So now that the president of the United States is all “Go, best friend, that’s my best friend” with the tyrannical leader of North Korea, he somehow believes that the press is America’s biggest enemy.
In an angry tweet Wednesday, Donald Trump declared that CNN and NBC were the purveyors of “fake news,” all claims that he’s made before, but this time, Trump took it a bit further, adding that, “Our Country’s biggest enemy is the Fake News.”
CNN notes that this isn’t the first time the president has declared the press the enemy; he made that claim back in February 2017 when he declared in a tweet that many news outlets were “the enemy of the American People!”
Here’s how CNN categorized the president’s position toward the press in historical context:
No modern American president has publicly spoken this way about the press.
Richard Nixon sometimes talked this way, but only in private.
“Never forget, the press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The press is the enemy,” Nixon told his advisers, according to Oval Office recordings.
Trump’s strategy isn’t unique. In fact, it’s quite elementary, and it works like this: Any news outlet that is highly critical of his administration is labeled “fake news,” and any news outlet that is willing to look at this shot-up, holey, Swiss-cheese-ass administration’s faults and point out the white supremacist leanings as good for the country (looking directly at Fox News) is not fake news.
That’s it. That’s the criterion for a fake-news label.
Truth is, Trump wanted to be lauded and heralded as this great dealmaker for meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, when, in fact, nothing came of the meeting except for a really great Dennis Rodman interview.
CNN points out that many on Twitter weren’t so sure that the president even wrote the tweet bashing news outlets, since the tweet used the word “promulgated,” and I’d have to agree. We know that the president doesn’t know what this word means or how to spell it correctly. Had the president written this tweet, he would have used all caps to show that he was bossing up his word game.
The war wages on, and sadly, the president of the United States is beefing with Canada, the American press, Robert De Niro and kneeling black players in the NFL.
He’s cool with North Korea and Russia, though.