Trump ramps up attacks on media ahead of White House Correspondents’ Dinner

President Trump has reignited his attacks on the news media in the days leading up to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, underscoring the White House’s use of the press as an effective foil.

Trump will skip the dinner for a third straight year, opting to hold a rally in Wisconsin instead on Saturday night. He has also directed other administration officials not to attend.

“The Correspondents’ Dinner is too negative. I like positive things,” Trump said earlier this month in explaining his decision.

Within hours of those comments, he had taken to Twitter to characterize the press as “the enemy of the people,” a favorite insult that has appeared to get under the skin of some in the media.

Trump has continued his near-constant criticisms of the news media in the weeks since, repeatedly lashing out in the aftermath of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference.

The latest wave of criticism reached its crest on Tuesday, when he fired off seven tweets castigating the press and singling out specific outlets and reporters by name. It included shots at “Psycho Joe” Scarborough of MSNBC and applied the term “enemy of the people” to The New York Times, despite its publisher warning Trump about the dangerous implications of the phrase.

The White House essentially trolled journalists on Thursday when press secretary Sarah HuckabeeSanders made her first appearance at the briefing room podium in 45 days — complete with an appearance by Vice President Pence — at a mock Q&A for children as part of Take Your Kids to work day. Reporters were unable to ask questions.

None of the Trump attacks are the least bit shocking and they are likely to only continue as the president seeks another four years in the office.

Trump has scored political victories in part by running against the press, which delights his core supporters. In 2020, there is every indication that the president will continue with this strategy, framing the election in part on a Washington elite symbolized by the mainstream media seeking to thwart his effort to win another four years in the Oval Office.

Trump has a long history with the White House Correspondents Association and its dinner, which is a key part of the story surrounding how Trump became president and of his relationship with the media.

Trump was the subject of ridicule at the 2011 event from both Seth Meyers and President Obama, who made fun of Trump’s decision-making and importance with references to “Celebrity Apprentice.”

Trump, Obama said at the time, recognized the need to fire Gary Busey and not Lil John or Meatloaf in a recent episode.

“And these are the kinds of decisions that would keep me up at night,” Obama said, mocking Trump. “Well handled, sir. Well handled.”

The jokes started a narrative that Trump had launched his presidential campaign because of the jokes at his expense, though The Washington Post’s Roxanne Roberts, who sat next to Trump at the 2011 dinner, has largely shot down that theory.

As president, Trump has stayed away from the dinner, which nonetheless provoked a huge controversy last year after comedian Michelle Wolf delivered a searing set that mocked the press, congressional Republicans and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who attended in Trump’s place.

The fallout led to changes at the dinner itself, which will feature biographer Ron Chernow as the keynote speaker in lieu of a comedic act.

The White House was unmoved by the shift in tone, as Trump directed other administration officials not to attend.

Trump will still loom large over Saturday evening’s proceedings. His consistent attacks on the media have raised concerns among First Amendment and press freedom watchdogs, and his rally could lead to split screen coverage of the festivities in D.C.

The president’s campaign rallies are typically rife with jabs at the media. Trump often references “fake news,” whipping his supporters into a frenzy while pointing at reporters in the back of the venue.

The press has served as a useful political foil for Trump, who has rallied his base by portraying himself as an outsider unwelcome by the Washington establishment, and a victim of unfair coverage and punditry.

[The Hill]

Trump ignores black #1 NFL pick to congratulate white player with history of racist tweets

In his first tweet on Saturday morning, President Donald Trump ignored the first player picked in the NFL draft, Oklahoma quarterback Kyler Murray, who is black, to praise the number two pick — a white player with a history of racist tweets.

In his tweet, Trump skipped over the Heisman Trophy winner to celebrate Ohio State’s Nick Bosa — who missed most of the 2018 season — for being picked second.

“Congratulations to Nick Bosa on being picked number two in the NFL Draft. You will be a great player for years to come, maybe one of the best. Big Talent! San Francisco will embrace you but most importantly, always stay true to yourself. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” he tweeted.

According to to the San Franciso Chronicle,”Bosa recently deleted tweets in which he called Colin Kaepernick a ‘clown,’ referred to Beyonce’s music as ‘complete trash’ and called ‘Black Panther’ the worst Marvel movie. On Thursday, the website Blacksportsonline posted threads showing Bosa following and liking accounts that feature white nationalist posts. The twitter feed @rzstprogramming showed Bosa retweeted a tweet referring to ‘crappernick.’”

