Donald Trump expressed his dissatisfaction at not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, as happened last year, saying yesterday (Friday) that he had “never heard” of the winner whose name was announced earlier today, Navi Pillay.
South African judge and human rights defender Navi Pillay won the award yesterday, in recognition of her efforts to address war crimes and crimes against humanity.
But Trump said during a rally in Syracuse (northeast): “The United States, represented by me, your president, should have won the Nobel Peace Prize, but that did not happen.” He added: “It is an indelible stain on Norway and those who made this shameful and embarrassing decision. The Nobel Peace Prize has been forever discredited by a handful of extremist ideologues who are hostile to democracy and are in fact enemies of civilization.
Trump has claimed, as he often does, to have ended eight wars, although some of the conflicts the president claims to have resolved were mere tensions, and his role in mitigating them has been disputed. Meanwhile, the war with Iran that he and Israel started - which Trump predicted would last only weeks - remains unresolved and a burden on his party as it faces disaffected voters ahead of the midterm elections.
Trump bitterly described Pillay as “a liberal person who works at the United Nations, and no one has ever heard of her before.”
Since his return to the White House in January 2025, Trump has not hidden his desire to win the Nobel Peace Prize, but his war against Iran and his expansionist ambitions, as in the case of Greenland, his hard-line stance towards immigrants, and his attacks on multilateral action and the media, excluded him from the list of eligible candidates, according to experts in Oslo who spoke before announcing that Pillay won the prize, according to what was reported by Agence France-Presse.
The award includes a gold medal, a certificate, and a sum of $1.2 million. Pillay joked about sharing her award with Trump, telling the audience who applauded her after the award was announced: “If you applaud a little more, I might share this award with Trump.”
This sarcastic phrase seemed to refer to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who presented her Nobel Prize gold medal to Trump after winning the award last year.
The state of dissatisfaction escalated over the American plans to carry out a public execution by firing squad against Nidal Hassan, who was convicted of murder, after Vice President J.D. Vance questioned the possibility of broadcasting the operation live as proposed, stressing that he would not watch it if that happened, according to Agence France-Presse.
US Defense Department officials had said that Hassan - a psychiatrist in the US Army who killed 13 by shooting at a military base in 2009 - would be executed by firing squad, and that the execution would be broadcast live over the Internet.
Hassan's execution will be the first operation of this kind carried out by the US Army since 1961, and the first carried out by firing squad since World War II.
When asked about broadcasting the execution live, Vance told reporters that he did not “know if that would happen.”
He added: “This is a man who, in my opinion, committed the worst terrorist attack on American soil after the attacks of September 11, 2001,” but added that if the execution was broadcast live, “I will not watch it.”
Republican Representative Austin Scott also said that he supports the execution of Hassan, but he believed that “broadcasting executions live is what terrorists do... America is better than that.”
In turn, Senator Mark Kelly, a Democratic member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that Hassan should “face justice,” but public executions are “practices similar to those carried out by Iran and the Taliban.” Is this the image we want to represent?
A Pentagon official told Agence France-Presse on Thursday that the execution would be broadcast live, after US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, “We will make sure that people are able to watch it, and that it is public.”
But Trump on Friday contradicted Hegseth's statement and said that no decision had yet been made about broadcasting the execution publicly, something Trump supports.
He added: “They are in the process of making a decision about that, but he will be killed.” “I don’t really care how it gets done, as long as it gets done.”
YouTube, Meta, and X did not immediately respond to Agence France-Presse’s requests for comment on whether they would allow the execution to be broadcast on their platforms.
As for TikTok, it referred the French Press Agency to its policy that prohibits showing “violent incidents and bloody scenes,” including “shooting a person.”
For its part, the United Nations said on Friday that the decision of American officials to broadcast the execution of Nidal Hassan live on the Internet may amount to torture.
The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said in a letter received by Agence France-Presse that: “Live broadcasting of an execution is equivalent to carrying out a public execution, and constitutes a violation of the absolute prohibition of torture.”
Nidal Hassan, an American of Palestinian origin, opened fire on November 5, 2009 inside a medical center at Fort Hood, in order to prevent soldiers from participating in a war that he considered “illegal” in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The attack, which was carried out by what was described as a “lone wolf” linked to Al-Qaeda, led to the death of 13 people, including 12 soldiers, and the wounding of about 30 people.
A military jury sentenced Hassan to death in 2013 for carrying out a mass shooting at Fort Hood in an attack inspired by Al-Qaeda.
During the trial, the sessions revealed that Hassan was communicating via the Internet with a figure believed to belong to Al-Qaeda, the extremist American preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in 2011 in a raid launched by an American drone in Yemen.
