US President Donald Trump said the decision to give this year's Nobel Peace Prize to former international judge Navi Pillay rather than to him had left "an indelible stain" on Norway, Reuters reported.

"This is an indelible stain on the country of Norway and those people that made such a disgraceful and embarrassing decision," Trump told a campaign rally in Syracuse, New York, on October 9, hours after the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced the award. "The Nobel Peace Prize has been forever discredited by a handful of radical ideologues who are anti-democracy and really enemies of civilization. And we will not forget, Norway."

He called Pillay a "mystery person". "I never heard of the person. Nobody did," he said.

On Truth Social, Trump wrote that he had "settled eight Wars", among them Pakistan and India, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Israel and Iran, and Kosovo and Serbia, and that he "should have won 8 Nobel Peace Prizes, not just 1" - a reference to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, last year's laureate, whose Nobel medal he said she gave him. He wrote that Pillay "very obviously, hates Israel".

Donald Trump's Truth Social post on the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. Source: Truth Social

The second part of Trump's post, listing the eight wars he says he settled. Source: Truth Social

The 85-year-old South African has spent her career on the institutions Trump's administration is attacking. She was a judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and at the International Criminal Court (ICC) from 2003 to 2008, then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and chaired the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which concluded that Israel's actions in Gaza amounted to genocide.

Committee chair Jorgen Watne Frydnes said the prize was "definitely a message to those who are undermining the international system and institutions", CBS News reported. He warned of a "shift towards power politics" at the expense of international law.

Washington's answer came within hours. The administration announced further sanctions on the ICC, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio calling the court a "threat to U.S. sovereignty". Israel's foreign ministry condemned "the grotesque weaponization of an award to legitimize anti-Israel hatred and prejudice", and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the committee had "lost its moral compass".

Trump has complained about being passed over for the prize in every year of his presidency. At the rally he also claimed to have prevented wars between North and South Korea, Japan and North Korea, and China and Taiwan, without giving evidence.