[Raw Story]

Donald Trump: Investigations Against Me Were a ‘Coup’ to ‘Overthrow the United States Government’

Throughout his interview with Sean Hannity on Thursday night, President Donald Trump raved that Robert Mueller‘s probe and the investigations into him were nothing less than an attempted “coup” to depose his administration.

As Trump lashed out at his various political foes and spoke to Hannity about his 2016 opponent who has been vanquished for about 2.5 years now, he said the counterintelligence investigations into his campaign’s possible Russian collusion was a scandal “far bigger than Watergate.”

T”his was a coup. This was an attempted overthrow of the United States government,” Trump said. “This was an overthrow and it’s a disgraceful thing…I think it’s possibly the biggest scandal in political history in this country.”

Trump continued by referring to the FBI and intelligence figures who’ve spoken against him as “sick people.”

[Mediaite]

Trump withdraws from UN Arms Trade Treaty

President Donald Trump speaking to the National Rifle Association, a group that made a multimillion investment in his campaign, declared his administration will not ratify the UN Arms Trade Treaty — a treaty supported by the Obama administration that is aimed at regulating the international arms industry.

“The United Nations will soon receive a formal notice that America is rejecting this treaty,” Trump said in a speech at the NRA convention in Indianapolis. The treaty was not supported by the NRA.

“We will never allow foreign bureaucrats to trample on your Second Amendment,” Trump said to applause and acknowledged the “happy faces from the NRA over there.”

Trump signed a document before the crowd, which he said was a “message asking the Senate to discontinue the treaty ratification process and return the now-rejected treaty right back to me in the Oval Office, where I will dispose of it.” The move, however, is mostly symbolic. The Obama administration submitted the treaty to the Senate, but it was never ratified after facing opposition. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has not signaled how lawmakers will move forward with the president’s request.

Immediately, gun control advocates spoke out against the president’s decision to back away from the treaty, which seeks to make it more difficult to sell weapons to countries that are under arms embargoes, often because of conflict.

“The Arms Trade Treaty is designed to keep guns out of war-stricken countries and prevent dangerous situations from descending even further into chaos. It is a treaty supported by our allies, but in opposing it, the president instead chose to stand with countries such as North Korea and Syria,” said Kris Brown, the president of Brady, an organization aimed at preventing gun violence.

As he took the stage, it appeared that a phone was thrown at but did not strike the president. ABC News has reached out to the Secret Service.

During his speech, Trump jumped from defending Second Amendment rights to building a wall to touting economic numbers.

The president argued that while Democrats advocate for undocumented immigrants, they want to “disarm law-abiding citizens.”

“Democrats want to disarm law-abiding Americans while allowing criminal aliens to operate with impunity. But that will never happen as long as I’m your president. Not even close,” the president said.

Trump also claimed he had successfully fought back against the corruption “at the highest levels” in Washington in his speech at the NRA’s annual convention in Indiana, held one week after special counsel Robert Mueller’s redacted report was released to the public.

“All was taking place at the highest levels in Washington, D.C. You’ve been watching, you’ve been seeing. You’ve been looking at things that you wouldn’t have believed possible in our country. Corruption at the highest level a disgrace. Spying, surveillance. Trying for an overthrow. And we caught them. We caught them,” he said.

Earlier, Vice President Mike Pence took a swipe at newly announced Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden on Friday saying that the nation is not in a battle for the “soul of America.”

[ABC News]

Trump Knocks McCain Again for Saving Obamacare During NRA Convention Speech

President Donald Trump made a dig at late Senator John McCain for voting against an Obamacare repeal bill, which ultimately killed Republican efforts to remove the ACA.

“We got the individual mandate, the absolute worst part of ObamaCare eliminated,” Trump said while bragging about his accomplishments to a raucous crowd gathered in Indianapolis for this year’s National Rifle Association convention. “Now we’re going for the rest.”

“And we had it [repealed] except for one vote,” he added, referencing the infamous McCain vote that saved Obamacare. “You know what I’m talking about.”

The crowd responded to Trump’s McCain jab with cheers and applause.

In nearly an hour long interview on Sean Hannity‘s Fox News show last night, Trump ripped McCain for doing the GOP “a tremendous disservice” and “the nation a tremendous disservice, tremendous, and it’s unfortunate.”

“He went thumbs-down at the very last moment and I thought it was a disgraceful thing to do and very, very bad for our country and bad for health care,” he added. “It was done and then John McCain, at the very last moment, late in the evening, went thumbs-down and everybody said, ‘What was that?’”

During his NRA speech, Trump also warned the audience that “socialists and far left Democrats want to destroy everything that we’ve done.” He went on to say that Democrats want to ban “new guns and confiscating existing guns from law-abiding citizens.”

