Donald Trump has wandered into a Thomas Bernhard novel and made vanity great again

I have a particular affection for Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989), one of Europe’s most remarkable 20th-century writers. 

I have read all his books, and few writers have given me quite the same pleasure. I love the way Bernhard exaggerates. Sometimes he becomes so outrageous that one almost wants to tell him to stop. But he doesn’t, and somehow that makes his writing so wonderful. He could spend pages condemning Austrian politicians, the cultural establishment or almost everyone around him. It is often hilarious, but underneath the humour there is something unsettling about how we human beings think about ourselves.

When I read Donald Trump’s extraordinary response on Truth Social to the announcement that the 2026 Nobel peace prize had been awarded to South African jurist Navi Pillay, I immediately thought of Bernhard. Trump claimed to have ended eight wars and argued that he should therefore have received eight Nobel peace prizes. 

He dismissed Pillay as someone nobody had ever heard of and declared that the Nobel Committee had permanently discredited itself. I was particularly struck by his insistence that nobody knew who Pillay was. I suspect many readers may never have heard of Thomas Bernhard either. Just because Trump has never heard of Pillay does not mean she is unimportant. It may simply mean that there is quite a lot he does not know.

I found myself smiling because Trump’s statement sounded so much like a Bernhard monologue. I could imagine one of his characters sitting in a Viennese café, becoming increasingly agitated about the incompetence of the Nobel Committee, repeating his grievances until the whole world had been condemned for failing to recognise his greatness. 

Exaggeration, repetition and absolute certainty of being right

The exaggeration, the repetition and the absolute certainty of being right were all so familiar.

Bernhard himself received numerous prestigious literary awards, including the Georg Büchner prize, Germany’s most prestigious award for literature. In his wonderful little book My Prizes: An Accounting, published after his death, he describes the often ridiculous circumstances surrounding these honours. He despised the ceremonies, ridiculed the organisers and regarded much of the business of literary recognition as dishonest. Yet he accepted the awards, frequently because he needed the money, which he sometimes spent on a car or property.

One of my favourite stories concerns the Grillparzer prize. Bernhard bought a suitable suit for the ceremony, only to discover that nobody seemed particularly interested in him when he arrived. Nobody recognised him, and he became thoroughly irritated. Here was a man who regarded literary prizes with contempt but was offended when an institution failed to acknowledge his importance. 

When he received the Austrian state prize in 1968, he caused a scandal by attacking Austria and its people in his acceptance speech. The dignitaries were outraged, which, knowing Bernhard, must have given him considerable satisfaction.

What fascinates me is that Bernhard understood how ridiculous this business of wanting recognition could become. He ridiculed the prizes but wanted the recognition, despised the ceremonies but attended them, and condemned the institutions while accepting their money. His writing allows us to laugh at his own vanity and contradictions. Trump ridicules an institution because it has not given him a prize. Bernhard ridiculed the institutions that gave him prizes. There is a wonderful irony in that difference.

There is something of Bernhard’s novel The Loser in this preoccupation with recognition. The novel explores how comparison with the extraordinary genius of pianist Glenn Gould (the celebrated Canadian classical pianist) becomes destructive for two other aspiring musicians. Bernhard understood how we can become prisoners of comparison, measuring our worth against others. We can become so obsessed with recognition that even our own achievements no longer seem enough.

Trump’s claim to have ended eight wars deserves serious scrutiny. 

Fact-checking has shown that some of these conflicts remain unresolved, some were diplomatic tensions rather than wars, and his role in others is disputed. Trump, however, simply declares that he has ended eight wars. That settles the matter as far as his statement is concerned. And if he has ended eight wars, surely he deserves eight Nobel peace prizes. 

A ceasefire is not necessarily peace

Having worked for many years in reconciliation and community development, I have learned that a ceasefire is not necessarily peace. Peace requires patience, compromise and a willingness to confront the injustices that gave rise to a conflict. It is seldom the achievement of one individual.

The choice of Navi Pillay makes Trump’s response particularly ironic. She grew up under apartheid in Durban and devoted much of her life to strengthening international law and holding powerful people and governments accountable. 

Bernhard was deeply troubled by Austria’s unwillingness to confront its Nazi past. They came from very different worlds, but both understood how difficult it can be to get societies to confront their history honestly. Pillay’s work represents an understanding of peace grounded in justice and the rule of law, while Trump’s statement presents peace largely as the achievement of one exceptional individual.

Bernhard, of course, was hardly a model of humility. He could be arrogant, resentful and spectacularly unreasonable. But his writing invites us to question the narrator, including Bernhard himself. Trump’s political rhetoric asks his audience to accept his account of events. 

I think Bernhard understood something about us that Trump might benefit from reading. We can become so caught up in our disappointments that we eventually believe everybody else is wrong. Bernhard’s characters do this all the time, and we can see how ridiculous they become, even when they cannot.

An irresistible outburst

I suspect Bernhard would have found Trump’s Nobel outburst irresistible. He might have written an entire novel about a president who believes he deserves eight Nobel peace prizes and then declares the prize worthless because he has not received one. But he might also have turned his attention to the millions who accept such claims without questioning them. Bernhard was deeply suspicious of societies carried along by comforting myths, particularly myths about national greatness.

Perhaps that is why I still enjoy Bernhard so much. He makes me laugh, but he also makes me uncomfortable. Sometimes I recognise something of myself in his ridiculous characters, and I suspect that is what he intended. 

There is something amusing about finding what sounds like a Bernhard character occupying the White House, but the amusement does not last long. Donald Trump commands the political and military power of the United States, and his grievances can have consequences far beyond his own wounded pride. 

Unlike the characters in Bernhard’s novels, we cannot simply close the book. DM