With less than two weeks to go before the midterm elections, Donald Trump stood before a crowd that had waited hours to hear his case for Republican candidates.
His intent to rile up voters did the complete opposite online as social media users picked apart his speech.
Somewhere along the way, he drifted back to the Nobel Peace Prize, and the room got a front-row seat to a grudge that clearly is not going anywhere.
Trump has been nursing that wound since he lost the prize again on Oct. 9.
But this week, his complaints took a nastier turn, and the woman who actually won it is now squarely in his crosshairs.
On Friday, Oct. 23, Trump headlined a rally at Florida Gulf Coast University’s Alico Arena in Fort Myers, where he was expected to boost Rep. Byron Donalds, who is locked in a tightening race for governor against Democrat David Jolly. Then came the line his critics have heard more times than they can count.
“I’ve settled 8 wars, think of that,” Trump told the crowd, as seen in an X post. “Did I get the Nobel Prize, no?”
Then, as if the arena hadn’t heard him the first time, he practically shouted the question again: “Did I get the Nobel Prize?”
He then gave a shoutout to the 2025 winner, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who spent nearly a year in exile before she snuck out to receive the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.
“You know the person who got the Nobel Peace Prize, the first one, said, ‘You have to be kidding; I got it. Trump deserves it. He deserves it more than any other person that has ever gotten the Nobel Prize.’ said Trump. “And she gave me her Nobel Prize, Maria, which I won’t forget.”
Machado gave Trump her medal during a private White House meeting, thanking him for ousting Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in a Jan. 3 U.S. military raid.
The eight-wars tally has been widely disputed. But that hasn’t stopped Trump from waving it around as proof he was robbed.
And Friday’s outburst was only the latest stop on what has become a weeklong grievance tour. Two days earlier, at Clemson University’s T. Ed Garrison Arena in Pendleton, South Carolina,
Trump turned his attention to this year’s winner, Navanethem “Navi” Pillay. The South African jurist previously led the U.N. human rights office and served as an International Criminal Court judge.
“The woman that got it, I don’t know where the hell she comes [from],” Trump said, as seen in another X post.
Trump complained that he never won a Pulitzer Prize, noting, “I didn’t get the Nobel Prize. I didn’t get the Pulitzer. I should have gotten the Pulitzer for writing, too.”
The jab targeted journalists who won Pulitzers for their reporting on Russia. He previously sued the Pulitzer Prize Board to revoke awards given to The New York Times and The Washington Post, insisting their reporting about the Russian interference in the 2016 election was wrong. The case remains ongoing.
The president had far warmer words for last year’s winner, calling her “a very high quality woman.” He bragged that Maria told him he deserved the prize more than anyone.
At another point, he seemed to forget the name of the award which Pillay, 85, had even won.
“Does anybody know the name of that peace prize?” he asked. “They gave the Pulitzer Prize to a young lady. I think she’s 80 years old—a young lady who nobody ever heard of.”
Trump, for the record, is also 80.
Online, the back-to-back rants landed about as well as expected.
“It seems that you don’t get the peace prize for just claiming you settled some wars,” one person wrote under a clip of the Florida remarks. Another joked, “It is never enough.”
Others pointed out that “He forgot her name,” while another blasted, “He. Doesn’t. Even. Read.”
Others pointed out that Trump had walked away with a consolation prize just a day earlier. One user asked, “Didn’t he just get the ‘Man of the Century’ certificate?”
That certificate came courtesy of Iowa congressional candidate Joe Mitchell, who handed Trump a self-made Man of the Century Award during a Sioux City rally on Oct. 22 after calling the Nobel snub “a disgrace.” Trump barely looked at it before passing it to someone offstage.
His frustration began simmering the morning of the announcement, when he shared a Truth Social post that called Pillay an “unabashed hater of America.”
The post claimed, “She has no credibility in any normal sphere and has never done a thing to foster peace.”
Pillay, for her part, had already gotten her own lick in. Shortly after learning she’d won, she joked to a cheering crowd that if they clapped a little more, she might just share the prize with Trump.
It marks the second straight year the committee has passed the U.S. President over. Since Machado took home the honor in 2025, Trump has spent the months since collecting replacement trophies and participation awards to fill the void.
Pillay will formally accept her medal in Oslo on Dec. 10, whether Trump likes it or not. No wonder she won’t hand it over like Machado.
