Donald Trump has spent years insisting he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.
Now the woman who actually won it is having a little fun at his expense. And her punch line was pretty good.
“If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump,” Navi Pillay joked as colleagues applauded her in Nuremberg, Germany, after learning she had won the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize.
The room erupted in applause.
And just like that, the new Nobel laureate managed to get in a dig at the president who has repeatedly argued that he deserves the honor.
Just two days before Friday’s announcement, Trump was once again touting his record of ending international conflicts.
“I’ve done stuff that nobody else has ever done. I’m not bragging, I’m just telling you the facts,” Trump told reporters.
“No president has probably ever settled any wars. I settled eight wars.”
He also suggested that failing to award him the prize would be a major mistake.
But the Norwegian Nobel Committee went with Pillay, an 85-year-old South African jurist whose career has centered on human rights, international law and holding perpetrators of atrocities accountable.
The committee said Pillay had been instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.
And its announcement carried a message that went well beyond the identity of this year’s winner.
“The system of international law is under tremendous pressure, and its institutions are under attack,” the committee said.
It warned that the growing emphasis on power politics was coming at the expense of legal frameworks and respect for international law.
That focus fits Pillay’s career.
She began as a lawyer in apartheid-era South Africa, defending Nelson Mandela and others who challenged the country’s racist system.
She later became a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, served as the UN high commissioner for human rights and held judicial roles at international courts.
More recently, Pillay chaired a UN commission of inquiry that concluded Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, a finding Israel strongly rejects.
In other words, the committee chose a jurist whose work has focused on international justice and accountability — precisely the themes it emphasized in announcing the award.
Trump, meanwhile, has spent considerable time making his own case for the prize.
Last year, the award went to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado. The White House responded by accusing the Nobel committee of putting “politics over peace” by passing over Trump.
Machado later symbolically handed her medal to Trump as a gesture of recognition for what she described as his support for freedom in Venezuela.
Trump seized on that gesture, repeatedly citing Machado’s praise as further evidence that he deserved the honor. But the 2025 award remained hers.
This year, the committee made its choice again.
And it wasn’t Trump.
