Fact Check: Did Trump 'freak out' and hurl a ketchup bottle over Nobel Peace Prize application question?

WASHINGTON, DC: A rumor has been circulating on social media that Donald Trump went nuclear inside the Oval Office over a supposed Nobel Peace Prize application question about using the military against civilians.

The claim is that the president “freaked out,” hurled a ketchup bottle at the wall, and nearly struck Stephen Miller in the head. But is there any truth to this? Let’s find out below.

Claim: Donald Trump hurled ketchup in Oval Office meltdown

It all began after a post went viral on Facebook. “Blasting the Nobel committee for including the question, Trump reportedly hurled a bottle of ketchup against a wall of the Oval Office, narrowly missing Stephen Miller’s head,” it read.

Some readers took the post as fact, while others flooded the fact-checking site Snopes, asking if Trump’s ketchup-throwing meltdown was real.

Fact Check: False, no evidence to back viral claim

This wasn’t journalism. It was satire by comedian Andy Borowitz, who has been in the parody business since launching The Borowitz Report in 2001. His “about page" even reads like a stand-up routine.

“Hello! If you're meeting me for the first time, I'm Andy Borowitz, a writer and comedian," it begins. "I live in New Hampshire with my wife, daughter, and dog, a goldendoodle named Cookie. I'm not posting a photo of Cookie because if I did, you'd want to subscribe to his newsletter instead of mine.”

"I've been writing satirical news since I was eighteen. This represents either commitment to a genre or arrested development," Borowitz quips. "In high school, I became editor of the newspaper solely because it produced an annual April Fool's issue. Later, as president of The Harvard Lampoon, I published parodies of the college newspaper, which got me hauled into the office of Dean Archie C Epps III, which was his actual name."

"For the next two decades, I took a break from news satire while I waited for the Internet to be invented. Then, in 2001, I started emailing made-up news stories to friends. One suggested that creating a 'website' would make it easier to 'blast' my 'posts.' Soon, The Borowitz Report was live at BorowitzReport.com, and my free newsletter was reaching untold dozens of people."

This latest story about Trump’s Nobel Prize “application” was just another Borowitz special.  

Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize ambitions clash with committee rules

While Donald Trump has long coveted a Nobel Peace Prize, the Nobel Committee does not accept self-nominations. As the official Nobel Prize site explains, nominees must be put forward by someone else and then selected by the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

A Norwegian newspaper once reported that Trump told the country’s finance minister he wanted the award. For the record, Norway is the country that actually awards the Peace Prize.

Snopes has previously fact-checked Borowitz’s Trump satire, including his June 26 piece headlined: “Trump Warns if He Does Not Win Nobel Peace Prize He Will Bomb Norway.”

That spoof spread just weeks after Trump took credit for supposedly brokering peace between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Serbia and Kosovo, and India and Pakistan.

On June 20, Trump lamented on Truth Social that he “won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize” for arranging “a wonderful Treaty between the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Republic of Rwanda, in their War, which was known for violent bloodshed and death.”

The Nobel talk resurfaced on July 31, when Trump’s Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters at a White House press briefing that “it's well past time that President Trump was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” She credited him with helping broker a peace deal between Thailand and Cambodia following rising tensions in Southeast Asia.

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