Donald Trump responded to the backlash over a series of tweets calling on reporters to return their “Noble prizes” by saying he was trying to be sarcastic.
The president caused a stir on Sunday for a series of tweets blasting reporters and apparently confusing the Pulitzer Prize, journalism’s top honor, with the Nobel Prize awarded for top performances in the sciences. The Twitter attack was sparked by a story from The New York Times claiming that Trump spent up to five hours each morning watching television and sometimes did not start work until noon or later.
Trump blasted the story as false, then took aim at journalists who had previously reported on Russian interference in the 2016 election and speculation that his campaign was somehow involved.
“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. I can give the Committee a very comprehensive list,” Trump said in a tweet, which has since been deleted.
Trump continued the attack over several tweets, questioning when the “Noble Committee” will “DEMAND” the prizes back from reporters, claiming they had been obtained through fraud.
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The tweets sparked a major backlash and led to the president’s misspelling of Nobel Prize to the top of Twitter’s trends for the U.S. Trump later took to Twitter to claim that the tweets were only sarcasm that was apparently not understood by his critics.
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?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 26, 2020
This is now the second incident in a matter of days where Trump brushed off criticism for a controversial remark by claiming he was only being sarcastic. After Trump made statements during a Thursday press conference speculating that disinfectants could be injected or ingested by a person as a manner of treating coronavirus, he faced sharp criticism and warnings from public health experts that doing so could be dangerous or even fatal.
As The Inquisitr reported, Trump responded the following day by saying he was only being sarcastic to see how reporters would respond.
“I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters just like you, just to see what would happen,” Trump said. “I was asking a sarcastic and a very sarcastic question to the reporters in the room about disinfectant on the inside.”
