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In a week where a White House lawyer confirmed the President had paid hush money to try and stop a porn star talking about their alleged affair, could the name Donald J Trump really be about to go down alongside Dr Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa and Nelson Mandela as a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize?
In these crazy times, it suddenly doesn't seem so crazy.
The sudden thaw in relations between North and South Korea, had crowds at a Trump rally in Michigan last weekend chanting "Nobel! Nobel! Nobel!" To which a beaming President Trump replied with unusual modesty: "That's very nice."
We are a long way from denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula or the end of the war after a 65-year truce, but if a deal is done, it could happen.
From war to peace prize
In reality, not all winners of the Nobel Peace prize have been saints, far from it.
The first US President to win the award was Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, for negotiating peace between Russia and Japan following their war over Korea and Manchuria in 1904-5.
And TR was certainly no peacenik.
He'd taken over the Philippines after a war with Spain, and famously led his "Rough Riders" against the Spaniards in the charge up San Juan Hill in Cuba in 1898.
Roosevelt was called a "military mad" imperialist by the Norwegian left, while newspapers in Sweden said the founder of the prize Alfred Nobel was spinning in his grave.
And the most controversial Nobel peace prize winner was probably US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who won the award for negotiating a ceasefire with North Vietnam in 1973.
That came after a massive escalation of the US bombing campaign against Hanoi. More than 80,000 bombs were dropped in the bloodiest aerial assault since the second world war.
Two members of the Nobel committee resigned in protest, his co-recipient — North Vietnamese communist leader Le Duc Tho — refused the award. Only two years later when the ceasefire collapsed after the U.S withdrawal, and the North took over the south, did Kissinger try to return the award.
Songwriter Tom Lehrer immediately retired from showbusiness, declaring: "Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize."
Obama's awkward win
Supporters of Mr Trump point to the fact former president Barack Obama won a Nobel prize after just eight months in office in 2009.
However, to be fair, that was a decision that made Obama and his staff feel intensely awkward, and according to the former chair of the prize committee, it was ultimately counter-productive.
Geir Lundestad wrote in 2015 they had hoped to strengthen Obama, but in fact the criticism he hadn't done anything worthy of the prize caused harm. Still the affair proves the Nobel committee has been prepared to give "encouragement awards" rather than simply recognising good behaviour.
There would be outrage
A Trump Nobel win would certainly provoke outrage.
As senator Lindsey Graham said through giggles on Fox News this week: "I want to be there — it may be the first time the Nobel peace prize was given and there was mass casualties, because I think a lot of liberals would kill themselves if they did that.
"The bottom line is by any objective measure what President Trump has done is historic."
But that's only true to a point.
Three times in the past quarter-century we've seen the leaders and North and South Korea or their delegates seriously discuss a formal peace treaty, the scrapping of nuclear weapons and even tentative talk of reunification. It came to little.
The only real difference so far is that an American president is prepared to sit down with a North Korean leader at what is essentially the start or mid-point of a new peace effort, not the end.
Where does the credit go?
So far, Mr Trump's chief "partner in peace", South Korean President Moon Jae-in is happy to give the American a lot of credit, saying this week: "President Trump should win the Nobel Peace Prize. What we need is only peace."
It's worth noting there is some debate over the translation. A more literal interpretation seems to be: "Let him have the prize, I'm only concerned about peace."
Be that as it may, at this stage we don't even know if Mr Trump is in the running for a Nobel.
Nominations closed at midnight on January 31. Only a select group of people can make a nomination, including senior politicians, past winners, members of international courts, and associates of the Nobel committee itself.
In late February the committee took the unusual step of announcing a nomination for Mr Trump had been forged — not once, but twice, and by the same person.
The matter has been referred to Oslo police.
I can't wait to find out who was behind it.
Topics: world-politics, donald-trump, united-states, korea-democratic-peoples-republic-of, korea-republic-of
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