Kathrine Frich
Trump has a long history with Russia.
Campaign rallies are meant to celebrate local allies and fire up the crowd.
Yet when a speaker goes off script, a casual brag can sometimes sound like an accidental confession.
At a recent Southern gathering, a complaint about journalism prizes raised fresh questions about what the speaker truly knows.
Attacking the press
Speaking at the T. Ed Garrison Arena in Pendleton, South Carolina, on Wednesday, President Donald Trump held a rally for Senator Darline Graham, according to the Irish Star.
Instead of sticking to the local race, he complained about missing out on the Nobel Peace Prize and the Pulitzer Prize.
“I didn’t get the Nobel Prize. I didn’t get the Pulitzer. I should have gotten the Pulitzer for writing, too,” Trump told the crowd, as quoted by the Irish Star.
Then he attacked past winners of the award. “The people that got it shouldn’t have gotten it, you know? They got a Pulitzer Prize for their accurate and wonderful writing on the subject of Russia, Russia, Russia. But they had it wrong. They all had it wrong,” he said, according to the outlet.
Who got it wrong
His words seem to indicate he knows more about Russian dealings than even Pulitzer-awarded writers, raising the question of whether he just admitted to having inside knowledge.
It is not completely clear which winners Trump meant. He likely pointed to the 2018 award given to The New York Times and The Washington Post for exposing Russian interference in the 2016 election and links to his own campaign.
Still, several other writers have won the prize for covering Moscow, according to the Pulitzer Prize board.
In 2023, The New York Times won for investigating civilian deaths in Bucha during the Ukraine invasion, while the Associated Press took the Public Service medal for frontline reporting in besieged Mariupol.
A year later, jailed Russian activist Vladimir Kara-Murza won for The Washington Post by writing columns from his Siberian prison cell about the dangers of dissent under President Vladimir Putin.
Inside Moscow connections
Whether Trump meant the investigation into his own team or wider Kremlin coverage, his long history with Moscow suggests he would know plenty.
According to a chronology by Inside, Trump pitched Soviet Ambassador Yuri Dubinin on a Moscow hotel back in 1986. By 2008, Donald Trump Jr. told a property conference that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets… We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
Five years later, Inside noted, Trump brought his Miss Universe pageant to Moscow in a $20 million deal and told David Letterman he had “done a lot of business with the Russians.”
Today, as president, Trump has also held several hour-long phone conversations directly with Putin to discuss the war and bilateral ties.
