On Sunday, President Donald Trump lashed out at the media on Twitter, calling for journalists to be sued and demanding they return their "Noble Prizes" for their work reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 US elections. He swiftly deleted the tweets.

It's likely he misspelled Nobel, but the Nobel Prize is not awarded for works of journalism. He could have been thinking of the Pulitzer Prizes.

He later tweeted again and asked whether sarcasm ever worked.

It's the second time this week he'd tried to deflect blame for comments by saying he was being sarcastic. The first time was for saying the US should study whether injections of household disinfectants might treat or cure a coronavirus infection — a dangerous suggestion that horrified public-health experts.

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President Donald Trump lashed out at the news media on Sunday, telling media members in tweets he swiftly deleted to return their "Noble Prizes" for their reporting on Russia.

In the later-deleted thread, he wrote: "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."

He said he could give the Nobel Committee a "very comprehensive list" of those he deemed "real" reporters, and he then asked when it would demand the prizes back.

He also said: "Lawsuits should be brought against all, including the Fake News Organizations, to rectify this terrible injustice. For all of the great lawyers out there, do we have any takers? When will the Noble Committee Act? Better be fast!"

The Nobel Prize is not awarded for journalism. Prizes are awarded for literature, physics, chemistry, peace, physiology, and medicine, with a separate memorial prize in economic sciences. It's possible Trump was thinking of the Pulitzer Prizes, which are awarded to journalists.

Earlier in the month, he said the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman should give back the Pulitzer she won for her reporting on Russia, after she wrote a critical story about Trump's new chief of staff, Mark Meadows, which went into detail about his crying at work.

After the president tweeted, Ben Rhodes, a former national security adviser in the Obama administration, wrote on Twitter: "Trump's weird obsession with the Nobel Prize seems entirely rooted in the fact that Obama won it." President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.

Rolling Stone reported last year that Trump even asked Japanese Prime Minster Shinzo Abe to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize for his negotiations with North Korea — negotiations that are now stalled over North Korea's refusal to dismantle its nuclear program.

As "Noble" began to trend on Twitter, Trump pivoted to arguing he was being sarcastic.

After deleting the thread, Trump later tweeted: "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?"

On Friday he also claimed he was being sarcastic when he suggested on live TV the previous day that injections of household disinfectants should be studied as a treatment or cure for coronavirus infections. The idea was immediately dismissed as dangerous by public-health experts and makers of disinfectants.

After the White House initially argued that his comments had been taken out of context, he later said he made the comments "sarcastically" to "reporters just like you to see what would happen."