In a segment on Fox Business on Thursday, July 31, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said Donald Trump could be eligible for the Nobel Prize in economics, and he highlighted the impact of the president’s sweeping tariff policies as a fundamental restructuring of the international trading environment.
“A lot of people talk about Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize,” Navarro added. “I’m thinking that, since he’s basically taught the world trade economics, he might be up for the Nobel in economics.”
However, Eric Maskin, famous around the world, who jointly won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2007 for his contributions to mechanism design theory, has a different viewpoint. “I think it is unlikely that Donald Trump will be awarded a Nobel for economics,” he told Newsweek.
“The prize is given for discoveries in economics, not for economic policies,” Maskin told Newsweek. “And even if it were awarded for a policy, it is far too early to know for sure what the impact of President Trump’s tariffs will be.”
What Others Are Saying
Navarro told Fox Business, “This is a fundamental restructuring of the international trade environment in a way where the biggest market in the world has said you’re not going to cheat us anymore. We’re going to have fair deals.”
“Everything he’s doing has defied the critics. The tariffs have been tax cuts rather than inflation, and it’s working beautifully,” he added.
On August 1, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a press briefing, “President Trump has brokered, on average, about one peace or ceasefire per month during his six months in office. It’s well past time that President Trump was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Jeffrey Frankel, economist and professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, told Newsweek that, “I must say, I put the probability of Trump winning the Nobel Prize as well below the probability of the US invading Sweden.”
Frankel added that Trump’s chances of winning the economics prize are “beyond absurd.”
However, in 2025, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Pakistani Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar, and Cambodia’s Deputy PM have nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in reducing conflict and tension.
Newsweek’s reporting contributed to this article.