Trump Knocks The ‘Phony’ White House Correspondence Dinner: Isn’t This Rally ‘More Fun?’

Near the tail end of his rally in Washington, MI, President Donald Trump blasted another Washington event that was taking place Saturday evening: the White House Correspondence Dinner.

“By the way, by the way, by the way… is this better than that phony Washington White House Correspondence Dinner? Is this more fun?” Trump asked the rally goers. “I could be up there tonight smiling like I love where they’re hitting you shot after shot. These people, they hate your guts. Shot- and I’m supposed to-”

The president then displayed an overly-large grin to the crowd.

“And you know, you gotta smile, and if you don’t smile, they’ll say ‘Oh, he was terrible! He couldn’t take it,’” Trump continued. “And if you do smile, they’ll say, ‘What was he smiling about?’ You know, there’s no way.”

This marks President Trump’s second consecutive missed White House Correspondence Dinner.

[Mediaite]

Sarah Sanders whines about the media’s tone as she berates CNN’s Jim Acosta

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders clashed with CNN reporter Jim Acosta on Wednesday.

During a press briefing, Acosta asked about Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Veteran Affairs. “Yesterday, the president suggested that Ronny Jackson does not have the experience to run the Department of Veteran Affairs — is that a fair assessment,” he wondered.

But Sanders quickly accused Acosta of distorting the president’s words.

Acosta also asked Sanders about remarks earlier in the press briefing, in which she suggested that the Trump administration was a champion of the press.

“We support a free press but we also support a fair press,” Sanders said. “And I think that those things should go hand and hand.”

She added that the reporters at White House briefings often had a “tone” that was “completely unnecessary.”

[Raw Story]

Media

Trump Trashes Journos in Correspondents Dinner Email: ‘Bunch of Fake News Liberals Who Hate Me’

President Donald Trump is explaining his absence from the upcoming White House Correspondents’ Dinner with a fundraising email, and an announcement of a rally the same night.

Rather than being “stuck in a room with a bunch of fake news liberals who hate” him, Trump says he has a better idea. He plans to hold a rally in another kind of Washington–Michigan’s Washington Township–for what he calls his “favorite deplorables who love our movement and love America.”

The email invites “one patriot” plus a friend to donate to Trump’s 2020 campaign, which then enters them into a raffle to attend the event as VIP guests.

“While the fake news media will be celebrating themselves with the denizens of Washington society in the swamp that evening, President Trump will be in a completely different Washington, celebrating our national economic revival with patriotic Americans,” the Trump campaign’s chief  operating officer, Michael Glassner, said in a statement, according to CNN.

The Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday will be the second the president has skipped, and the second time he’s held a rally instead. In 2017, he held an event in Pennsylvania in place of attending the dinner, speaking before crowds as if to be campaigning as he did before the election.

[Mediaite]

‘Stupid question’: Trump snaps at reporter who asked about pardoning Michael Cohen

President Donald Trump on Tuesday angrily snapped at a reporter who asked him if he’d consider pardoning his own personal lawyer.

During a media session with French President Emmanuel Macron, Trump was asked by ABC News’ Jonathan Karl if he planned on pardoning attorney Michael Cohen, whose office and home were raided by federal officials earlier this month.

The president glared at Karl and simply replied, “Stupid question.”

Although Trump’s attorney has not yet been accused of a crime, legal experts say the raid on his office would not have been approved unless law enforcement officials had probably cause to believe crimes had been committed.

Because of this, there has been speculation that Trump’s recent pardon of former vice presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby was a signal to Cohen and others in his circle that he would pardon them if they refused to cooperate with investigators.

[Raw Story]

Media

Trump Swipes at ‘Pundits’ Talking About North Korea: They ‘Couldn’t Come Close to Making a Deal’

The President of the United States is once again going after TV pundits criticizing him on policy decisions.

President Trump directly called out Chuck Todd on this issue earlier today, tweeting, “Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd of Fake News NBC just stated that we have given up so much in our negotiations with North Korea, and they have given up nothing. Wow, we haven’t given up anything & they have agreed to denuclearization (so great for World), site closure, & no more testing!”

Now he’s going more generally after “pundits”:

[Mediaite]

Trump Mistakenly Claims North Korea Has Agreed to “Denuclearization”

President Donald Trump took yet another shot at the media on Sunday, this time aiming his fire toward “sleepy eyes” Chuck Todd from NBC. A day after he criticized the New York Times and the Washington Post, the president was mad Sunday morning after Todd said, according to Trump, “we have given up so much in our negotiations with North Korea, and they have given up nothing.” The truth, Trump went on to write on Twitter, was exactly the opposite. “We haven’t given up anything & they have agreed to denuclearization (so great for World), site closure, & no more testing!” Trump said.

Does Trump know something the rest of us don’t? Or is he just confused about what denuclearization means and what North Korea has said? On Friday, North Korea said it would suspend nuclear and ballistic missile tests before a planned summit with South Korea. But North Korean leader Kim Jong Un never actually pledged to get rid of the country’s existing nuclear weapons and missiles.

Analysts have struck a cautious tone over the promises precisely because North Korea has made similar promises in the past and they never amounted to much. “North Korea has a long history of raising the issue of denuclearization and has committed to freeze its nuclear weapons programs in the past. We all remember how those pledges and commitments went down over past decades,” Nam Sung-wook, a professor of North Korean Studies at Korea University in Seoul, told Reuters.

