In August 2025, a rumor circulated on social media sites like Facebook claiming that U.S. President Donald Trump "freaked out" after supposedly finding out the Nobel Peace Prize application featured a question asking if the applicant had ever used the nation's military against civilians.
(Andy Borowitz on Facebook)
Some readers seemed to interpret the rumor as a factual recounting of real-life events, and Snopes readers wrote in asking us to fact-check the claim.
However, there was no evidence to substantiate the rumor that Trump "freaked out" after supposedly reading a question in the application for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Rather, the story was created by Andy Borowitz, a comedian and satirist known for creating the satirical publication The Borowitz Report, which he's been publishing online since 2001. The site's about page reads:
Hello!
If you're meeting me for the first time, I'm Andy Borowitz, a writer and comedian. 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.
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.
Borowitz's fictional story spread via social media following news reports that Trump was attempting to campaign for the award, including one claim by a Norwegian newspaper that he told the country's finance minister he wanted the award. (Norway is in charge of awarding the Peace Prize).
In reality, according to the official Nobel Prize website, the committee does not consider self-nominations. Trump would have to receive a valid nomination from someone else, then be selected by the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
Snopes has addressed similar satirical claims from the Borowitz Report in the past, including the assertion that Trump threatened to bomb Norway if he wasn't given the Peace Prize.
For background, here is why we alert readers to rumors created by sources that call their output humorous or satirical.