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Why Trump Can’t Stand His Nobel Prize Humiliation

The Nobel winner’s public jab hit on something the president famously hates: being laughed at.

Donald Trump’s desperate quest for a Nobel Peace Prize has hit another humiliating roadblock, courtesy of a winner who openly mocked him.

On The Daily Beast Podcast, Joanna Coles and Hugh Dougherty reacted to the Nobel committee giving the award to Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, a South African human rights lawyer and judge who investigated war crimes.

The committee called Pillay, who led a United Nations commission that concluded last year that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, “one of the most respected international jurists of our time.”

While accepting the prize, Pillay, 85, dedicated the honor to “all the survivors of international crimes as well as to practitioners and defenders of international justice.”

She also mocked the U.S. president’s desire for the honor: “If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump.”

But the public mockery wasn’t the only thing likely to sting. Trump’s longtime obsession with the Nobel Peace Prize has seemingly been fueled, at least in part, by the fact that his predecessor, Barack Obama, won the award in 2009 for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

“It lives in his mind,” Dougherty said. “And of course we know why it lives in his mind: It’s because ‘Barack Hussein Obama’ got it and ‘Donald J. Trump’ did not.”

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Trump, 80, made his resentment clear again Wednesday.

“Obama got it, and he didn’t do anything,” he grumbled. “He still doesn’t know what he got it for. He got it when he got elected, right at the beginning, and he had no idea why he got it.”

According to Dougherty, Pillay’s public joke may have hit another particularly sensitive nerve: Trump’s aversion to being laughed at.

“One of the obsessions that Trump has had is that the world was laughing at America before he became president,” he noted. “And I think people will remember when he went to the United Nations and said, ‘People used to laugh at us. They’re not laughing anymore.’ And people started laughing at him.”

Trump drew an amused response from dignitaries at the United Nations in 2018 when he claimed that his administration had accomplished more than “almost any” of his predecessors.

“There’s nothing that gets up in his feelings like people laughing at him,” Dougherty said. “He’s going to be furious.”

Trump later shared an ally’s post arguing that the 80-year-old president deserved the prize more. Hours after Pillay’s victory was announced Friday, the Trump administration slapped sanctions on the International Criminal Court, where she previously served as a judge.

Dougherty added that Pillay seems unlikely to hand over her prize to Trump—unlike last year’s winner, Venezuelan democracy advocate María Corina Machado, who did so after the U.S. captured then-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The prize, however, cannot be “revoked, shared or transferred,” the Nobel committee has said.

“Of course he was hoping he would win the Nobel Peace Prize and get it in a bona fide way as opposed to what happened to him last year when he snatched it practically out of the hands of Venezuela’s Machado and then, of course, dismissed her and said she wasn’t popular enough, and got in bed with Nicolas Maduro’s number two, Delcy Rodríguez,” Coles said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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