Trump’s tweet is also a reminder that North Korea’s Kim often means a very different thing when he refers to denuclearization than South Korea or the Western world in general. Whereas the United States and South Korea have long said denuclearization means dismantling North Korea’s nuclear program, North Korea’s Kim has talked about denuclearization of the entire Korean peninsula.

When Trump criticized Todd, he appears to have been referring to this segment:

With his response, Trump makes it clear he doesn’t think he has given up anything to North Korea seemingly without realizing that sitting down for talks in and of itself is a victory for Kim. With his seeming concessions, Kim will be heading to the summits with a recognition from global powers that North Korea is a nuclear nation, which is something the country has long wanted. As one analyst told Axios on Saturday, the issues North Korea says it is willing to discuss, “amounts to “all the trappings of a ‘responsible’ nuclear weapons state (which is what they ultimately wanted to be accepted as).”

In a second tweet Sunday, Trump made clear he knows the North Korean nuclear issue is a long way from being resolved, in a rare note of caution for the commander in chief. “We are a long way from conclusion on North Korea, maybe things will work out, and maybe they won’t—only time will tell,” Trump wrote on Twitter.

[Slate]

Trump Tees Off on Negative Media Coverage: ‘Should Be Getting Good Stories’

President Donald Trump capped off another chaotic week of news out of Washington on Friday by — you guessed it! — tweeting, this time gloating about his approval rating and making America great again while spewing alternative facts.

The president once again attacked the media on Friday for its critical reporting of his administration amid a looming investigation into his 2016 presidential campaign’s suspected collusion with Russia and Wikileaks to sway the election in his favor.

“Can you believe that despite 93% bad stories from the Fake News Media (should be getting good stories), today we had just about our highest Poll Numbers, including those on Election Day?” Trump wrote on Friday. “The American public is wise to the phony an dishonest press. Make America Great Again!”

The 93 percent stat is a reference to the findings of a Harvard study on coverage of the President from 2017.u

As for his approval ratings, the president is in fact currently polling just slightly above normal with a nearly 40% approval rating according to FiveThirtyEight. It’s not the highest numbers he’s seen during his presidency, however — not even according to his favorite right-leaning poll, Rasmussen Reports, which previously had him at 50 percent. That poll now has him at 49 percent, while most other polls have him somewhere between 38 to 42 percent approval.

Trump once again praised himself when the Rasmussen poll hit 50 percent earlier this week before dipping again just before the weekend, attacking his predecessor with the fun new nickname he seemed to create earlier this month: “Cheatin’ Obama.”

Clearly the president is getting the weekend fun started early at Mar-A-Lago.

[Mediaite]

Trump Responds to Sketch of Man Who Allegedly Threatened Stormy Daniels: ‘A Total Con Job!’

President Donald Trump replied to a Twitter troll on Wednesday morning who sent him a photo of the newly revealed sketch of the man who allegedly threatened porn star Stormy Daniels.

Stormy appeared with lawyer Michael Avenatti on The View on Tuesday, and revealed a composite sketch of a man she claims threatened her in Las Vegas in 2011.

According to Stormy, the threats came in response to a story she was working with Us Weekly on regarded her alleged affair with Trump in 2006.

“A guy walked up on me and said to me, ‘Leave Trump alone, forget the story,’” Stormy said on 60 Minutes. “And then he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, ‘That’s a beautiful little girl. It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.’ And then he was gone.”

Trump has now obviously weighed in on the sketch, which elicited wild speculation on the internet (it bears an uncanny resemblance to Tom Brady, Michael Avenatti with hair, Matt Damon’s character in Team America, and so on).

“A sketch years later about a nonexistent man,” Trump tweeted. “A total con job, playing the Fake News Media for Fools (but they know it)!”

Stormy and her lawyer believe the man was sent by Trump’s lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen, who was the subject of a sweeping FBI raid last week.

[Mediaite]

Trump touts Rasmussen poll: ‘51% Approval despite the Fake News Media’

President Trump touted a conservative-leaning poll of his job approval on Tuesday while slamming surveys from news organizations, such as The Washington Post and CNN, as inaccurate.

“Rasmussen just came out at 51% Approval despite the Fake News Media,” Trump tweeted. “They were one of the three most accurate on Election Day.”

Rasmussen Reports, a right-leaning polling firm, routinely pegs the president’s approval ratings higher than other pollsters. As of Tuesday, Trump’s approval rating sat at 49 percent, according to the firm, and 50 percent disapprove.

RealClearPolitics, which averages data from a number of pollsters, had Trump’s current figure at about 42 percent on Tuesday.

Trump has seen relatively low approval ratings throughout much of his first 15 months in office, but has repeatedly insisted that many surveys are inaccurate.

Trump has long questioned the accuracy of public opinion polls, especially during the 2016 presidential race, when many pollsters projected a win for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

[The Hill]

Trump denies NYT report on firing Mueller in angry morning tweet — but also threatens to do it

President Donald Trump denied a New York Times report but confirmed its premise in an angry morning tweet.

The president logged into Twitter on Thursday morning to refute a Tuesday night report that he sought to fire special counsel Robert Mueller in December.

“If I wanted to fire Robert Mueller in December, as reported by the Failing New York Times, I would have fired him,” the president tweeted. “Just more Fake News from a biased newspaper!”

Republicans have said firing Mueller could trigger serious consequences, but they have refused to pass any legislative measures to protect the special counsel.

[Raw Story]

1 27 28 29 30 31 34