Trump attacks Nobel Peace Prize winner as 'liberal person … who nobody has ever heard of’

US President Donald Trump on Friday attacked this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner, describing her as "a liberal person who works at the United Nations, who nobody has ever heard of." Trump said he himself had "never heard of the person," referring to South African jurist Navi Pillay, who chaired a UN commission of inquiry that concluded Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. "Today they gave out the Nobel Peace Prize to a person I never heard of. The person nobody did. It’s a mystery person," he said at a Republican campaign rally in Syracuse, New York ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections, adding: "But congratulations anyway." Trump repeated his assertion that he "settled eight wars," citing the conflict between India and Pakistan as an example. "Any one of these eight wars, you get the Nobel Prize. I did eight. No president’s ever done any," he said. He then escalated his criticism of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee and Norway, the country it comes from. "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," he said. He claimed the prize had been "forever discredited by a handful of radical ideologues who are anti-democracy and really enemies of civilization." "We will not forget Norway," said Trump, adding that the omission was "just another sign of how Norway and all these others are ripping off our country." Trump has long made the case that he is deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize and criticized how to date he has not been awarded it. Pillay served as a judge and president of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, as a judge at the International Criminal Court, and as the United Nations high commissioner for human rights from 2008 to 2014. She chaired a UN inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory from 2021 to 2025. That commission said Israel had committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, a finding Israel rejected. The Nobel Committee said she played a central role in efforts to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, and that her work had widened the effect of international law.