‘I should have won 8’: Trump fumes over latest Nobel snub

Washington: US President Donald Trump has fumed at the Norwegian committee that awards the Nobel Peace Prize, saying that the fact it didn’t go to him “is just another sign of how Norway and all these others are ripping off our country”.

“The United States of America, represented by me as your president, should have received the Nobel Peace Prize, but didn’t,” Trump told supporters at a rally in Syracuse, New York. He called the snub an “indelible stain on the country of Norway and those people that made such a disgraceful and embarrassing decision”.

The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on Friday to Navi Pillay, a South African judge and human rights lawyer.

Pillay serves as an ad hoc judge on the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Last year, she chaired the UN commission that investigated Israel’s retaliatory war in Gaza and concluded that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration had committed genocide against Palestinians, a finding that the Israeli government firmly denounced. She previously served as an appeals judge on the International Criminal Court (ICC).

“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 … I don’t know what the woman has done,” Trump continued in a nearly 600-word Truth Social post late on Friday night (Washington time).

Trump claimed in posts on Friday and Saturday, as he often does, to have ended eight wars, though some of the conflicts he says he resolved were merely tensions, and his role in easing them has been disputed. Meanwhile, the war with Iran that he and Israel started – which Trump predicted would last mere weeks – remains unsettled and is a weight on his party as it faces a dour electorate ahead of midterm elections.

“I settled 8 Wars, with letters being sent from every President and Prime Minister from the countries that I helped to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, and I’m about to settle, or win, two more, Iran and, Russia/Ukraine,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

“They’re both happening at breakneck speed but, forget them, it’s the 8 that I’ve already settled, any one of which, in particular, Pakistan and India, would be far more than necessary to win the Nobel Prize. In actuality, I should have won 8 Nobel Peace Prizes, not just 1.”

Hours after Pillay received the Nobel Prize, the Trump administration unveiled fresh sanctions against the ICC, which the White House has long accused of unfairly targeting the US and Israel. It was not immediately clear if the sanctions were intended as a response to the Nobel announcement.

Trump campaigned aggressively in 2025 to be awarded the prize, arguably the most prestigious award in global diplomacy.

The Nobel Committee was unswayed then, instead awarding Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado the prize. She later gifted her medal to Trump, prompting the Nobel Institute to release a statement saying the prize could not be revoked, shared or transferred.

“I saved more lives than anyone in History and, as Maria Corina Machado, a truly fine person, stated to the Media when she gave me her Nobel Prize of last year, ‘Donald Trump settled many Wars, and deserves the Nobel Peace Prize more than any person that has ever received it’. Based on my record of PEACE, a record like no one else has ever achieved, I agree!” Trump continued in his post.

Since then, Trump launched a war against Iran alongside Israel that has stretched through much of the year and set off a series of retaliatory strikes across the Middle East. On Friday, he also lifted some sanctions on Russia related to the Ukraine war, despite so far failing to broker his promised peace deal to end that conflict.

Pillay was attending the Nuremberg Forum, a gathering to discuss international law in the German town that hosted the trials of Nazi leaders after World War II, when she learned she had won. The news was met with applause by the audience.

“If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump,” Pillay joked.

Trump told the New York rally the Nobel Peace Prize had been “forever discredited by a handful of radical ideologues who are anti-democracy and really enemies of civilisation”.