Donald Trump just got passed over for the Nobel Peace Prize for the second year in a row.
And after the new winner joked about sharing the award with him, Trump decided to respond by reposting a vicious attack on her.
The target was Navi Pillay, the South African jurist and former UN human rights chief who won the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.
Trump reposted a rant from his former impeachment lawyer, David Schoen, who accused Pillay of hating America and Israel and claimed she had “never done a thing to foster peace.”
“Today the Nobel Committee shamed itself beyond repair and demeaned the once great Nobel Peace Prize by giving it to the UN’s Navi Pillay,” he wrote.
Then he escalated.
“Pillay is an unabashed hater of America and Israel,” Schoen declared, accusing her of celebrating terrorists and rewarding Hamas.
He also dismissed the UN investigation into Israel’s conduct in Gaza that Pillay chaired as a “phony” investigation.
The commission concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, a finding Israel strongly rejects.
The Nobel committee, meanwhile, cited Pillay’s work promoting international law and ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.
But Schoen wasn’t finished attacking the committee.
He brought up Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader who shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize.
What Schoen left out was that Arafat shared that award with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres for their efforts toward peace in the Middle East.
Then came the inevitable comparison.
Trump, Schoen argued, was the person who should have won.
“President Trump gave us the Abraham Accords, which the world said would be impossible and is now expanding them!” he wrote.
He also praised Trump’s efforts involving hostages, the Russia-Ukraine war, Iran and Gaza.
“These are the kinds of things the Nobel Peace Prize was intended to recognize and reward!!!” Schoen declared.
Trump reposted the message to his Truth Social account shortly after the committee announced Pillay as the winner.
And the timing is hard to ignore.
Trump has spent years publicly making the case that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. He has repeatedly pointed to his claims of ending international conflicts as proof that he should receive the honor.
Just Wednesday, he was still promoting his own record.
“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.”
Of course, there’s no evidence to support his claim that he has settled eight wars.
The Nobel committee chose Pillay. And its explanation focused on something Trump has often seemed less interested in discussing: the importance of international law and the institutions responsible for upholding it.
The committee said the international legal system was under tremendous pressure and warned against a shift toward power politics at the expense of legal frameworks and respect for justice.
“Whenever might overtakes right, it undermines stability, trust and peaceful coexistence,” it said.
The statement ended with a simple message: “Peace requires justice.”v
Pillay’s career has centered on that principle.
She defended Nelson Mandela and other anti-apartheid activists, became a judge and president of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and later served as UN high commissioner for human rights from 2008 to 2014. She also served as a judge at the International Criminal Court and chaired the UN commission of inquiry into the occupied Palestinian territory.
Her work on Gaza has drawn sharp criticism from Israel and its supporters. But the Nobel committee’s stated reason for honoring her was her broader record advancing international law and accountability for serious crimes.
Trump’s allies clearly wanted the committee to take a different view.
This year’s snub also comes after a similar dispute in 2025, when the Nobel Peace Prize went to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado. The White House accused the committee of putting “politics over peace,” and Machado later symbolically presented her medal to Trump as a gesture recognizing what she described as his commitment to Venezuelan freedom.
This time, Pillay made no comparable offer.
