WILKES-BARRE, Pa. — Thundering that the media is the “fake, fake disgusting news,” President Donald Trump unleashed a torrent of grievances Thursday at a Pennsylvania campaign rally in which he cast journalists as his true political opponent.
Trump barnstormed in a state that he swiped from the Democrats in 2016 and that is home to a Senate seat he is trying to place in the Republicans’ column this fall. But the race between GOP U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta and two-term incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey took a back seat to Trump’s invectives against the media, which came amid a backdrop of antagonism to journalists from the White House and hostility from the thousands packed into a loud, overheated Wilkes-Barre arena.
“What ever happened to the free press? What ever happened to honest reporting?” Trump asked, pointing to the media in the back of the room. “They don’t report it. They only make up stories.”
Time and time again, Trump denounced the press for underselling his accomplishments and doubting his political rise.
He tore into the media for diminishing what he accomplished at his Singapore summit with North Korea leader Kim Jong Un. He complained about the tough questioning he received in Helsinki when he met with Russia’s Vladimir Putin last month. And he began his rally speech with a 10-minute remembrance of his 2016 election night victory, bemoaning that Pennsylvania wasn’t the state to clinch the White House for him only because “the fake news refused to call it.”
“They were suffering that night, they were suffering,” Trump said of the election-night pundits. He then promised that the Keystone State would deliver his margin of victory “next time.”
“Only negative stories from the fakers back there,” the president declared.
With each denunciation, the crowd jeered and screamed at the press in the holding pen.
The inflammatory performance came hours after White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders refused to distance herself from Trump’s previous assertions that the media is the “enemy” of the American people. Pressed during a White House briefing on the issue, Sanders said Trump “has made his position known.”
