President Trump blasted the media as “the enemy of the American people” in a tweet Friday, calling out several outlets specifically.
“The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” he wrote.
He had posted and then quickly deleted a slightly different version of the tweet just a few minutes earlier, which omitted ABC and CBS. He also included the word “SICK!” at the end of the original post.
The tweet came one day after Trump held an adversarial and lengthy news conference, in which he berated the media as “very fake news” and dismissed news reports about his and his associates’ ties to Russia as a “ruse.”
About an hour later, he posted a second tweet criticizing the media’s coverage of the press conference.
“‘One of the most effective press conferences I’ve ever seen!’ says Rush Limbaugh. Many agree.Yet FAKE MEDIA calls it differently! Dishonest,” Trump wrote.
{mosads}Trump has long had an antagonistic relationship with the press, and often labels news stories he sees as unfavorable as “fake news.” Trump’s campaign issued a survey to supporters on Friday, asking them to gauge the trustworthiness of the media.
The news outlets singled out in Trump’s Friday afternoon tweet are not new targets for the president. He has often lambasted CNN and The New York Times, referring to them as “failing” and out of touch with voters.
In a rare interview with The New York Times last month, Chief White House Strategist Steve Bannon, the former chair of the far-right Breitbart News, called reporters the “opposition party” and said “the media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.”
“They don’t understand this country,” Bannon said. “They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”
Trump echoed Bannon’s comments shortly after, telling “The Brody File” that “the media is the opposition party in many ways.”
– Updated at 7:16 p.m.