Donald Trump Jr. deserves some kind of award for his latest spectacular self-own. But not a Pulitzer.
President Donald Trump’s eldest son was mercilessly mocked on Twitter on Friday after he chimed in on his father’s criticism of The Washington Post and The New York Times.
The president slammed the two newspapers for their reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 election, which led them to share the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.
The Pulitzer Committee praised the publications for their “relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”
Trump, however, demanded Friday that “their prizes should be taken away by the Committee!” as he further tried to skew the narrative on the conclusion of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
Attorney General William Barr released his summary of Mueller’s report from the inquiry last weekend. He said Mueller had determined that the Trump 2016 campaign did not collude with Russian officials but that there was insufficient evidence on whether Trump had obstructed justice.
Democrats are demanding the release of Mueller’s full report. Trump and right-wing commentators continue to spin the summary as a victory.
The Times hit back to say that every article cited as part of its award “has proven accurate.”
The Post’s Josh Dawsey said “not a single prize-winning story had a substantive correction.”
But the newspaper’s responses did not come before Trump Jr. backed his dad with this ill-conceived tweet:
“He’s right… unless they give Pulitzer’s for fiction,” wrote Trump Jr., who in recent days has teased the idea of a future run for office and has caught heat for giving an interview to a far-right conspiracy theory-peddling website which has previously called former President Barack Obama “a demon from hell.”
Of course, there is a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. And Twitter users ― including Vietnamese American author Viet Thanh Nguyen, who won the prize in 2016 for The Sympathizer ― were quick to point it out: