Trump’s Latest Posts Show He’s Pissed He Lost Nobel Peace Prize

President Donald Trump didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize Friday—but that isn’t stopping him from trying to make the prestigious award all about himself.

The president took to Truth Social to share a video of Russian President Vladimir Putin criticizing past winners and praising Trump’s peace efforts on long-standing crises.

“There have been cases where the committee has awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to people who have done nothing for peace,” Putin said, according to the AP’s translation. “A person comes, good or bad, and [gets it] in a month, in two months, boom. For what? He didn’t do anything at all. In my view, these decisions have done enormous damage to the prestige of this prize.

“[Trump’s] really doing a lot to resolve such complex crises that have lasted for years and even decades,” Putin added. The Kremlin had announced earlier Friday that it would support Trump’s bid for a peace prize—but clearly Moscow’s efforts were too little, too late.

“Thank you to president Putin!” Trump wrote when resharing the video.

Trump also shared an X post from this year’s winner, María Corina Machado, a pro-democracy activist and the leader of the opposition party in Venezuela, where she partially dedicated her win to Trump for supporting Venezuela.

“We are on the threshold of victory and today, more than ever, we count on President Trump, the people of the United States, the peoples of Latin America, and the democratic nations of the world as our principal allies to achieve Freedom and democracy,” Machado wrote on X. “I dedicate this prize to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support of our cause!”

Trump then proceeded to go back to posting about his efforts to prosecute his political enemies, namely New York Attorney General Letitia James, who was indicted Thursday for mortgage fraud by the president’s (seemingly incompetent) former lawyer who was recently installed as a prosecutor in Virginia.

While Trump seemed to avoid having a total temper tantrum (for now, but he’s speaking late Friday afternoon), the White House didn’t spare fighting words.

In announcing the award Friday morning, the Nobel Committee warned about the dangers of unchecked leaders. “When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognise courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist,” the committee said.

Republican Speaker Mike Johnson thinks the “No Kings” rally planned for next week is a “Hate America” rally meant to extend the government shutdown—something someone who has never been to a “No Kings” event would say. 

“We’re so angry about it. I’m a very patient guy, but I have had it with these people. They’re playing games with real people’s lives,” Johnson said Friday morning on Fox News, in his usual monotone voice. “The theory we have right now: They have a ‘Hate America’ rally that’s scheduled for October 18 on the National Mall. It’s all the pro-Hamas wing and the antifa people, they’re all coming out. Some of the House Democrats are selling T-shirts for the event. It’s being told to us that they won’t be able to reopen the government until after that rally, ’cuz they can’t face their rabid base. This is serious business hurting real people.… I’m beyond words.” 

The “No Kings” rally is a nationwide action with a very simple goal: oppose the blatantly authoritarian tilt of the Trump administration. The protests are supported by groups like the Human Rights Campaign, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the College Democrats of America, among others. The rallies have been very tame, and I have run into veterans, federal employees, and mostly older, liberal white people who love America but hate what President Trump is doing. No one there is particularly close to being pro-Hamas, and antifa (whoever that is) would likely consider the action to be insufficiently leftist for them. 

But Johnson can say ridiculous things like this because his party can’t fathom that not everyone who opposes them is some militant anarchist with a Molotov cocktail locked and loaded. The government is shut down because Republicans refuse to negotiate with Democrats on extending health care subsidies millions of Americans rely on, not because Democrats want antifa to destroy the government.  

Bari Weiss must have pulled a lot of management inspiration from the Department of Government Efficiency.

The new editor in chief of CBS News issued a memo to staff Friday, ordering them to send her memos by Tuesday denoting how they spend their workdays and what they believe could be improved.

“By the end of day Tuesday, I’d like a memo from each person across our news organization,” Weiss said in a copy of the email obtained by Semafor’s Max Tani. “I’m not looking for a JD or words like synergy. I want to understand how you spend your working hours—and, ideally, what you’ve made (or are making) that you’re most proud of. I’m also interested in hearing your views on what’s working; what’s broken or substandard; and how we can be better.

“Then I’ll use your memo as a discussion guide for when I meet with most of you (ideally, all of you if time permits) in the coming few weeks,” Weiss added.

That strategy is remarkably similar to the one employed by Elon Musk when he ran DOGE. The parallels weren’t lost on CBS staffers, either: One lamented to Status newsletter writer Oliver Darcy, “We just got Elon Musk-ed.”

