The News
There’s a sweet genre of videos of American professors getting surprised in the middle of the night by the news they’ve won the Nobel Prize. In one endearing 2020 clip, a Stanford economist is captured by a security camera delivering the news to his collaborator; this year, a molecular biologist described her husband learning she’d won from the AP photographer at her door.
The Norwegian Nobel Institute is getting in on the action, filming a behind-the-scenes video of its director, a 63-year-old sociologist named Kristian Berg Harpviken, delivering what the @nobelprize Instagram caption describes as “the emotional moment this year’s laureate Maria Corina Machado finds out she has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”
In a particularly goofy touch, Harpviken wears wired headphones. Machado is stunned and says she has “no words.” Harpviken’s voice cracks while he reads the citation. “The shaky voice of humanity,” raves one top Instagram comment, from a wellness influencer.
I watched the video and thought: There is no way these people can stand up to Trump.
The Norwegians seem to want to resist the US president, who has been campaigning for the prize and whose Gaza deal will make him harder to reject. Their citation for Machado laments “a world where democracy is in retreat” with “societies pushed towards authoritarian rule and militarisation.”
But that Instagram post might as well be a white flag. One of Trump’s core political insights has always been to see through institutions to the individuals who run them — a skill perfectly formed for a social media age that has been corrosive to institutions for the same reason. Judges are mere politicians. Political parties, media brands, and government agencies turn out to be just a collection of individuals vulnerable to pressure and attack.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee’s silly Instagram post (they did something similar last year) embodies one way that liberal institutions are attempting to reboot in the age of Trump. They’re humanizing themselves — and at times responding to the great engagement numbers their social media teams deliver when they trade prestige for likes.
This is an old move. Trump mastered it decades ago, on . (A personal favorite of mine is the episode where Trump walks hotel guests’ dogs.) While this genre may elevate the individual (though, is Harpviken really looking to be elevated?), it reduces the scale of the institution. Instagram fans may enjoy the Norwegian sociologist; for Trump and anyone looking to pressure the committee, personalizing it just offers an attack surface.
Meanwhile, only a few institutions have managed to retain their mystique, and it’s not by going on Instagram. The Vatican, the British monarchy, the Kremlin: all impenetrable, and it’s no coincidence that Donald Trump, the great politico-media genius of the age, is obsessed with them. Stateside, the Supreme Court, which continues to release only audio recordings, is trying to hold onto some of that power.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee had also been holding on to its mystique. That’s part of why Trump covets the prize: It embodied the 20th-century relationship between institutions and individuals: a faceless government body, in the end, validating an individual. (The oddly premature 2009 award to Barack Obama may play a role too.) Harpviken’s cute phone call undermines its power.
Machado, a modern politician, may better understand the situation. When she found her words, according to Trump, she called Trump to tell him that, in fact, he should have won.
If that conversation happened as he said, Machado didn’t turn it into an Instagram reel.
Room for Disagreement
Calls to reject the institutional mystique of the Supreme Court in particular have been growing louder across the political spectrum. “Liberal lawmakers should view the court primarily as a hostile political actor with its own distinctive political incentives, internal divisions and weaknesses,” a New York Times op-ed in 2022 argued.
