After an uneventful flight aboard Qatari Air Force One, the President’s motorcade drove by protestors with signs that said “Never Forget Jan. 6,” as he made his way to the Oncenter in Syracuse, New York, for another Strongman Rally. After a day spent ranting about not winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Donald Trump and his swollen belly waddled onto the stage at 8:11 tonight, where he rambled on for almost an hour and a half, at one point telling the crowd, “Iran gives us everything, or they don’t exist any longer,” before immediately saying, “The United States of America, represented by me as your president, should have received the Nobel Peace Prize, but didn’t. This is an indelible stain on the country of Norway. We will not forget, Norway.”
Aside from the fact that the Norwegian government has nothing to do with awarding the Nobel Peace Prize, which is selected by an independent committee that Norway’s leaders do not control, this is something Donald Trump should already know after the months-long meltdown he had when he was denied the prize last year. Yet he is still blaming an entire country for his well-deserved snub. Even more troubling than his ignorance is the fact that the President of the United States threatened to erase a nation from the planet and then complained that he wasn’t given an award for peace.
He went on to call the Nobel Committee the “enemies of civilization.” He belittled the actual winner as “a mystery person” and “a liberal person who works at the United Nations, who nobody has ever heard of.” He said, “Based on my record of peace, a record like no one has ever had, I’m just saying how crooked the whole Nobel Prize deal is.” Then he kept going, listing all of the reasons that he believed made him the only person to have actually earned the award. He once again claimed that he ended eight wars, and added a new claim to his list, saying that he also prevented major conflicts between South Korea, North Korea, Japan, China, and Taiwan. As if that weren’t enough, he added, “I also, by the way, got Greenland. I hope you’re happy about that.” He also said that he has saved “more lives than anyone in history.”
The man who claims he should have won a prize for peace also shared that a dictator who is waging an active war is proud of him, telling the crowd about Armenia and Azerbaijan, “Putin couldn’t believe it. He said, ‘I’ve worked for ten years to settle that war, and I couldn’t do it.’ I got it done in two days.” He said he was about to “settle or win” two more conflicts, Iran and “Russell-Ukraine.” He cannot even pronounce the name of the country whose war he promised to end on day one, which was almost 21 months ago.
Trump knew this loss was coming. Two days ago, on October 7, he even told reporters, “They have a reputation for maybe not giving it to people like me.” And his outrage at the decision didn’t stop there. Donald Trump also shared a post from one of the attorneys who defended him during his second impeachment, David Schoen, where Schoen called Pillay “an unabashed hater of America and Israel” and said the Nobel Committee had “shamed itself beyond repair.”
The person Trump called a nobody is an 85-year-old South African named Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, who grew up under apartheid and spent her life fighting to protect people from human rights abuses. She served as a judge on the International Criminal Court from 2003 to 2008 and on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, where she helped establish that sexual violence could be prosecuted as an act of genocide. She went on to become the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Most notably, she chaired the UN commission that concluded Israel committed genocide in Gaza. She has dedicated her entire life to ensuring that leaders who commit atrocities can and must be held accountable, no matter how powerful they are.
In a very fitting twist of fate, Pillay was in Nuremberg, Germany, when she learned that she had won the Nobel Peace Prize. She was actually in the very city where, after the horrors of World War II, Nazi leaders were put on trial and held accountable for the atrocities that they committed. Where it was established that following orders was not a defense and that even those in the highest positions of power could be held accountable for their crimes. When she spoke about winning the prize, she joked, “If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump.”
When the Nobel Committee awarded Pillay the prize, they did so “for her efforts to promote peace and international law,” with the warning that international legal institutions are under political attack. They called out the global shift away from legal accountability and toward the exercise of raw political power and said that “Peace requires justice.” They specifically mentioned judges being sanctioned and institutions being attacked in their statement. Whether they would admit it or not, it’s hard not to see this as a warning aimed directly at the United States government.
Not too long after the announcement, Donald Trump’s own Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, proved the United States was doing exactly what the Nobel Committee was warning about by announcing new retaliatory sanctions against the International Criminal Court. All on the same day that the man in the Oval Office didn’t get the shiny prize he wanted.
Rubio said in July, “Either the ICC will end its threats, or we will end the ICC.” He wasn’t just talking about sanctioning a few more judges. Today, the administration announced sanctions against the entire International Criminal Court, cutting it off from American banks, financial services, technology companies, and the use of U.S. dollars, with limited temporary exemptions. The Trump administration has already sanctioned 13 of its judges and prosecutors and pressured other countries to withdraw their support.
What makes Rubio’s actions even more shameful is that just four years ago, in 2022, when he was still capable of recognizing right from wrong and before he traded his ethics and morals to be close to Donald Trump, he co-sponsored a Senate resolution describing the International Criminal Court as “an international tribunal that seeks to uphold the rule of law” and encouraged other countries to ask the court to investigate Russian war crimes in Ukraine. He supported the court investigating Vladimir Putin and Russian military leaders, but today he is threatening to destroy that same court over fears it will eventually investigate Americans for all of the war and human rights crimes being committed by Trump and his inner circle.
Eight countries who used to consider us allies against this sort of abuse of power issued a joint statement opposing the sanctions and defending the court’s independence. They include Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom. The ICC’s president said the court would continue its work.
