Donald Trump took to Twitter yet again for a rant against the media, and this time he confused the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize — misspelling the former to boot.
“When will all of the ‘reporters’ who have received Noble Prizes for their work on Russia, Russia, Russia, only to have been proven totally wrong (and, in fact, it was the other side who committed the crimes), be turning back their cherished ‘Nobles’ so that they can be given to the REAL REPORTERS & JOURNALISTS who got it right,” Trump wrote in a series of tweets that were taken down after several hours.
“I can give the Committee a very comprehensive list. When will the Noble Committee DEMAND the Prizes back, especially since they were gotten under fraud? The reporters and Lamestream Media knew the truth all along.”
Of course, the “Noble Prize” is actually the Nobel Prize, and it is not given out to journalists. The Nobel Prize is given out annually in six categories: Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Economics, Literature, and Peace. Occasionally, journalists have won the Nobel Literature Prize, but none have done so for investigating Trump. The most recent journalist to win the award was Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich in 2015 for her work documenting life under the rule of the Soviet Union.
Trump’s rant on Twitter was similar to one he gave during a coronavirus daily briefing on April 19 against New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who received a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for her work investigating the president.
“The crime was not committed by this side. It was committed by the other side, a bunch of bad people,” he said. “You saw the reports coming out over the last two weeks. They got caught. So Maggie Haberman gets a Pulitzer Prize? She’s a third-rate reporter.”
But Trump’s mixup of two very different awards got him roasted on Twitter, with many journalists pointing out the difference between a Nobel and a Pulitzer. Ben Rhodes, a former national security adviser for the Obama Administration, noted that “Trump’s weird obsession with the Nobel Prize seems entirely rooted in the fact that Obama won it.”
Later in the day on Sunday, Trump’s Twitter account deleted the three tweets mentioning the “Noble” prizes. But he also sent another tweet claiming that his initial use of the word was deliberate and constituted “sarcasm,” the same excuse he used to explain his comments about using injections of bleach and light to potentially cure COVID-19.
The tweet read: “Does anybody get the meaning of what a so-called Noble (not Nobel) Prize is, especially as it pertains to Reporters and Journalists? Noble is defined as, ‘having or showing fine personal qualities or high moral principles and ideals.’ Does sarcasm ever work?”