A professor has been accused of pulling a stunt straight from Donald Trump’s playbook for inventing a Nobel-style prize and giving it to himself. Frenchman Florent Montaclair, who taught at a university in eastern France for two decades, dreamed up the Gold Medal of Philology and a bogus learned society to hand it out, the BBC reported. His 2016 coronation took place inside the National Assembly in Paris, with government ministers and genuine Nobel winners in attendance. Prosecutor Paul-Edouard Lallois told the broadcaster: “It’s such an unlikely tale, it could be out of a film.” The ruse only collapsed last year when a colleague realized Montaclair was about to lead a discussion on misinformation. Before then, he had even bestowed an honorary version of the medal on MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, then 88, at a Brussels ceremony. He also listed a Ph.D. from a Delaware university that does not exist. When police searched his home in February, Montaclair admitted he had spent about $300 at a jeweler on the medal itself, telling officers: “It’s not a con. It’s an attempt to set up a new distinction in the world of academia—an attempt that failed.” He has been suspended indefinitely. Trump, 79, was given a made-up award by FIFA and lapped it up after being snubbed for the actual Nobel Peace Prize—which he had spent years insisting he deserved. When the Nobel committee handed the 2025 prize to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado instead, FIFA boss Gianni Infantino stepped in to soothe the president’s bruised ego with the “inaugural 2025 FIFA Peace Prize.” Trump accepted the bauble while moaning that Norway had “screwed” him.
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