crime of “undermining state power.” The Nobel Committee presented the award to an empty chair because the Party refused to allow Liu to travel to Norway to receive the prize.

Following Liu’s victory, the Chinese regime established its own parallel award, the “Confucius Peace Prize,” to award to those it deemed more worthy than the Nobel recipients. Among the Confucius laureates currently are genocidal Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, communist Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, and Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, who won the peace award for going to war.

When Liu died in 2017 of liver cancer – which his friends and family accused China of ignoring and failing to properly treat – the Global Times published a screed labeling human rights defenders “losers” and Liu’s advocacy a “tragedy.”

“Dissidents exiled overseas accused the Chinese government of removing any trace of Liu Xiaobo through having a sea burial, and instigated the message that his death be turned into an ‘opportunity’ to change China. Most of these losers, increasingly marginalized overseas, are trying every means to reboot their image,” the Times claimed.

Tybring-Gjedde, the Norwegian lawmaker nominating Trump, said in an interview that he believed Trump had “done more trying to create peace between nations than most other Peace Prize nominees.” He went on to describe himself as “not a big Trump supporter” but noted, “the people who have received the Peace Prize in recent years have done much less than Donald Trump. For example, Barack Obama did nothing.”

Obama won the prize in 2009 for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” according to the Nobel Committee. The Committee went on to call Obama “the world’s leading spokesman” of its values and declared, “thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.”

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