After Wednesday afternoon’s speech urging calm and condemning political violence, President Donald Trump is back to his old tricks Thursday morning, suggesting that his critics in the media are responsible for the atmosphere of conflict and violence that led to bombs being sent to two living former Democratic Party presidents, progressive donor George Soros, and CNN (addressed to former CIA Director John Brennan, who is a commentator on NBC and MSNBC).
According to Trump, “the Anger we see today in our society” is caused not by his own demagogic politics but rather “by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting of the Mainstream Media that I refer to as Fake News.”
Indeed, Trump’s takeaway from Wednesday’s threatened violence against Trump opponents is that journalists should stop running critical stories about him: “Mainstream Media must clean up its act, FAST!”
Wednesday night, instead of canceling or delaying partisan political activity to help underscore the need for unity, Trump flew to Wisconsin to speak at a rally that featured calls to imprison former Secretary of State and 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton where he simultaneously called for unity and blamed the media for disunity.
By Thursday morning, however, Trump’s thinking had become more pointed.
On Wednesday, the New York Times published an explosive investigative story detailing the fact that a president who made fake concern about information security the notional centerpiece of his campaign has been regularly communicating via insecure cell phone calls even though he’s been advised by his staff that the Chinese government is spying on those calls.
The story also reports that while the Russian government snoops on the calls to an extent, they are “not believed to be running as sophisticated an influence effort as China because of Mr. Trump’s apparent affinity for President Vladimir V. Putin, a former official said.”
Trump, before arguing that journalism (that he pretends is made up) is responsible for the violence, argued that this story was an example of the kind of bad journalism he’s condemning.
In other news, Trump continues to cite wildly inaccurate jobs numbers as the reason why he won’t halt arms sales to Saudi Arabia to punish their government for murdering a dissident (and US resident) in the Saudi consulate in Turkey.
Sourse: vox.com
