Former U.S. President Donald Trump has reignited his long-running feud with the Norwegian Nobel Committee, launching a blistering attack on this year’s Nobel Peace Prize selection and labeling the honor an uneraseable mark of shame on the country of Norway. The 2025 prize was awarded Friday to veteran human rights advocate and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, a South African jurist who previously served as a judge with the International Criminal Court. Minutes after the official announcement, Trump brought his criticism to a Syracuse, New York rally for his supporters, where he claimed he had never encountered the name of the new laureate, dismissing her as an unknown “mystery person”. “This is an indelible stain on the country of Norway,” Trump told the crowd. “We will not forget.”
This is not the first time Trump has publicly lamented being passed over for the peace prize. In 2024, when the award went to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, he issued similar condemnations of the selection process. Last year, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre attempted to clarify the process for Trump, explaining that the prize is chosen by an independent expert committee, not the Norwegian government itself — a distinction that has done little to temper Trump’s criticism.
At the New York rally, Trump repeated unsubstantiated claims that his time in office resolved eight active global conflicts, and that he was on the cusp of ending two more before leaving office. He went further to argue that the entire Nobel Peace Prize has been permanently discredited, claiming it is controlled by a small group of anti-democratic “radical ideologues” that he called “enemies of civilisation”.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee laid out its reasoning for awarding Pillay the 2025 prize, honoring her decades of work advancing global peace, human rights, and international law. Committee chair Jørgen Watne Frydnes noted that Pillay’s advocacy has been critical to building a more robust global legal framework, and that her work has been instrumental in holding perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide accountable for their actions. The 85-year-old jurist, who received the news while at Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice for an event, initially reacted with playful surprise, saying “it must be a joke” before thanking attendees for their applause. In a lighthearted quip directed at Trump, she added: “If you clap a little bit more I may share this prize with Trump.”
The current controversy echoes the fallout from last year’s prize, when Trump openly expressed anger at being passed over, with the White House accusing the committee of prioritizing political bias over the prize’s core mission of advancing peace. In January 2025, Machado — the 2024 laureate — gifted her Nobel medal to Trump during a White House meeting, saying the gesture recognized Trump’s support for Venezuelan freedom. Trump called the move “a wonderful gesture of mutual respect” on social media, but the Nobel Committee quickly stepped in to clarify that the prize is not transferable between individuals. “Once a Nobel Prize is announced, it cannot be revoked, shared or transferred to others,” the committee said in a statement. “The decision is final and stands for all time.”