Trump dreams of ‘everlasting peace’ as acolytes drop heavy hints to Nobel committee

So to peace in our time. And why not? The Nobel committee is meeting in Oslo to divvy up its annual gongs and Donald Trump, convening his cabinet – and the media – in the White House had a good story to tell.

After two years of death, destruction, starvation and captivity for Israeli hostages in Gaza, peace at last was at hand. Israel and Hamas were on the brink of a historic deal, brokered by the man in the Oval Office, who has made no secret of his desire to be known as the president of peace.

The stakes in Gaza are so gravely baleful that it would be churlish to ascribe selfish motives to the cabinet meeting’s main theme.

Yet the timing was, shall we say, serendipitous.

Today is Thursday, tomorrow Friday – by coincidence, the day the winner of the Nobel will be announced.

But Trump, whose previous expressions of desire for the same prize awarded to Barack Obama have bordered on the avaricious, was all decorum and restraint – at least on that narrow issue alone.

In the course of a 70-minute meeting, the N word went unmentioned – apart from by one journalist near the end, whose question about Trump’s views on the prize went unanswered.

There was going to be “peace in the Middle East”, he said portentously.

“I think it’s going to be a lasting peace, hopefully an everlasting peace,” he added, no ambition being too great.

“It will be a day of joy,” the president said, when the remaining living Israeli hostages – believed to be 20 in number – are released on Monday or Tuesday.

“They’re dancing in the streets. They’re so happy. Everybody’s happy. They’re dancing in the streets of Arab countries, Muslim countries, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Everyone around him deserved credit, the president said magnanimously. “JD [Vance], you were fantastic. And Pete [Hegseth], you were great. Marco [Rubio] was fantastic. I mean, some of you were very much involved. I think almost everybody in this room was involved. Susie [Wiles, the White House chief of staff], I want to thank you very much. You were incredible … and then you have Steve Witkoff [his personal envoy].”

But it fell to Rubio, the secretary of state and acting national security adviser, to supply the heavy hint to the Nobel committee in Norway.

“I don’t know if the one day perhaps the entire story will be told about the events of yesterday, but suffice it to say – it’s not an exaggeration – that none of it would have been possible without the president. Without the president of the United States being involved,” enthused the man once disparaged by Trump as “little Marco”.

That drew a round of applause from the cabinet – the second of the meeting, the first being for Trump’s announcement at the beginning that a national holiday on the second Monday of October would henceforth be known as Columbus Day.

Rubio warmed to his theme. The achievement transcended dry geopolitics to encapsulate the person of Trump himself.

“Yesterday was a human story,” he said. “And because of the work you put in. And honestly, not only is there no other leader in the world that could have put this together, Mr President, but frankly, I don’t know of any American president in the modern era that could have made this possible because of the actions you have taken unrelated to this, and because of who you are, and what you’ve done, and how you’re viewed.”

But this was still a Trump cabinet meeting, and it would not have been complete without some dissonant notes.

They were duly supplied by the jarring contrast between the promise of peace and harmony in the Middle East and the darkening prospect of war, or at least civil disharmony, in America.

Trump only had good words to say about countries in the Middle East who were he said were on board with his peace deal – even Iran, a country which he recently bombed but now said he wanted to see rebuilt.

But here at home an “enemy from within” had to be confronted. Troops were to be deployed onto the streets of US cities to show elected local Democratic mayors and governors who was boss.

Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, reported going to Portland and meeting the governor, mayor, chief of police and highway patrol superintendent.

“They are all lying and disingenuous and dishonest people,” she declared, charitably, “because as soon as you leave the room, then they make the exact opposite response.” This presumably because the officials named depicted their city in somewhat more peaceful terms than the warzone of Noem et al’s fevered narrative.

Yet taking the prize for low blows was JD Vance, who understood that the unifying theme of the meeting was Trump’s nascent success in ending bloodshed in the Middle East – yet failed to grasp that this call for a display of graciousness on his part.

The vice-president has been known at cabinet gatherings to double up with contrived laughter at his boss’s jokes.

This time he decided the best policy was to repurpose for his own use one of Trump’s tried-and-tested jibes – at the expense of Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ leader in the Senate.

“The one thing I would say is obviously the president of the United States, a New York real estate billionaire, one of the most famous New Yorkers in the world, has a lot of interaction with a lot of people who are very pro-Israel,” said Vance.

Then, perhaps realizing that he could not reach the giddy heights of Rubio’s testimonial, he added: “He also, of course, knew one of the most famous Palestinians in the world, Chuck Schumer.”

The crack provoked laughter. It is one of Trump’s cruelest taunts against Schumer, a fellow New Yorker who is proudly Jewish and a staunch supporter of Israel. Given the current backdrop, retreading it at this point struck a particularly discordant note.

JD, it seems, has secret aspirations as a king of comedy. A calling missed, perhaps. But someone needs to tell him about timing – and context.