In Nuremberg, inside the Palace of Justice where Nazi leaders were once tried for crimes against humanity, an 85-year-old South African lawyer heard she had won the Nobel Peace Prize and assumed it was a joke. Navi Pillay, a former United Nations human rights chief and a former judge at both the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, was honoured on Friday for decades spent building the legal machinery that allows war crimes and genocide to be prosecuted. Thousands of kilometres away, in Syracuse, New York, President Donald Trump received the news rather differently, telling supporters at a rally that he had never even heard of the recipient and calling the choice "an indelible stain" on Norway. This is not a new grievance.

Trump has made little secret of wanting the prize himself, and he reacted with similar frustration last year when it went to the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who later gave him her medal at the White House, calling it "a wonderful gesture of mutual respect." The Nobel committee quickly clarified that the honour cannot be shared, sold, or passed on, no matter the intention behind the gesture. Norway's prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, has also tried to explain, more than once, that an independent committee in Oslo chooses the winner, not the Norwegian government, a distinction Trump has not appeared to accept. At the rally, Trump repeated unverified claims of having "settled eight wars" and being close to resolving two more, arguing that the prize had been "forever discredited" by what he called a handful of radical, anti-democracy ideologues.

Pillay, for her part, responded to her own applauding crowd with characteristic dryness, joking that if they clapped a little harder, she might share the prize with Trump after all.