EDITOR'S NOTE: Trump's obsession with the Nobel Prize is all about the November elections

Many decades ago, fake news inspired the establishment of the Nobel Peace Prize that US President Donald Trump covets so much he is willing to risk starting a world war.

The great Norwegian inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel, is said to have been irked by an inaccurate newspaper report in 1888 that labelled him the “Merchant of Death”. They didn’t call it fake news back then, but the story had all the elements – some truth mixed together with the falsehoods, including that he had died and that he was a war profiteer. Nobel then bequeathed his wealth for the establishment of the prize to ensure he left a positive legacy.

An important piece of detail came out this week about the dynamite-like but unstable US president who is hell-bent on taking over Greenland. His gripe is that Norway snubbed him and “decided not to give” him the prize despite having stopped “8 Wars PLUS”. Last week the snubbed and humiliated Trump had to stoop so low as to accept a hand-me-down Nobel medal from Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who, according to Trump, lacks the support to take over from President Nicolas Maduro, whom he captured recently from his oil-rich country like a prisoner of war.

All this may sound like fake news or madness, but Trump put all down in black and white in a missive to Norway’s prime minister. However, there’s a method to this episode of his madness. Since his predecessor and archnemesis Barack Obama is a Nobel Laureate, Trump wants that shiny medal too – and wants to throw shade at Obama’s.

It's an open secret now that Obama was given the 2009 prize by mistake – and failed to live up to it. The selection committee had been hoping the peace medal would spur him on in his global diplomacy and cooperation efforts.

The disinformation part of Trump’s Norway propaganda is the suggestion that the government, and not the independent and secretive Nobel committee, decides on who gets the prizes each year.

Trump knows he won’t be getting a Nobel Prize medal with his name on it anytime soon. His real prize is to get his voting base back home excited as the US heads to the mid-term general elections in November.