In February, Musk ordered federal employees across the government to email his office weekly summaries of their achievements. Failure to do so, under Musk’s rule, would be grounds for immediate firing.

The mandate was remarkably unpopular and scantily enforced by agency heads—some of whom butted up against Musk for making demands outside of his purview as a special government employee. The program met its quiet demise in August, when the Trump administration officially axed it—months after Musk was forced out.

Weiss’s version will have her inundated in paperwork. CBS News on its own employs thousands of individuals. A memo from each person on staff would lend itself to a tremendous amount of work.

The anti-woke, pro-Israel grifter became CBS’s newest chief last week. Her far-right, pro-genocide blog, The Free Press, was simultaneously scooped up by CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, for roughly $150 million. It will also be Weiss’s first foray into running a major news operation. The Free Press, by comparison, employed more than 50 people as of last month.

The acquisition—and Weiss’s whopping promotion—mark the beginning of a radical new era for the historically middle-ground, traditional news conglomerate. Weiss is expected to bring a notably right-wing slant to CBS, which has served as the home of some of journalism’s most venerable names, including Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Friday announced the establishment of a Qatari military installation in Idaho.

Seated beside Qatar’s defense minister, Sheikh Saoud bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, Hegseth announced that the United States is “signing a letter of acceptance to build a Qatari Emiri Air Force facility at the Mountain Home Air Base in Idaho.”

The facility, the defense secretary said, “will host a contingent of Qatari F-15s and pilots to enhance our combined training, increase lethality, interoperability”—though he provided little else by way of detail.

The two officials signed a letter green-lighting the move, after Hegseth praised Qatar for its role in securing a peace deal in Gaza. Notably, the announcement also comes from an administration heavily criticized for corruption involving Qatar, a country the president accused of being a “funder of terrorism” in his first term.

The agreement builds on an existing U.S.-Qatari military relationship. Under a $12 billion deal signed in 2017, the U.S. gave aircraft and U.S.-based training to Qatar. In 2022, it was reported that about 170 Qataris were to be sent to train with F-15s at Idaho’s Mountain Home Air Base, which already hosts Singaporean forces and would be expanded to accommodate the new arrivals.

Representative Mike Simpson, a pro-Trump Republican of Idaho, called the development “fantastic news.” But some proponents of the president’s so-called America First cause disagree.

Laura Loomer, an informal Trump adviser and frequent purveyor of Islamaphobic hysteria, decried the administration’s decision. “What the hell is going on? Why are we trying to train more Muslims how to fly planes on US soil? Didn’t we already learn our lesson?” she wrote, saying it would allow “the Islamic enemy to gain so much ground in our country.”

Energy Secretary Chris Wright and White House Budget Director Russell Vought are reportedly at odds over massive cuts to clean energy projects, Politico reported.

One senior administration official told Politico Thursday night that the White House Office of Management and Budget was annoyed that Energy Department senior staff had prepared a broad list of clean energy projects the agency hoped to target without sharing its contents with the White House. The list was the product of nearly 100 DOE staffers working to identify potential cuts, with a committee of roughly eight making selections and Wright making final determinations, people familiar with the process said.

That senior administration official said there was some friction within factions at the DOE, and that a “Colorado and DOGE crew” that lacked experience in government wasn’t interested in running decisions by the White House. “The tension is between the people who worked in government before and this other team who worked in the private sector and don’t think they need to follow processes or rules and think they can turn things on their heads,” the official told Politico.

Another person with direct knowledge of the discussions told Politico that Wright’s office was ready to drop the ax on a whopping $30 billion in funding awards but was told to wait so that OMB could use the funds as leverage against states.

Cut to last week, when OMB Director Russell Vought—not Wright—declared that the Trump administration would cut $8 billion in lawfully approved funding for energy projects, targeting 16 Democratic-led states. At the same time, a copy of the complete list began to circle around the Capitol, alarming energy advocates and lawmakers, including Republicans whose districts could be affected by the cuts. The fate of the remaining $22 billion, which is mostly earmarked for Republican districts, remains unclear.

Politico reported that the White House had forced Wright’s hand on the timing of the announcement. “Timing of announcements, I don’t control that always, but these decisions are made all in the Energy Department, all based on facts,” Wright told CNN last week.

There seems to be even more infighting at the DOE, but it’s not totally clear why. Two people told Politico that the DOE was looking to oust Undersecretary Preston Griffith Wells III. “It’s toxic af over there,” one person who works with senior DOE staff texted POLITICO. “The boys are fighting.”

But another person said that Wright had a good relationship with Griffith.