‘Does sarcasm ever work?’ Trump brushes off ‘Noble Prize’ blunder, says it was a dig at media’s lack of morals

US President Donald Trump fired back at detractors on Sunday, saying that mixing up the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize, and making a spelling mistake in a tweet attacking the media, was a deliberate play on words.

“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,’” Trump tweeted shortly after taking a swipe at the “fake news” media in a series of tweets that threw the platform into full-blown meltdown.

“Does sarcasm ever work?”

In a string of tweets earlier on Sunday, Trump launched yet another scathing attack on the media, first calling a New York Times report on his supposedly laid-back schedule a “phony story” written by a “third rate reporter,” and then tearing into the media for winning awards while peddling the debunked ‘Russiagate’ narrative.

“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... lawsuits should be brought against all, including the Fake News Organizations, to rectify this terrible injustice,” Trump asked, before calling on the journalists to return “their cherished ‘Nobles.’”

And so Twitter was once again set alight by the president, sending ‘Noble’ to the top of the trends, with netizens wasting no time in pouncing on Trump’s apparent gaffe, as he seemed to have confused the Nobel Prize with the Pulitzer Prize, which is awarded for “excellence in newspaper journalism,” among other more or less noble things.

Trump subsequently deleted his Noble/Nobel tirade, which caused many to doubt whether his choice of words was indeed intended as a joke.

Mentioning the “Noble Committee” in his rant didn’t help convince many that it was a sarcastic remark rather than just a typo.

This is not the first time a member of the Trump family has run into problems related to the spelling of the Nobel Prize. Last October, his daughter and adviser Ivanka Trump congratulated Abiy Ahmed, the prime minister of Ethiopia, for winning the Nobel Peace Prize, typing “noble” instead of “nobel” in a congratulatory message posted on her Instagram stories. Unsurprisingly, the #Resistance crowd didn’t miss out on the chance to pounce on her either.

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