President Donald Trump reiterated his claims against news media he thinks unfairly portrays his administration in a negative way, doing so in a pair of tweets he put out on Monday morning.
Trump insisted that the media was putting the nation in harm’s way, suggesting that their negative reporting of him was to blame for the present-day divisive political climate. He also hearkened back to a previous moniker of the press he has sometimes utilized, labeling them the “true Enemy of the People” in his tweets .
“There is great anger in our Country caused in part by inaccurate, and even fraudulent, reporting of the news,” Trump wrote. “The Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People, must stop the open & obvious hostility & report the news accurately & fairly. That will do much to put out the flame of Anger and Outrage and we will then be able to bring all sides together in Peace and Harmony. Fake News Must End!”
Trump regularly puts out statements out against media that covers his administration’s foibles and miscues, oftentimes labeling stories he merely disagrees with as “fake news,” according to reporting from the Hill . Trump made no specific complaint in his tweets Monday about which news reports he thought were “fake,” nor did he provide evidence to back up his claims that media reports casting him in a negative light were misinformative.
Just days after we were forced to evacuate our NYC offices here at CNN because a bomb was sent, Trump takes to Twitter to call the media the “true Enemy of the People” and says, “Fake News Must End!” pic.twitter.com/YGCvn4Qvxv
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) October 29, 2018
The tweets from Trump come less than one week after bomb devices, delivered in the mail to prominent liberal and anti-Trump voices, were discovered, apparently sent by a vehemently pro-Trump supporter named Cesar Sayoc. Packages were sent to former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, former Vice President Joe Biden, billionaire philanthropist George Soros, and a handful of others. Two packages were sent to individuals through the offices of CNN headquarters in New York City.
Upon Sayoc’s arrest, Trump seemingly recognized the need to calm down the rhetoric, speaking at a campaign rally Friday night about the importance of unifying the country.
‘Everyone will benefit if we can end the politics of personal destruction. We must unify as a nation in peace, love and in harmony.”
But Trump didn’t seem to recognize his own role in doing so. In the very same speech, he also went on the attack, blaming the media for creating “deep hostility and negative attacks [that] only serve to drive people apart and to undermine healthy debate.”
When the crowd started chanting “CNN sucks,” Trump did nothing to quell them, according to reporting from ABC News .