Continuing his attack on the news media, President Donald Trump on Friday authored a tweet condemning several prominent news organizations as “the enemy of the American people.”
The president bashed the New York Times, CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS as the “enemy”—not his enemy, mind you, but America’s—while emphasizing that “many more” news organizations should be considered hostile entities as well.
Trump first deleted his on Friday, resulting initially in theories that he may have rethought his words; such notions were proved wrong minutes later, however, when the president reposted the tweet to include ABC and CBS, in addition to NBC, CNN, and the Times.
The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2017
These latest insults follow a slew of damning news reports from some of the nation’s top journalists, who’ve collectively cast suspicion on the Trump campaign’s ties to Russian intelligence; the unconstitutional flaws of his travel ban, which has been repeatedly knocked down by the courts; not to mention the far-reaching consequences of Trump’s numerous conflicts of interest, which stem from his decision not to place his business holdings into a blind trust.
At a press conference on Thursday, Trump dabbled in double speak, condemning classified leaks from within the administration as “criminal,” while stating that the news about them is “fake”—”fake” being the preferred parlance of the president to describe any news that does not automatically cast his policies and conduct in a favorable light. “Russia is fake news,” Trump told reporters, for instance.
“The leaks are absolutely real,” Trump added. “The news is fake because so much of the news is fake.”
Last month, while addressing a crowd at the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, Trump declared he was at “war” with the media and called journalists, “the most dishonest human beings on Earth.”
Fox News, as the other major TV network, is noticeably absent from the president’s tweet, even though one of the most widely shared reels after Thursday’s press conference showed Fox News host Shepard Smith shaming the president for “repeating ridiculous, throwaway lines that are not true at all and sort of avoiding this issue of Russia as if we’re some kind of fools for asking the question.”