President Donald Trump on Thursday appeared to claim some credit for the Nobel Prize in physics for work done decades before he even became president.
The president shared a quote on Truth Social that he said was from Energy Secretary Chris Wright ― a former fracking exec ― saying the award this year given for work in quantum physics is, by extension, an award for Trump.
“Quantum computing, along with AI and Fusion, are the three signature Trump science efforts,” the quote attributed to Wright read. “Trump 47 racks up his first Nobel Prize!!”
This year’s prize went to John Clarke (UC Berkeley), Michel H. Devoret (Yale and UC Santa Barbara), and John M. Martinis (UC Santa Barbara and Qolab), for “the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit,” according to a news release from the Nobel Foundation.
The trio won for a breakthrough they achieved when they worked together at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1984 and 1985, long before even Trump’s first presidency, which began in 2017.
That same lab recently laid off 15-20% of its research staff due to cuts Trump made to federal funding for research, according to The Daily Californian.
Trump has made no secret of his desire to win a Nobel, although the one he fixates on most is the Nobel Peace Prize. He has complained for years about not getting one, insisting he should have “four or five” of them, and seems especially sour that President Barack Obama has one.
His critics mocked him for shifting attention to a prize they say he’s even less qualified for: