Reuters
President Donald Trump continued to ramp up his onslaught against the media on Sunday, warning news outlets can “also cause war” and claiming he is helping Americans by pointing out how news outlets are biased against him.
“The Fake News hates me saying that they are the Enemy of the People only because they know it’s TRUE. I am providing a great service by explaining this to the American People,” he tweeted Sunday to his more than 53 million followers.
“They purposely cause great division & distrust. They can also cause War! They are very dangerous & sick!,” he added, without providing proof of his assertion.
About an hour later, after posting a couple of tweets about tariffs and trade, Trump returned to his assault on the media, saying it’s a “complete fabrication” that he’s worried his son Donald Trump Jr. did anything wrong when he met with a Kremlin-linked lawyer at the Trump Tower in June 2016.
“Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower,” Trump wrote from his golf resort in Bedminster, N.J., where he’s spending the weekend.
“This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics – and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!”
The president has ratcheted up his inflammatory rhetoric on the media recently, referring to them as the “enemy of the people” and “horrible and horrendous people” in campaign-style rallies.
First daughter Ivanka Trump broke with her father’s views of the media during an interview last Thursday when she said she didn’t believe that.
“I’ve certainly received my fair share of reporting on me personally that I know not to be fully accurate, so I have some sensitivity around why people have concerns and gripe, especially when they’re sort of targeted,” she told Axios in an interview at the Newseum. “But no, I do not feel that the media is the enemy of the people.”
But later during the White House briefing, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders passed up an opportunity to reject Trump’s use of “enemy of the people” and blamed the media for increasingly attacking Trump and members of his media.
The president, according to reports, has grown worried that his son may be in the crosshairs of special counsel Robert Mueller for the Trump Tower meeting, which was also attended by onetime Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner.
Donald Jr. told a Senate panel that his father wasn’t aware of the meeting, but Trump’s former longtime fixer and personal lawyer Michael Cohen said he was prepared to tell Mueller that the president was aware of the sitdown.
The White House has downplayed the meeting as a discussion about an adoption policy that affects Moscow, but Donald Jr.’s emails show the Russian lawyer promised to have dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Trump also continued his assault on Mueller, asking why the media aren’t reporting on the corruption of the special counsel’s “Rigged Witch Hunt.”