Just hours after U.S. President Donald Trump lost the Nobel Peace Prize to South African jurist Navi Pillay, the president lashed out, launching blistering insults at the committee after investing his hopes in winning the award.
His argument is that the prize should have gone to the United States and that the award had been discredited.
Amazing moment.
— Agnes Callamard (@AgnesCallamard) October 9, 2026
Navi Pillay has received the Nobel Peace Prize ! https://t.co/HL3r1PJzLO
We are at the Nuremberg Court; I cannot think of a stronger symbol for her Nobel prize.
We are all so thrilled!
This is her first reactions upon hearing the news: pic.twitter.com/Crbj6XdiyQ
“If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump,” Navi Pillay said in light-hearted joke while accepting the price.
That remark came in reference to last year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who gave her medal to Trump as a gesture for freedom fighting earlier this year, after Trump mopped their president and his wife at night.
"The commission finds it is a genocide"
– Navi Pillay, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the former head of the UN Commission of inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory. pic.twitter.com/ugWKwrS6b6
— HatsOff (@HatsOffff) October 9, 2026
In the long post published on Truth Social Friday, the president argued that his diplomatic record outweighed Pillay’s and said that alone made him the rightful person for the prize. He further accused the Norwegian Nobel Committee of making a politically motivated choice.
The Nobel Committee awarded the prize to Pillay for her efforts to promoting peace and international law.
The circumstance of Trump’s blistering attack has raised some eyebrows since, where the administration on Friday lashed its frustration on the International Criminal Court (ICC), where Navi Pillay served as a judge, sitting on its Appeals Chamber. The administration has now designated the court as a sanctioned entity..
The sanctions now freeze the court’s finance and assets in the U.S. or held by U.S. individuals and companies, with further threats to weaken or shut down the court unless its allied countries address U.S. concerns.
“I know nothing about this woman, and neither does anyone else! In fact, to the best of my knowledge, no one ever heard of her other than the fact that she, very obviously, hates Israel,” Trump said.
“I don’t know what the woman has done. In actuality, I should have won 8 Nobel Peace Prizes, not just 1,” he added.
From 2021 to 2025 Pillay chaired the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. That commission concluded in 2025 that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. Israel and its supporters strongly rejected the findings as biased and one-sided.
“In the jury’s reasoning it says that the prize winner is one of our time’s most respected international law jurists. This is a highly relevant prize at a time when the international legal order is under severe pressure,” Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre said.
Støre congratulated Pillay on behalf of the government.
Although President Trump had repeatedly campaigned publicly for the Nobel Peace Prize and was a popular choice among bettors, experts had cast doubt on his chances ahead of the announcement.
Betting odds shortly before the decision instead placed climate activist Vanessa Nakate and Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms among the favourites. Trump had public support from a national leader who explicitly hoped he would win, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was among them, reiterating Pakistan’s nomination of Trump ahead of the announcement.
Pillay’s career includes nearly three decades defending anti-apartheid activists in South Africa, service as the first non-white woman judge on South Africa’s High Court, and a central role at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in the Akayesu judgment, that tribunal established that rape and sexual violence can constitute acts of genocide and crimes against humanity.
She has also served as a judge of the International Criminal Court from 2003 to 2008, as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014, and later as an ad hoc judge at the International Court of Justice in the Myanmar case.
“Her unwavering commitment to justice, human rights and accountability is a source of inspiration for the United Nations and millions of people around the world,” the United Nations congratulatary post.
“In all of the Wars that I have settled, I never spoke to the United Nations—they were of no help,” Trump wrote. “The Nobel ‘Peace’ Prize has been forever discredited by a handful of Radical Ideologues who are Anti-Democracy, and Enemies of Civilization!”
Trump cited his diplomatic record as deserving recognition, claiming he had settled eight wars, including conflicts involving Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda, as well as disputes involving India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and Israel and Hamas.
