Despite Trump's hawkish moves, GOP lawmakers back his Nobel push -- with a twist

WASHINGTON — Some Republican lawmakers say Donald Trump still deserves the Nobel Peace Prize despite his recent drug cartel-targeting military operation in the Caribbean and a revival of the Department of War, another sign of their enduring loyalty to the commander in chief.

The president has raised eyebrows, even among some allies, with the U.S. military strike on what the administration called a vessel transporting drugs and operated by the Tren de Aragua criminal gang and his threats to take on that group and drug cartels inside Venezuela. Asked Sunday evening while returning to Washington from the U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York if he would send the U.S. military into the South American nation, Trump responded, “Well, you’re going to find out.”

Earlier, on Friday, the president did not rule out U.S. military action to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whom his administration has called illegitimate.

“We’re not talking about that,” he told reporters. “But we are talking about the fact that you had an election, which was a very strange election to put it mildly. I’m being very nice when I say that.”

The White House has taken a hawkish stance against Tren de Aragua and Venezuela at the same time Trump and his surrogates almost daily assert that he has personally ended “seven wars” since returning to office in January while also making his case for the Nobel Peace Prize. On his Caribbean operation, White House officials have attempted to describe the drug flow as a national security threat.

“I can only say that billions of dollars of drugs are pouring into our country from Venezuela,” Trump said Friday. “And when you look at that boat ... what those bags represent, hundreds of thousands of dead people in the United States,” he said of the narcotics on board. “That’s what they represent.”

A White House spokesperson described the Tren de Aragua boat strike as one “against the operations of a designated terrorist organization,” adding that Trump approved it “in the collective self-defense of other nations who have long suffered due to the narcotics trafficking and violent cartel activities of such organizations. The strike was fully consistent with the law of armed conflict.”

Some Democratic lawmakers strongly disagreed. One raised possible violations of international standards, which could get the attention of the peace prize selection committee.

“This was a DOD — it was not an intel (community) project. It was a DOD project,” Senate Intelligence Vice Chair Mark Warner told CBS News on Sunday. “But my fear is, there are still international laws of the sea about how the process of interdicting these kind of boats — there’s supposed to be a firing of a warning shot. You’re supposed to try to take it peacefully.”

“My understanding, this boat, none of those procedures were followed,” the Virginia Democrat said. “What I’m worried about is, if we put our sailors in harm’s way by violating international law, unless there (are) the appropriate designations, could this come back ... and hurt those sailors?”

Democratic lawmakers and officials late last week also questioned Trump’s alleged peacemaking focus after he and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced they would be changing the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. (A closer examination of the executive order Trump signed, however, called the new moniker a “secondary” name.)

Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin, in a Friday statement said then-candidate Trump last year “looked voters in the eye and promised to be a peacemaker only to turn around and name his own Department of War.”

“Today’s announcement feels like a middle finger to his own voters and all the brave service members who are now being treated as the president’s personal vanity project,” he added.

David Axelrod, a former top strategist for President Barack Obama suggested the Department of War move would hurt Trump’s Nobel chances.

“Memo to @POTUS: Probably best to leave the whole Dept. of War rebranding off of your Nobel Peace Prize campaign materials,” he wrote on X.

‘Incredible accomplishment’

Some GOP lawmakers, however, continued over the weekend to back Trump winning the Nobel Prize — but with a twist: Emphasizing the COVID-19 vaccine project “Operation Warp Speed” that he fast-tracked during his first term, rather than more recent diplomatic efforts.

Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, a physician, said during a Senate Finance hearing Thursday that he believes Trump “deserves a Nobel Prize for Operation Warp Speed.”

“If he had been President Obama, he would have gotten it. But because of Operation Warp Speed forcing the federal government to come to a vaccine development within 10 months when others said it couldn’t be done, we saved millions of lives globally, trillions of dollars; we reopened ... economies — an incredible accomplishment,” the GOP senator said.

Another doctor-turned-Republican senator, Roger Marshall of Kansas, told CBS News on Sunday that Trump “absolutely” deserved the peace prize because “that vaccine saved millions of lives.”

The senators were not alone in pushing the vaccine-for-Nobel pitch.

“When Operation Warp Speed was started, it was a massive success for our country,” Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz told Fox News. “And I do agree that President Trump should get the Nobel Prize for that. He should have back then.”

Oz, a physician and former television personality, also appeared to accuse the Nobel committee of ideological discrimination ahead of its October peace prize announcement.

“And maybe if he was a Democrat,” Oz said, “he would have.”

Another hit to Trump’s peace prize push, though, could come from his early second-term threats to U.S. neighbors and partners, adding to what was recently dubbed a worldwide “moment of extraordinary peril.”

“Wars of territorial conquest, once common, have become exceedingly rare — and the world has been more peaceful and prosperous than ever before as a result. That may be coming to an end,” analysts Oona A. Hathaway and Stewart Patrick wrote recently for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noting Russia’s war in Ukraine and China “building military installations on contested rocks, reefs, and islands in the South China Sea, intimidating neighbors and ignoring international legal decisions disputing its claims.”

“Now U.S. President Donald Trump has refused to rule out taking Greenland and the Panama Canal by force, claimed that Canada will become the (51st) state, and suggested that the United States might own Gaza,” the analysts wrote. “With three of the permanent five members of the (United Nations) Security Council seemingly willing to abandon the prohibition on the use of force, and the council itself mired in dysfunction, what does this mean for the international legal order?”