… and the horse you came in on

by David Benjamin

“I think I’m going to get a Nobel Prize for a lot of things, if they gave it out fairly, which they don’t.” —Trump

STOCKHOLM—In announcing the creation of a new category in the world’s most prestigious international awards program, Sigurd Sigurdssonn, chairman of the Nobel Prize Search Committee, has denied that the decision had any connection to five years of relentless whining by U.S. president Donald Trump that he’s been screwed out of a Nobel Prize he so richly deserves.

“It’s not a matter of pressure. More accurately, it was Trump who inspired this expansion of the Nobel mission,” said Sigurdssonn.”We realized that the Nobel Committee has never truly recognized careers of extraordinary distinction in public affairs that provide lasting lessons for humanity about wretched excess and the dark side of political power. The committee was unanimous in acknowledging that, save for the towering example of Donald Trump, we would have never imagined the creation and—in 2025—the initial awarding of the Nobel Horse’s Ass Prize.”

Sigurdssonn noted that the history of this radical but logical Nobel innovation dates to 2020, when Trump received a number of nominations, from right-wing zealots for the Nobel Peace Prize.

“Of course, when I heard that, I almost spit up my meatballs,” said Sigurdssonn.

He made clear that associating Trump in any way with “peace” would be an absurdity beyond the wildest fancies of Franz Kafka and Maurice Sendak. Sigurdssonn cited Trump’s urging of his followers to “beat the hell” out of protesters at his rallies. He noted that Trump tore families apart at the U.S./Mexico border, leaving more than a thousand children still separated from their parents. Sigurdssonn also mentioned Trump’s illegal effort to summon the U.S. military to a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Washington, where he asked Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Can’t you just shoot them?” Sigurdssonn added that Trump later called for Milley to be “executed.” Moreover, said Sigurdssonn, Trump incited a riot among his followers at the U.S. Capitol that injured 150 policemen and resulted in several fatalities. More recently, Trump’s effort to cancel—after more than fifty years—the humanitarian mission of USAID is a harbinger of death and despair, said Sigurdssonn, for million of the world’s poorest people, in countries that Trump calls “shitholes.”

“This ain’t,” said Sigurdssonn, “a peaceful guy.”

He went on, however, to insist that the prominence of Trump’—and similar privileged white men—in world affairs requires the attention of the Nobel Committee. “It is Trump’s naked example,” said Sigurdssonn, “that has led us to understand that we’ve been kind of snobby about the honors we hand out.”

The Nobel Prizes, traditionally, go to physicists who expand human understanding of the worlds within our worlds, to doctors, nurses and scientists who work quietly to heal the sick and eradicate horrible diseases, to peacemakers, and to poets and writers who plumb the depths of human emotion and enrich the language of the family of man.

“We’ve been giving our trophies to a lot of goody two-shoes. What was missing was a Nobel Prize for the paragons of iniquity in our midst, all of them rich and famous, whose example is so abominable that they chasten all humanity and remind us of how completely rotten we can be if we don’t mind our P’s and Q’s and keep foremost in our minds the Golden Rule,” explained Sigurdssonn.

“We owe Donald Trump our thanks and admiration for helping us to appreciate the giant horse’s asses with whom normal folks must cope every day in every way.”

Sigurdssonn emphasized that nominations for the new Prize have already been received. Among the international figures said to be in the running are Vlad “The Invader” Putin of Russia and Chinese strongman Xi Jinping. Nicholas Maduro, who recently rigged his re-election in Venezuela has been mentioned. Among Americans on this prestigious list are Robert Kennedy, Jr., Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor “Jewish Space Lasers” Greene and surprisingly, New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers.

Sigurdssonn noted that the the medal bestowed for the new prize will not bear the usual image of Alfred Nobel. “We made up something special. It’s a solid gold disk, with a beautifully sculpted thoroughbred horse’s patootie right in the middle, with silk strands for the tail. It’s just as cute as can be.”

Another deviation from the other Nobel Prizes is money. The five traditional prizes include a reward of about a million dollars. “But for the Horse’s Ass Prize, we’ll be asking the winner to pay us,” said Sigurdssonn.

He explained. “This is a prize only available to someone renowned for being obscenely rich, greedy, pathologically heartless and, above all, transactional.”

Sigurdssonn went on:“Why, after all, does Donald Trump keep bugging us to give him a our prize? He tried to keep Barack Obama out of the White House, and he failed. Then, Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, pissing off Trump to the point of sheer white-lipped rage. He got back at Obama by winning the presidency—twice now. But he’s still one notch down from the uppity Black boy. If he can’t stand up front of ten thousand MAGA yahoos and declare himself a bonafide Nobel laureate, well, he’s a loser.”

In other words, added Sigurdssonn, “Our price: a million bucks. Cheap.”

After announcing the creation of the Horse’s Ass Nobel, Sigurdssonn took aside several reporters to further discuss the criteria, noting that this judging might be the most stringent among all the honors bestowed. “Ideally,” he said, “we’re looking for someone without a shred of human feeling. We need to single out, from all the demagogues, blowhards and sadists on earth, the one who manifests most consistently behavior that’s juvenile, impulsive, pathologically mendacious, grotesquely amoral, indiscriminately destructive, willfully cruel and, above all, ridiculous. We need to identify and illuminate, every year, a cancer on the soul of humankind, a short-fingered vulgarian to whom every mother can point and tell her children, “If you act like that, I’ll kill you.”

Sigurdssonn then went on to reveal that, yes, the Nobel Committee has reached a tentative decision on the 2025 Horse’s Ass Nobel laureate. It’s a guy, said Sigurdssonn, “who seems so stupid and silly, so bloated with his own self-regard that people are tempted to just laugh him off as a silver-spoon twit. But he has accumulated wealth and power of such magnitude that he must be taken seriously as a threat to civilized order everywhere on earth.”

Pressed to name the winner, Sigurdssonn responded in a whisper. “Just between us,” he said, “the world’s foremost Horse’s Ass, winner of the most significant award ever announced by the Nobel Committee, is—ta da-a-a—Elon Musk.”

Sigurdssonn shook his head and added, “Sorry, Donald, Maybe next year.”