Donald Trump has publicly condemned Norway after the Norwegian Nobel Committee passed him over for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.
Trump, 78, lashed out during a rally in New York on Friday, just hours after the committee announced that South African human rights campaigner Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, 85, would receive the honor. The former president had made what aides described as a last-minute bid for the prize, telling reporters at the White House earlier in the week: “I don’t know what [the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s] decision is going to be. They have a reputation for maybe not giving it to people like me.”
The committee’s announcement came Thursday, October 9, with Chair Jørgen Watne Frydnes citing Pillay’s decades of work promoting peace and international law.
At the New York rally, Trump framed the snub as a national insult. “The United States of America, represented by me as your president, should have received the Nobel peace prize, but didn’t. And this is an indelible stain on the country of Norway, and those people that made such a disgraceful and embarrassing decision,” he told supporters.
He broadened his attack to the institution itself. “The Nobel peace prize has been forever discredited by a handful of radical ideologues who are anti-democracy and really enemies of civilization,” he continued.
Trump then pivoted to listing his claimed foreign policy achievements, saying he was going to “settle or win two more wars,” specifically naming Iran and Russia-Ukraine. “Iran will be very quick one way or the other: that they give us everything or they don’t exist any longer,” he warned.
The former president also claimed he had “stopped Iran from having a nuclear weapon and blowing up the entire Middle East” and had “saved more lives than anyone in history.”
Despite his fury, Trump offered brief congratulations to Pillay while repeatedly emphasizing his unfamiliarity with her work. “Despite all of this and all of these unbelievable accomplishments, the Nobel prize was given out today to a liberal person who works at the United Nations, who nobody has ever heard of,” he said. “In all of the wars that I have settled, I never spoke to the United Nations, they were of no help to me.”
Trump extended his grievance onto social media the following day. In a Saturday Truth Social post, he wrote: “I settled 8 WARS, am close to ending or settling 2 more, got all of the Israeli hostages back, including the final 28, both living and dead, had hundreds of hostages, from countries all over the World, released and sent back home, won a war in Venezuela, and captured the violent dictator who so viciously ran that country, and stopped the number one state sponsor of terror, the Islamic Republic of Iran, from obtaining a Nuclear Weapon — AND MUCH MORE! Yet, with all of that I, or the United States of America, did not get the Noble Peace Prize. WOW!”
The outburst follows months of escalating military tensions, including the U.S. Launch of a war against Iran earlier this year. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has separately described Trump’s recent deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin as “absolutely terrible.”
Trump continues his campaign schedule with upcoming rallies across the Midwest.