A country's dignity rarely reveals itself in its palaces. You're more likely to find it in a room everyone needs to visit sooner or later. On the edge of a cliff overlooking the Aurlandsfjord, at the Stegastein viewpoint, stands a small building with a large window. Inside, visitors can gaze out across the water. From outside, nobody can see in. Giving people a spectacular view without exposing them is an art the Norwegians have mastered even when building toilets. In Washington, that art has apparently gone out of fashion. Admission is free. In 2015, an architecture website ranked this toilet No. 1 on its list of the world's 10 most beautiful public restrooms. And that brings us to Norway's answer to the president of the United States.
On Sunday, October 25, Donald Trump stood before his supporters in Port Huron, Michigan, and declared: "Norway has become a shithouse country, actually." What had Norway done to deserve this? The answer goes back a few weeks. In early October, the Nobel Peace Prize went to international jurist Navi Pillay. Trump had claimed the prize for himself and repeatedly questioned whether the Norwegian Nobel Committee would ever award it to him. The fact that the committee operates independently of the government in Oslo has done little to restrain his language. A bruised ego doesn't care who's responsible. It simply goes looking for the biggest available target, even if that means an entire country. Of course, a prize you publicly demand is already lost before the committee even meets. Peace is hard to impose. Apparently, so is getting an award for it.
No Nobel Peace Prize for Trump: Now He Calls Norway a "Shithouse Country" Donald Trump called Norway a "shithouse country" at a campaign rally in Michigan and declared that he no longer wanted Norwegian immigrants coming to the United States because he hadn't received the Nobel Peace Prize. Norway's foreign minister, Espen Barth Eide, reminded the president that the Nobel Committee makes its decisions independently. No change to immigration policy has been announced so far.
Norway could have sent a diplomatic protest. Instead, it sent toilets.
The country's government-run tourism agency took the president at his word and gave its response a name straight out of his own political playbook: "Norway makes shithouses great again." It then showcased a collection of public restrooms nestled among fjords and mountains that have long been tourist attractions in their own right. Some have won international awards. Others offer views of the Northern Lights. The agency had heard some noise about a "shithouse country," it wrote. What could it say? Norway really does have some of the world's most beautiful and spectacular toilets.
Nobody even had to come up with anything new. The photos and descriptions came from a campaign created a few years ago for World Toilet Day, which falls on November 19 every year. Evgenia Egorova, who oversees the agency's social media, said her team had happily put the material back to use. The response had been overwhelmingly positive. A president supplies the insult, and a country pulls its answer straight out of the archives. It's hard to imagine a more sustainable way to deal with filth.
On the island of Senja, the "Gulldassen," a triangular golden restroom built in 2014, has become a popular stop for travelers. While Trump verbally drags Norway into the gutter, visitors there sit on gold above the fjord. Rarely has the contrast been quite so perfectly measured. The president's map of contempt is remarkably flexible, too. In 2018, Trump called Haiti and African nations "shithole countries" and said he'd rather have immigrants from places like Norway. Back then, Norway was the opposite of a shithole. Today, it's a shithouse country itself. Not much has changed about the fjords in the meantime. What has changed is the list of Nobel Prize winners. The standards of a man who sorts countries by how grateful they are to him last about as long as his most recent disappointment.
Golden toilets have been following him around anyway. In early 2026, a protest group installed a golden toilet on the National Mall in Washington to protest his White House renovations. During his first term, the White House had wanted to borrow a Vincent van Gogh painting from a New York museum. Instead, the Guggenheim Museum's chief curator offered "America," a fully functioning toilet made of 18-karat gold by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, a work mocking excessive wealth. It was later displayed at Blenheim Palace, Winston Churchill's birthplace. In 2019, it was stolen during a break-in. Two of the thieves were convicted last year. The toilet was never recovered.
Norway, meanwhile, still has all its toilets. And it doesn't have to lend them to anyone.
The next World Toilet Day is coming up on November 19. The perfect publicity arrived in late October, courtesy of Port Huron, absolutely free. The president wanted to humiliate a country and ended up handing it an advertising campaign no marketing budget could have bought. The Norwegians are thanking him in their own way. They're holding the door open for him, inviting him into a quiet little restroom overlooking the fjord, where he can sit for a while and think about who brought the shit here in the first place.
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