Navi Pillay Won the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump Says Nobody's Heard of Her.

Pillay, an 85-year-old South African jurist and former U.N. human rights chief, won the Nobel Peace Prize 2026 for defending international law.

President Donald Trump attacked the Nobel Peace Prize and its new winner, former U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay, in a Truth Social post late Friday.

"I know nothing about this woman, and neither does anyone else!" Trump wrote, TheWrap reported. He claimed nobody had heard of Pillay except as someone who, in his telling, obviously hates Israel, and he wrote that he didn't know what she'd done.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee had spelled that out earlier in the day. It said it chose Pillay, 85, for promoting international law at a moment when that law is under attack, and it credited her with helping make sure genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity are prosecuted, according to TheWrap.

The South African-born jurist's career runs from defending a then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela to leading a U.N. panel that concluded Israel committed genocide in Gaza. Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, have both rejected what that panel found.

As for nobody having heard of her: Pillay's Wikipedia page ranked No. 5 on the site's most-read list.

She got the news in Nuremberg, Germany, where she was attending a forum in the same room where Nazi war criminals were tried after World War II. In a video shared on X, she told the people applauding her, "If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump." Her supporters laughed.

Trump's post, by contrast, made his own case at length. He repeated his claim that he's settled eight wars, listed them pair by pair from Cambodia and Thailand to Israel and Hamas, and wrote that he should have won eight Nobel Peace Prizes, not one. He also said leaders of countries he'd helped had pressed the committee on his behalf.

He does have a Nobel medal, sort of. Last year's winner, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, gave him hers after the U.S. removed Nicolás Maduro from power. The committee called the gift symbolic and said a laureate can't hand the prize to someone else. Trump quoted Machado's praise of him in Friday's post anyway.

Trump wasn't alone in attacking the pick. Netanyahu's office posted on X that the committee had lost its way and called Pillay a bigot. The Nobel Committee didn't immediately respond to TheWrap's request for comment on Trump's post.

Trump ended with a verdict on the prize itself: "This is an indelible stain on Norway, one that will never be forgotten. The Nobel 'Peace' Prize has been forever discredited." The committee had put its reasoning in fewer words earlier Friday: peace, it said, requires justice.

Source: thehill.com.

Source: TheWrap, retrieved October 10, 2026. Other sources: TheWrap (2).