“And the reason you’re my first stop is that, as you know, I have a running war with the media. They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth,” Trump said.
The approximately 400 CIA employees broke out into applause after Trump said this.
.. “We had a massive field of people. You saw that, packed,” Trump said. He then noted that when he woke up Saturday morning, he turned on the TV and noticed, “I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks and they show an empty field. I said, wait a minute. I made a speech. I looked out. The field was, it looked like a million — a million and a half people. They showed a field where there were practically nobody standing there. And they said, ‘Donald Trump did not draw well.’”
He added, “We have something that’s amazing because we had it looked — honestly, it looked like a million and a half people. Whatever it was, it was. But it went all the way back to the Washington Monument. And I turn on [the tv], and by mistake I get this network, and it showed an empty field.”
“So, we caught them,” he said. “And we caught them in a beauty, and I think they’re going to pay a big price.”
.. So Zeke, Zeke from Time Magazine” wrote a fake news story, Trump said. “I would never do that. I have great respect for Dr. Martin Luther King. And it was right there. But this is how dishonest the media is.”
Reince Priebus: Media Obsessed With Trying to ‘Delegitimize’ President Trump
Trump administration chief of staff Reince Priebus said the press is trying to “delegitimize” President Donald Trump.
Priebus said,”There is an obsession by the media to delegitimize this president. And we’re not going to sit around and let it happen. We are going to fight back tooth and nail every day and twice on Sunday”
The traditional way of reporting on a president is dead. And Trump’s press secretary killed it.
“This is called a statement you’re told to make by the President. And you know the President is watching,” Fleischer wrote. (MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski pegged it as “Sean Spicer’s first hostage video.”)
Spicer’s statement should be seen for what it is: Remarks made over the casket at the funeral of access journalism.
As Jessica Huseman of ProPublica put it: “Journalists aren’t going to get answers from Spicer. We are going to get answers by digging. By getting our hands dirty. So let’s all do that.”
Saturday made clearer than ever that President Trump intends to make the American media his foremost enemy.
Trump wants a flat-out war with the nation’s media for one well-calculated reason: Because he believes it will continue to serve his political purposes, as it has for months.
Spicer earns Four Pinocchios for false claims on inauguration crowd size
This is an appalling performance by the new press secretary. He managed to make a series of false and misleading claims in service of a relatively minor issue. Presumably he was ordered to do this by Trump, who conjured up fantastic numbers in his own mind, but part of a flack’s job is to tell the boss when lies are necessary — and when they are not.
Spicer earns Four Pinocchios, but seriously, we wish we could give five.
