President Donald Trump responded to being passed over for the Nobel Peace Prize for a second straight year by amplifying a post from his former impeachment lawyer blasting the winner, the South African jurist and former UN human rights chief Navi Pillay, “an unabashed hater of America and Israel” who “has never done a thing to foster peace.”
The post, written by David Schoen — who defended Trump in his 2021 Senate impeachment trial over the Jan. 6 attack — went up on Truth Social at 7:58 a.m. Friday, within hours of the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s announcement in Oslo, and was reposted by the president to his 10 million followers shortly afterward.
“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,” Schoen wrote. “Pillay is an unabashed hater of America and Israel. In her position she celebrated terrorists and rewarded Hamas. She conducted a phony ‘investigation’ claiming to find that Israel committed genocide and urging prosecution. She has no credibility in any normal sphere and has never done a thing to foster peace. Just the opposite. But what could be expected from a committee that previously gave the once-coveted peace prize to Yasser Arafat?”
The post, which neglected to note that Arafat, the late Palestine Liberation Organization leader and former terrorist, had been awarded the prize jointly in 1994 along with Israeli leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres for their work together on the Oslo Accords, then pivoted to the man Schoen believed should have won — his former client.
“President Trump gave us the Abraham Accords, which the world said would be impossible and is now expanding them!” the post went on. “He brought home the hostages when all seemed hopeless! He is making best efforts to end the Russia/Ukraine war, to stop Iran, the number one sponsor of international terrorism, and he is trying to rebuild Gaza despite the terrorists’ best efforts to control it. The list goes on and on. These are the kinds of things the Nobel Peace Prize was intended to recognize and reward!!!” The post closed by tagging the president’s account.
Pillay, 85, had by then already gotten in a shot of her own. Arriving to applause at a legal conference at the Nuremberg courthouse — the site of the postwar trials of Nazi leaders — she told the room: “If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump.”
The committee’s citation did not mention Trump, but it did not need to. Committee chair Jørgen Watne Frydnes said Pillay was being honored for being “instrumental in ensuring war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted,” at a moment when “the system of international law is under tremendous pressure, and its institutions are under attack.”
The committee’s statement went further: “We see a shift towards power politics at the expense of legal frameworks and global respects for law and justice. Whenever might overtakes right, it undermines stability, trust and peaceful coexistence.” It ended with three words: “Peace requires justice.”
Pillay defended Nelson Mandela and other anti-apartheid activists before serving as a judge and later president of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, then as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014. The “phony investigation” Schoen referred to was the independent UN commission of inquiry she chaired, which concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza — a finding Israel rejects, and one the Trump administration has treated as further proof that the UN’s human rights machinery is, in the words of White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly last month, a body that has “accomplished nothing for human rights while spouting unserious nonsense for decades.”
Trump had spent the week making the case for himself, telling reporters on Wednesday that he’d “done stuff that nobody else has ever done” and claiming that “no president has probably ever settled any wars” while boasting of having supposedly brought eight to a close.
The figure was seven when he addressed the UN General Assembly last September; the United States has been at war with Iran, one of the seven, since February. And his assertion that none of his predecessors had “settled any wars” appeared to betray his ignorance of the fact that Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States, was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize (which is displayed in the West Wing’s Roosevelt Room) for negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese War in 1905.
Trump’s repost of Schoen’s rant was a far more muted reaction to this year’s snub compared to what happened when he was passed over last year.
When the 2025 prize went to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, the White House accused the committee of placing “politics over peace.” Machado later presented her medal to Trump as what she called “recognition for his unique commitment with our freedom.” As of Friday afternoon, Pillay had made no comparable offer
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