The wrath of Don
PREZ RIPS ‘FAKE NEWS’ AND REAL LEAKS; ‘I’M NOT RANTING AND RAVING!’
PRESIDENT TRUMP on Thursday insisted his administration is a “fine-tuned machine,” praised his ousted national security adviser as “a fine man” and blasted the “dishonest” media for “fake news” that he acknowledged was based on real facts.
And that was in just the first 15 minutes of an extraordinary 77-minute news conference to announce his new pick to head the Labor Department — and that would go on to include a review of his accomplishments in office, his plans to reform Obamacare, pushback on his staffers’ ties to Russia, mockery of Hillary Clinton and Sen. Chuck Schumer, and an insistence that the country is “a mess.”
But his main target was the press, who he insisted was concocting reports of “chaos” in his young administration.
“The press — the public doesn’t believe you people anymore. Now, maybe I had something to do with that. I don’t know. But they don’t believe you,” Trump charged. “But you’ve got to be at least a little bit fair, and that’s why the public sees it. They see it. They see it’s not fair. You take a look at some of your shows and you see the bias and the hatred.
“Tomorrow, they will say: ‘Donald Trump rants and raves at the press,’ ” he added. “I’m not ranting and raving.”
He also pushed back against numerous reports of infighting in the White House.
“I see stories of chaos, chaos, yet it is the exact opposite,” he said. “This administration is running like a fine-tuned machine,” he insisted, and said he was making his case directly to the American people.
He stuck up for Flynn, who resigned earlier this week after news reports revealed he lied to Vice President Pence about discussing Obama-administration sanctions with his Russian counterpart before the inauguration.
“What he did wasn’t wrong,” Trump said of Flynn’s discussions with Russia. “I fired him because of what he said to Mike Pence. That simple.”
He went on to complain about leaks of a federal investigation into his campaign staffers’ ties with Russia. He acknowledged the information about the leaks was accurate, but said the reporting on them was not.
“The leaks are absolutely real,” he said. “The news is fake.”
Trump touted the results from a recent Rasmussen poll, saying “it has our approval rating at 55% and going up” as a symbol of how disconnected the media are to the people of the country.
However, 10 other polls have Trump’s approval rating falling far below 50 percent.
A poll released Thursday by the Pew Research Center only found Trump with 39 percent support.
He also called the Russia reporting a “ruse.”
“Russia is fake news put out by the media,” he said, later adding that none of his staffers had ties to the country — as far as he knew.
The event started with Trump announcing former U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta as his new labor secretary nominee. His previous pick, Andrew Puzder, withdrew his name from consideration on Wednesday.
Trump repeatedly claimed he “inherited a mess” from the prior administration but denied the existence of any problems, small or large, within his 28-day-old run as President.
“There has never been a President that has done so much in such a short period of time,” he said. “And we haven’t even started the big work yet.”
He even claimed that the rollout his controversial executive order to ban the entry into the U.S. of nationals from seven majorityMuslim countries — which caused chaos at airports across the world and had since been halted by federal courts — was “very smooth” and only faced problems because “we had a bad court.”
Trump further blasted the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which earlier this month unanimously upheld a suspension of the commander-inchief’s travel ban, as a “circuit in chaos.”
“Frankly, it’s in turmoil,” he said.
He said the court “has been overturned at a record number,” but other appeals courts actually have a higher reversal rate.
Trump vowed to sign a new executive action next week, “that will comprehensively protect our country.”
Trump did not reveal even the tiniest of details about the new supposed order, saying only that he himself would “not back down from defending my country.”
As far as other supposedly imminent policy, Trump said he would unveil an Obamacare repeal-and-replace package “early in March,” followed by a tax reform bill the same month.
Calling on reporters and then interrupting them to dispute their facts, Trump jumped from topic to topic, casually referencing “nuclear holocaust” and falsely claiming he’d enjoyed the largest electoral victory in decades.
When a reporter disputed his boast that he had the most electoral votes since Ronald Reagan, a miffed Trump uncharacteristically tempered himself, saying, “I was given that information” and that “we had a very, very big margin.”
“I was given that information, it was a very substantial victory,” he added before moving on gruffly to another question.
At another point, Trump suggested his rumored coziness with the Kremlin was all part of a vague strategy to avoid all-out nuclear war.
“If Russia and the United States actually got together and got along ... and don’t forget we’re a very powerful nuclear country and so are they, there’s no upside,” he said.
“Nuclear holocaust would be like no other,” he added after a pause. “If we have a good relationship with Russia, believe me, that’s a good thing.”
When asked by a Jewish reporter wearing a yarmulke about a recent rise in anti-Semitic incidents, Trump responded testily.
“One, I am the least antiSemitic person you’ve ever seen in your entire life,” he said.
“Two, racism. The least racist person,” he said.
“I hate the charge. I find it repulsive. I hate the very question.”
Asked by a black reporter if he had plans to meet with the Congressional Black Caucus, he asked the journalist if she wanted to set up the meeting for him.
He then accused one of the caucus’ most prominent members, Elijah Cummings, of ditching a planned get-together because of political pressure.
“I was all set to have the meeting. You know, we called him and called him. And he was all set. I spoke to him on the phone, very nice guy,” Trump said. “But he probably was told by Schumer or somebody like that, some other lightweight” to cancel.
Cummings denied the allegations. “I have no idea why President Trump would make up a story about me like he did today,” he said — while the caucus tweeted an invitation for Trump to meet with the group from January.
Keeping in campaign-style mode, Trump also mocked Hillary Clinton, and wrongly claimed she gave Russia “20% of the uranium in our country.” He also said her efforts to reset the U.S. relationship with Russia with a mock “reset” button in 2009 “made us look like a bunch of jerks.”