“What they don’t tell you is, the bad guys aren’t giving up their guns and you’re not going to be giving up your guns either,” he added.

[Mediaite]

Trump again says armed concertgoers could have prevented Paris attack

President Trump on Friday reiterated his claim that the 2015 terrorist attacks at the Bataclan nightclub in Paris might have been avoided if some concertgoers had been armed.

“Paris, France, they say has the strongest gun laws in the world,” Trump said Friday during his speech to gun rights advocates at the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) annual convention in Indianapolis.

“If there was one gun being carried by one person on the other side, it very well could have been a whole different result. The shooting went on so long and there wasn’t a thing you could do about it,” he said.

Trump used his fingers to emulate a gun being fired, saying, “Get over here, boom. Here, boom. And then they left. They were captured later.”

The president added that if a “tiny percent” of concertgoers had been able to carry weapons, the attack “probably wouldn’t have happened because the cowards would have known there were people and they’re having guns.”

Trump has weighed in before on the shooting, which left 90 people dead. Coordinated attacks from Islamist extremists at a concert hall, stadium, restaurants and bars killed 130 people and injured hundreds more on Nov. 13, 2015.

The president made very similar comments last year while speaking at the NRA conference in Dallas and was later condemned by the French government.

[The Hill]

Reality

Actually Trump is echoing the NRA’s own argument that if guns are not allowed near schools, churches, and government buildings then shootings cannot be stopped by a “good guy with a gun.” However the empirical evidence is not on Trump’s side.

In 2014 the FBI released a reported titled “A Study of Active Shooter Incidents in the United States Between 2000 and 2013” which looked over 13 years of data and a of total of 160 incidents, and concluded the concept of a good guy with a gun was unequivocally proven to be a myth. The number of times a shooting ended after armed citizens exchanged gunfire with the shooters only amounted to 5 times (3.1%). In contrast the number of times unarmed citizens safely and successfully disrupted the shootings was 21 times (13.1%).

Media

Trump defends Charlottesville comments by praising a Confederate general

President Trump on Friday defended his comments after the 2017 “Unite the Right” protests in which an avowed neo-Nazi killed a woman and injured dozens of others in Charlottesville, arguing that his focus was on the protesters defending the monument of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Trump, pressed on whether he stood by his comments that there were “very fine people on both sides,” told reporters, “If you look at what I said, you will see that that question was answered perfectly. And I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general.”

Former vice president Joe Biden resurrected Trump’s response to the deadly rally by self-professed white supremacists in a video to launch his presidential campaign on Thursday. In it, Biden said Trump’s remarks “shocked the conscience of this nation.”

“With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it,” Biden says in the video. “And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.”

Trump, who spoke to reporters en route to a speech to the National Rifle Association in Indiana, said, “People were there protesting the taking down of the monument of Robert E. Lee. Everybody knows that.”

Trump and others have tried to distinguish between the self-proclaimed white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and the other supporters of Confederate monuments, who were all marching in Charlottesville that weekend.

But the events that weekend were organized by a self-proclaimed white nationalist, Richard Spencer, and those in attendance wore swastikas and chanted anti-Semitic slogans.

James Alex Fields Jr., who killed Heather Heyer and injured 35 other people when he plowed his car into a group of counterprotesters at the rally by self-proclaimed white supremacists, pleaded guilty to hate crimes in federal court earlier this month.

Fields, 21, of Ohio admitted guilt to 29 of 30 counts in a federal indictment as part of a deal with prosecutors, who agreed they would not seek the death penalty in the case. Fields is set to be sentenced July 3.

Some Trump supporters have become Charlottesville truthers, arguing that Trump’s comments were taken out of context. They maintain, as Trump does, that he was not calling self-proclaimed neo-Nazis and white supremacists “very fine people,” and in fact, he said they should be condemned.

Post writer Aaron Blake more thoroughly examined the fallacies of this argument, noting that it’s hard to make the case that there were “very fine people” marching alongside people chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”

[Washington Post]

Reality

Then on August 15, 2017 Trump again defended the backlash of his comments equating neo-Nazis with those protesting the neo-Nazis by first claiming it was “the left” who was violent and initiated the violence, then again and again stuck to his guns that “both sides” were to blame, which is when Trump made the statement “there was very fine people on both sides.” Later in the press conference Trump said he’s not defending the neo-Nazis, but the obvious problem is this.

First, It was a neo-Nazi rally.

