Watch words, publisher tells Trump
BRIDGEWATER, N.J. — President Donald Trump escalated his feud with the news media Sunday, accusing journalists of being unpatriotic and endangering lives.
His comments came after the publisher of The New York Times disclosed that he had warned Trump recently that his rhetoric about the media could lead to violence.
“When the media - driven insane by their Trump Derangement Syndrome - reveals internal deliberations of our government, it truly puts the lives of many, not just journalists, at risk! Very unpatriotic!” Trump tweeted from his golf club in Bedminster, N.J.
The president went on to say that “I will not allow our great country to be sold out by anti-Trump haters in the dying newspaper industry,” singling out The New York Times and The Washington Post for writing “bad stories even on very positive achievements.”
Trump seems to have been responding to the statement issued earlier Sunday by New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, who publicly detailed his July 20 meeting at the White House with the president.
Trump first characterized their discussion as “a very good and interesting meeting,” writing in a Sunday morning tweet that he and Sulzberger “spent much time talking about the vast amounts of Fake News being put out by the media & how that Fake News has morphed into phrase, ‘Enemy of the People.’”
Sulzberger then took issue with Trump’s interpretation of their meeting. The president had invited the publisher, and he was accompanied to the White House by James Bennet, the newspaper’s editorial page editor, according to a New York Times spokesman.
Sulzberger said in his statement that he agreed to the meeting with Trump “to raise concerns about the president’s deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric.”
“I told the president directly that I thought that his language was not just divisive but increasingly dangerous,” Sulzberger said. “I told him that although the phrase ‘fake news’ is untrue and harmful, I am far more concerned about his labeling journalists ‘the enemy of the people.’ I warned that this inflammatory language is contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence.”
He continued, “I repeatedly stressed that this is particularly true abroad, where the president’s rhetoric is being used by some regimes to justify sweeping crackdowns on journalists. I warned that it was putting lives at risk, that it was undermining the democratic ideals of our nation, and that it was eroding one of our country’s greatest exports: a commitment to free speech and a free press.”