Trump warns Norway he won’t forget Nobel Peace Prize snub

President Donald Trump 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, Friday night. 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 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, and last year 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.

“The Nobel Peace Prize has been forever discredited by a handful of radical ideologues who are anti-democracy and really enemies of civilization,” Trump said.

“We will not forget, Norway,” he added.

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.

The move would impose financial punishment on any entity that does business with the ICC, a move that US allies including the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada and Japan warned would have a “significant impact” on the court, its staff and their families.

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 Maria 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.

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 described Pillay at the rally as “a liberal person who works at the United Nations, who nobody has ever heard of.”

“I know a lot of people,” the president said. “I’ve never heard of this particular person. But congratulations anyway.”

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