President Donald Trump took to Twitter on Tuesday morning to slam the “fake” mainstream media for trying to silence him on social media.
Trump singled out CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, the Washington Post and the New York Times, but didn’t mention his favorite news organization — Fox News.
The president has given the majority of his interviews to Fox News since taking office and even retweeted a pair of “Fox & Friends” messages on Tuesday morning.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/872059997429022722
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/872064426568036353
The president also did not mention Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, which on Tuesday published a blistering editorial about Trump’s “self-destructive” propensity to tweet messages that undermine his policies. “The most effective opponent of the Trump Presidency is Donald J. Trump,” the paper’s editorial board concluded.
Trump’s use of Twitter is always under a microscope, but it has drawn extra attention since he sent a series of tweets related to the most recent terror attack in London, specifically mocking the mayor of London for saying there is “no reason to be alarmed.”
Many commentators noted that the president took the comments out of context because the mayor was simply saying an increased police presence offered “no reason to be alarmed.”
On Monday, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway defended Trump on NBC’s “Today” show Monday, slamming the media’s “obsession” with the president’s Twitter feed. Deputy White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said she didn’t consider Trump’s tweets as an attack on London Mayor Sadiq Khan.
“I don’t see the president as picking a fight with the mayor of London at all. I think, again, the president’s point… when the president talked about how we have to be more committed to national security, one of the reasons we have the travel ban here, through that executive order, is to focus on national security,” Sanders said during Monday’s press breifing. “That was the point he was trying to make.”
Despite what critics thinks about Trump using Twitter, he clearly believes that it allows him to get “honest and unfiltered” messages out. Therefore, his surrogates will presumably continue to publicly defend the president.