Donald Trump To Direct Federal Agencies To Cancel ‘Washington Post’ & ‘New York Times’ Subscriptions

President Donald Trump will reportedly direct federal agencies to cancel their subscriptions to The Washington Post and The New York Times in what the White House claimed was a measure to cut costs, The Daily Beast reported.

“Not renewing subscriptions across all federal agencies will be a significant cost saving — hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars will be saved,” White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement, The Daily Beast said.

As the digital news outlet noted, there isn’t an indication of how many subscriptions that federal agencies have to the two East Coast newspapers, so it’s unclear how much money the federal government would actually be saving by cutting the subscriptions.

Per The Daily Beast, neither The Washington Post nor The New York Times commented on the White House’s Thursday decision. The Daily Beast noted the president first indicated such a move on a Monday night Fox News interview with Sean Hannity. The president told Hannity that he was going to “terminate” both of the newspapers from the White House.

“They’re fake,” the president said about the newspapers on Monday. Sources told The Wall Street Journal, who initially broke the story on Thursday, that they believed the president would still read both newspapers despite the order and his rhetoric about them.

The White House directive isn’t all too surprising given the president’s past comments about the media. The president regularly uses the moniker “Fake News” to describe news reports that are unfavorable to him. Recently, the president has frequently criticized media coverage of the impeachment inquiry against him and the reports about his call with Ukraine that sparked it. He also calls the inquiry a “witch hunt.”

Although the president has often seemed to favor conservative-leaning Fox News, The Inquisitr noted earlier this week that the network’s chief political anchor, Bret Baier, spoke out against the president’s “fake news” rhetoric. He particularly seemed to take issue with the president’s repeated sentiment that the news media is the enemy of the American people. While the president has often sent attacks toward The New York Times, The Washington Post, and cable news network CNN, he has more recently also hurled attacks toward Fox News, particularly anchor Chris Wallace.

Earlier this month, the president specifically attacked both of the papers he reportedly intends to remove, calling the papers “pure fiction.”

The Media is “Fixed” and Corrupt. It bears no relationship to the truth. The @nytimes & @washingtonpost are pure fiction. Totally dishonest reporting!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 5, 2019

In late September, the president also attacked both papers, dubbing the New York paper the “Failing New York Times,” and the D.C. paper “The Amazon Washington Post,” in a reference to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ ownership of the newspaper.

The LameStream Media had a very bad week. They pushed numerous phony stories and got caught, especially The Failing New York Times, which has lost more money over the last 10 years than any paper in history, and The Amazon Washington Post. They are The Enemy of the People!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 22, 2019