N.Y. Times publisher urges Trump to stop ‘dangerous’ rhetoric
BRIDGEWATER, N.J. — President Donald Trump escalated his feud with the news media on Sunday, accusing journalists of being unpatriotic and endangering lives after the publisher of The New York Times disclosed that he had warned Trump recently that his inflammatory rhetoric about the media could lead to violence.
Trump fired off a Twitter tirade Sunday afternoon from his New Jersey golf estate.
“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 wrote.
The president went on to say, “I will not allow our great country to be sold out by anti-Trump haters in the dying newspaper industry.”
Trump seems to have been responding to the lengthy statement issued earlier Sunday by 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 the 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 at the White House by James Bennet, the Times’ editorial page editor, according to a Times spokeswoman. The spokeswoman said that White House aides asked that the meeting remain “off the record,” in keeping with past practice for such meetings, but that the president put it “on the record” with his Sunday tweet.
Sulzberger said in his statement, based on his and Bennet’s notes, 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 la- beling 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.”
The publisher went on to say, “I made clear repeatedly that I was not asking for him to soften his attacks on The Times if he felt our coverage was unfair. Instead, I implored him to reconsider his broader attacks on journalism, which I believe are dangerous and harmful to our country.”