The administration has a very good and self-serving reason for attacking the ICC. They are concerned that in 2029, the ICC will turn its attention to the president, to the vice president, the secretary of war, and others, and pursue prosecutions against them. Trump also said back on August 1 that their campaign against the ICC also was about “defending Bibi,” referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Rubio immediately redirected the conversation, saying the real danger was to United States service members who could face prosecution over actions like the deportation of migrants or strikes on boats that officials say are carrying narcotics. Since Trump’s people started launching these strikes last September, the United States military has killed at least 238 people on boats they claim were carrying drugs, without providing any evidence of who or what was actually on those boats.
With the attention being placed on attacking the ICC and its ability to hold powerful people accountable, we also need to look at what else happened this week and ask ourselves if this is just the beginning of the crimes they will end up committing and if they are trying to protect themselves from things that are even more horrific. Because earlier this week, back on Oct. 6, Trump gave a shoutout to Russell Vought, his director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, who is the same person responsible for much of Project 2025. This was during his speech near Baltimore, where he was talking about building more shipyards. He said, “We have some big surprises coming up in another few weeks, right, Russ?” The president added, “He’s going to be one of the very important people in the history of our country, in my opinion. He’s got some great things happening.” Then tonight at the rally, Trump said, “We’re going to elect a Republican House and a Republican Senate, stop the Dumocrats and the communists and we’re gonna do a number like nobody has ever seen. They have a big surprise coming.”
So many of my worst fears from a second Trump presidency have come true. Including the growing enthusiasm of my fellow Americans to celebrate his cruelty. During tonight’s speech, I watched a woman behind Donald Trump smiling and celebrating his cruelty, laughing at everything he said and just giddy from the hatred he was spewing. I watched a young boy standing right behind the President of the United States, taking every word in. I watched so many of my fellow Americans putting on red cult hats, jumping at the opportunity to follow a man who threatens countries, degrades women, and makes promises he never keeps. I watched them cheer for the destruction of our country with every word he said.
As bad as it is now, it is going to get worse before those people ever see the reality right in front of them. I just shudder thinking about how bad it will get for all of us, and the world around us, before any of them understand just how destructive the very things they have been cheering for have become.
Back inside the Oncenter tonight, while Trump was delivering his tired talking points and complaints, there was another woman in attendance who was the complete opposite of the first one. A grandmotherly type stood up while Trump was speaking and loudly denounced his cruelty. She was escorted out, but not before she gave Trump and the other supporters in attendance two middle fingers and said exactly what she thought of him, “F*ck you!” She did not care what her protest cost her when she said what millions of us are feeling, and she walked out proudly with her head held high.
The resistance we are building is not and cannot be carried by any single person if we want to succeed. It must be carried by us all. It is in the grandmothers giving two middle fingers to the president and his supporters. It is in the young people filling the streets to protest yet another shooting, this time in New York City. It is in those who held signs and chanted “this is what democracy looks like” outside the rally tonight in Syracuse. We have 25 days until we take part in our largest act of resistance, voting in the midterms. Until then, consider casting your vote early and keep encouraging others to do so as well. We might not be as loud as Trump’s sycophants, but we have strength in numbers and determination behind us. We are on the right side of history, and we will never give up fighting for our country. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
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This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.
Picture of the day: It was another warm day here in San Diego and absolutely beautiful. I stopped while I was running errands to take this picture just before the waves really started to pick up. What this picture doesn’t show is that less than 10 minutes from here, there were multiple reports of ICE kidnappings and detainments, one close to a school with children reportedly present. We are living in a police state where brown and black people are being warned to carry their papers with them at all times to prove that they are documented. Never would I have imagined that there would come a time when this would be happening in modern-day America. I’ve been beside myself all day about the cruelty all around. People are run down and tired from all of Donald Trump’s relentlessly cruel ways, and we are not seeing the appropriate level of outrage that we did last year.
Links to sources used in writing this article:
President Trump speaks in Syracuse: YouTube Video
Note: I normally include the links to Trump’s filmed events directly from the White House official YouTube channel, but around the time CNN and the other legacy members of the press were banned by the White House, they have delayed or not uploaded a great majority of them.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/09/trump-nobel-peace-prize
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/10/09/nobel-peace-prize/81213152-c396-11f1-8170-681419af1cc9_story.html
https://spectrumlocalnews.com/us/snplus/international/2026/10/09/navi-pillay-nobel-peace-prize-for-justice
https://apnews.com/article/e3b5d3e000f4803d3bda8c6de93f1c5b
https://news.usni.org/2026/06/22/two-men-killed-in-u-s-strike-on-suspected-drug-boat-in-the-caribbean
https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/07/15/trumps-boat-strikes-crimes-against-humanity/
https://www.congress.gov/117/bills/sres546/BILLS-117sres546ats.htm
More BS from that racist rapist condemned conman! What a true asshole. Getting worse by the day, soon by the hour. Remove that disgraced Putin’s poodle now!
Oh for goodness sake, can't someone create a fake Nobel Prize for our baby-in-chief? AI will do it in a minute. Evidentally, as a child, someone, in family or schoolyard, pulled something precious from our never-grew-up President and he has unable to let that robbery go. It was bad enough when Trump confined his souless maneuvers to our country, now our former foreign allies are as angry and fed up as you, Heather, me, members of the Democratic Party and other sentient human beings. Putin and his buddies are having a laugh on us. Counting on Trump to go against him is useless. The Republican Party must put on their big boy and girl pants and send Trump to jail. Don't they realize he is taking them down with him? Hell will be so crowded, it will have to add facilities to welcome each and every Republican in power.