It was always billed as a neo-Nazi rally with prominent white supremacists, such as Richard Spencer, David Duke, and others, all to support the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, a traitor who fought the United States specifically for the right to own humans of African descent as property.

Second, Trump later in the press conference, while clarifying his remarks, said that the night before the rally he saw the Unite the Right protesters walking very quietly the taking down the statue of Robert E. Lee.

They were not walking very quietly, but were all carrying tiki torches and chanting “Blood and Soil!” and “Jews will not replace us!”

And finally Trump attacked the “left” for showing up to protest the neo-Nazis without a permit, and pointing out the neo-Nazis had a permit and a right to be there.

Donald Trump was absolutely giving neo-Nazis a pass, and morally equating them with people protesting neo-Nazis.

Watch the press conference in full.

Trump Rages at Tom Steyer After His Impeachment Ad Runs on Fox & Friends

President Donald Trump attacked liberal billionaire Tom Steyer after his ad pushing for impeachment aired on Fox & Friends this morning.

“Weirdo Tom Steyer, who didn’t have the ‘guts’ or money to run for President, is still trying to remain relevant by putting himself on ads begging for impeachment,” the president tweeted today. “He doesn’t mention the fact that mine is perhaps the most successful first 2 year presidency in history & NO C OR O!”

“It’s all here: 10 detailed acts of obstruction of justice,” Steyer says in the clip while holding up a copy of the Mueller report. “Robert Mueller’s report lays out a road map for impeachment proceedings against this president, and challenges Congress to do its job. I’m Tom Steyer, and we can’t let this president destroy the public trust, break his oath of office and get away with it. Congress has to do its job and hold him accountable. Please call them at this number. Tell them to get going.”

This is the second time one of Steyer’s ads has triggered a Twitter response from the president. In 2017, Steyer aired another impeachment ad that Trump complained about.

[Mediaite]

Donald Trump denies he tried to fire Mueller, disputing account from a former senior White House aide

President Donald Trump insisted Thursday that he did not try to fire Robert Mueller, disputing a central finding in the special counsel’s report that was based on extensive interviews with Trump’s former White House counsel, Don McGahn.

“As has been incorrectly reported by the Fake News Media, I never told then White House Counsel Don McGahn to fire Robert Mueller, even though I had the legal right to do so,” Trump tweeted. “If I wanted to fire Mueller, I didn’t need McGahn to do it, I could have done it myself.”

The special counsel spent nearly two years investigating whether anyone from Trump’s presidential campaign conspired with Russia to sway the 2016 election and whether the president sought to illegally obstruct justice.

Mueller’s 448-page report detailed multiple contacts between Russian operatives and Trump associates during the campaign but said investigators didn’t find evidence of a criminal conspiracy. The report documented actions by Trump to derail Mueller’s investigation. The special counsel did not conclude Trump obstructed justice, but it refused to clear him of wrongdoing.

McGahn told Mueller’s team that Trump ordered him to have the special counsel fired and later asked him to lie about the incident. McGahn spent hours speaking to investigators and supplied written notes.

Trump has repeatedly called the Mueller investigation a “witch hunt” and a “hoax.” He also claimed the report vindicated him.

In recent days, he has lashed out at House Democrats, who vowed to conduct their own fact finding and seek to have McGahn and other figures in the inquiry testify on Capitol Hill. Trump indicated he will try to block testimony by McGahn.

The Mueller report’s findings spurred calls by some House Democrats to move toward impeachment proceedings, though House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., urged her colleagues to focus first on carrying out an investigation.

The Mueller report details an incident June 17, 2017, that McGahn described to investigators.

Trump “called McGahn at home and directed him to call the Acting Attorney General and say that the Special Counsel had conflicts of interest and must be removed,” the report says. “McGahn did not carry out the direction, however, deciding that he would resign rather than trigger what he regarded as a potential Saturday Night Massacre.”

[USA Today]

Trump goes off script at opioid summit: ‘I know about rigging the system because I had the system rigged on me’

President Donald Trump alleged on Wednesday that the U.S. justice system had been “rigged” against him.

While speaking at an event on opioid abuse, the president argued that pharmaceutical companies are giving European countries better prices than they give U.S. customers.

Trump vowed to stop the practice and called his promise “a big deal.”

“At long last we’re stopping drug companies in foreign countries from rigging the system,” Trump said before straying from his prepared remarks.

“I know all about the rigging of the system because I had the system rigged on me,” the president said, likely referring to special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

“I think you know what I’m talking about,” Trump added. “Unfortunately, that will be your soundbite tonight but that’s okay. The system was rigged!”

[Raw Story]

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