President Donald Trump complained Monday morning that members of the media have treated officials from his administration rudely and advised the media that “you will do much better” if his officials are treated nicely.
Trump’s tweet, which did not reference any specific interactions between his administration and the media, followed interviews with counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway on four networks.
“It is amazing how rude much of the media is to my very hard working representatives. Be nice, you will do much better!” Trump wrote on Twitter.
On ABC’s “Good Morning America,” anchor George Stephanopoulos challenged Conway to explain an interview she gave to the Bergen (N.J.) Record, in which she seemingly suggested that former President Barack Obama had used household electronics such as televisions, computers and smart phones inside Trump’s Manhattan skyscraper to spy on him.
Asked for evidence to support such a claim, Conway said she had none and insisted that she had been speaking about surveillance broadly and not leveling a specific allegation against Obama.
In response to a similar line of questioning on CNN’s “New Day,” a program Conway and other White House officials have largely avoided in recent weeks, the counselor to the president said it was not her responsibility to provide evidence for an allegation.
“I’m not Inspector Gadget. I don’t believe people are using the microwave to spy on the Trump campaign,” she said. “However, I’m not in the job of having evidence. That’s what investigations are for.”
CNN host Chris Cuomo pushed Conway on the issue, asking her why she even raised the use of household gadgets for surveillance purposes if it were not her intention to imply that Obama had done just that inside Trump Tower. “The question is why were you doing that?” Cuomo said. “Because this goes to personal integrity.”
“I’m allowed to talk about things that are in the news without you questioning anybody’s personal integrity,” Conway replied. Accusations that she intentionally leveled an allegation against Obama without evidence have come from at least in part from “other people who don’t necessarily want Donald Trump to be the president,” she said.
And on NBC’s “Today,” Conway struggled to offer an explanation as to why the White House trumpeted a positive jobs report last week as an early success of the Trump administration when the president regularly derided similarly positive reports as phony and inaccurate when they were released during the Obama administration.
Conway’s justification for the discrepancy, under repeated questioning from “Today” hosts Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie, was to say that “there’s a lot of fakery going on for people who were promised something that never came to be,” during the Obama administration, pointing to broken promises on health care as an example.
Lauer and Guthrie also sought answers from Conway about her Trump Tower surveillance remarks over the weekend, questions that prompted the counselor to the president to criticize the media for talking too much about Trump’s wiretapping claim.
“Can I stop you right there? The media did not bring up this topic. President Trump did,” Guthrie interjected as Conway sought to steer the conversation away from the president’s claim that Obama tapped his phones during the election. Conway replied that the media has focused too much on the wiretapping allegation and not enough on health care and other issues “that the American people also want to hear about.”
“All the more reason to question why it is that he would bring that up and then therefore throw the discussion” away from the White House’s preferred topics, Guthrie replied. “I mean, it isn’t like something a blogger wrote. It’s something the president of the United States accused his predecessor of tapping his phone.”
(h/t Politico)
