WASHINGTON — Whether by whim or design, President Donald Trump keeps adding fuel to his incendiary Twitter battle against the media. The press is an easy target for the Republican president, and one his supporters love to hate.
But the escalating conflict has diverted attention not just from Trump’s failures but his claimed successes as well.
Trump tweeted Monday that “at some point the Fake News will be forced to discuss our great jobs numbers, strong economy, success with ISIS, the border & so much else!”
It’s his own campaign against the press, though, that keeps changing the subject from that more substantive policy debate Trump claims to crave. And it has hindered Trump’s ability to push his agenda through Congress, where Republicans complain about the president’s lack of focus as his health care plan is struggling, work on next year’s budget is stuck and talk of a big infrastructure deal is fading.
Trump’s latest bash was a repurposed old video he tweeted on the weekend of him fake-pummeling a wrestling promoter whose face had been replaced by the CNN logo.
It was unprecedented, even for Trump: a sitting president, in effect promoting physical assault of a media stand-in. Media watchdogs quickly called him out.
Unrepentant, Trump argued over the weekend that his outsized Twitter presence was part of a calculated redefinition of the presidency.
“My use of social media is not Presidential — it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL,” he tweeted.
Trump spent the weekend at his private golf club in New Jersey. His activities were closely held. There was no telling how much of his anti-press drumbeat was a calculated strategy to divert attention from his policy struggles vs. a capricious reaction to criticism.
But Trump was clearly being egged on by his supporters, including his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., a frequent attack dog for his father.
The younger Trump on Monday contrasted the more accepting way the media have treated a New York production of “Julius Caesar,” in which a Trumpian Caesar dies in a bloody group stabbing, with the outcry over the wrestling clip.
“CNN & dems calling Trump assassination play ‘artistic expression’ but WWF joke meme is ‘a call for violence’? Hilarious reinforcement of FNN,” the younger Trump tweeted Monday, using an acronym for what the president has begun to refer to as the “Fake News Network.”
When a CNN reporter tweeted, “Isn’t pro wrestling fake?” Trump Jr. responded: “Yes, just like your coverage.”
Princeton University historian Julian Zelizer said that while presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard Nixon and George W. Bush have long distrusted and made derogatory statements about the press, Trump’s sustained and personal attacks are something entirely new.
