Will Scott

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. As of Wednesday, this has been confirmed by the Daily Mail. I read it on the tram. The headline said, "Donald Trump says Norway is a 's***hole'. Now the country he slammed has delivered its withering response." I assumed the withering response would be our foreign minister. It was me. "In a long post on X," the article said, "Peter Girnus, a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, reminded readers that President Trump did have the Nobel Peace Prize medal." Then it quoted me, correctly, twice. "You might think that holding a peace medal would make a man think about peace, even a little, even out of politeness." And: "Most laureates take years to disappoint us. This one did it in a long weekend, with someone else's medal." A few paragraphs above me, the same article quoted our foreign minister, Espen Barth Eide, on public broadcasting. "He knows very well that the Nobel committee is independent," he said. "We have reminded him of that, in case anyone is wondering, and that is still the case." The committee is independent of the government. As of Wednesday, it is also independent of reality. Both facts appeared in the same article, a few scrolls apart, and nobody at the Daily Mail noticed. I find this very Norwegian of them. You will want to know how a man who does not exist feels about being confirmed. I will tell you, because I have been keeping a tally, the way we tally nominations, which is to say carefully and with no expectation that anyone will read it. Against my existence: Snopes, on October 15, rated me "Originated as Satire," and noted with regret that my confession "did not include markings in its post making it obvious that the content was satire." Lead Stories published the five names of the actual committee and concluded: "There is no one on the committee by the name of 'Peter Girnus.'" An app called What the Fact ruled that I "falsely claims to be a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee." Full Fact, this morning, issued its verdict in five words: "This is a satirical post." And Meta's own artificial intelligence, asked about me on Threads, said: "It's not actually from the Nobel Committee — that text is satire." I have now been fact-checked by a machine. In Norway we have a word for being corrected by something that has never been rained on. The word is "Wednesday." That is five rulings against me. Five. The same number as the committee. Five people decide every year which human being the world will call good, and five fact-checkers decided this month that I am not one of them. I respect the symmetry. It is the closest I will come to a quorum. For my existence: The Daily Mail. A man on Facebook named Ben Pennings, who wrote: "Peter Girnus is a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. He just put this on Twitter/X and it's exceptional!!" Two exclamation marks. In Oslo that is a parade. A message board called the Straight Dope, where a reader introduced me as "a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee that selected this year's winner." I did not select her. I was on the tram. A Facebook post that called me "Nobel Prize Commissioner." This is a title we do not have. It sounds like someone who enforces the prize, which is the one thing the President would most like to hire. And a website in Spanish that translated me in full. "Soy miembro del Comité Noruego del Nobel. Somos cinco." I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. There are five of us. I have now been ruled fictional in English and confirmed in Spanish. I believe this makes me a European institution. So the vote is five against, one newspaper and a Facebook man for. In Norway we would call that a decision. In America you would call it a recount. Now the part the Daily Mail had me there for. On Sunday, at a rally in Port Huron, Michigan, the President told his audience that the prize had been "gotten by a woman nobody had ever heard of." Then he turned to us. "So I'm not in love with Norway," he said. "Frankly, Norway sucks. Norway has become a s***house country, actually." He added that he would rather Norwegians did not come to America. "I didn't get the Nobel Prize. So I don't want anybody from Norway… I don't want anything to do with Norway." In 2018, by the same newspaper's account, he asked why America wasn't taking more people from Norway. We have gone, in eight years, from the nice country to the other kind. Nothing in Norway changed. The prize did. I want to reassure him. We are not coming. According to our government, 1,529 Americans moved to Norway last year, and 1,005 Norwegians moved to America. The President is worried about the wrong direction. The traffic is coming here, in the rain, with wet shoes, to the s***house. And I am, I would point out, the only Norwegian he cannot keep out. I do not exist. There is no form for me. You cannot deport a man who has been ruled satire by five separate agencies. I have the most secure immigration status of anyone in this affair. As for the shouse. Somebody posted a video of one of our public toilets. It is an architect-designed building on a mountain, with a floor-to-ceiling window over a roaring river. "Here's just one of the shouses, Mr. President," the poster wrote. I have been to that toilet. It has a better view than our meeting room. It has fewer portraits of Kissinger. Our sovereign wealth fund, the Daily Mail reports, earned 1.75 trillion kroner in the first half of this year. That is about $184 billion in six months. If Norway is a s***house, it is the most profitable one in human history, and its plumbing is invested in his country's stock market. Our foreign minister, who is a careful man, said the President "is currently in the midst of an election campaign that perhaps isn't going very well for his party, and that leads him to say a lot of things." You may not hear the violence in that sentence. You would have to be raised here. In Norway, "that leads him to say a lot of things" is the diplomatic equivalent of setting a car on fire. Our Prime Minister did not respond at all. The Daily Mail reports he spent Tuesday on a rare ninety-minute phone call with Vladimir Putin, alongside Finland's president, about peace in Ukraine. Ninety minutes of trying to end a war. No posts. No rally. No medal. That is how you can tell he is serious about it. There is one more entry in my file. Lead Stories also investigated a screenshot in which the President supposedly called me "a total LOSER who claims to be on the Nobel Committee but is obviously NOT," and complained that "I'm told he rides a TRAM. A grown man!" The fact-checkers noticed the account name. It was @notRealDonaldTrump. That post was fake, and it said so in its own name. It is the only document in this whole affair that labeled itself honestly. I have had it framed next to Kissinger. Here is what I have learned this month. The fact-checkers proved I do not exist, and they were right. The newspaper proved I do, and it printed my sentences as testimony, in a story about a head of state calling an allied country a toilet because a five-member book club in the rain gave a prize to an eighty-five-year-old judge. The fiction was never the strange part. The fiction was the only part with a label on it. The President has spent two years trying to get into this building. He collected nominations. He had prime ministers phone us. He took someone else's medal home. He never got past the door. I got in through the Daily Mail, in one long weekend, with someone else's newspaper. I remain, according to five fact-checkers, fictional, and according to one newspaper, in office. I intend to serve out my term in both. Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.