A resource for journalists and for shutting down your crazy uncle.
Ahead of his summit with Kim Jong Un in Vietnam, President Donald Trump touted the “AWESOME” potential for North Korea if they denuclearize.
“The potential is AWESOME, a great opportunity, like almost none other in history, for my friend Kim Jong Un,” the President tweeted.
He also swiped at Democrats for not being able to do “it” while Barack Obama was president:
President Donald Trump insisted investigators would find no evidence of collusion, even as special counsel Robert Mueller has reportedly neared completion of his Russia probe.
The White House reportedly expects Mueller to turn in his report any day now to newly confirmed attorney general William Barr, and the president tweeted out an all-caps denial of wrongdoing during the 2016 election involving Russian interference.
“Highly respected Senator Richard Burr, head of Senate Intelligence, said, after interviewing over 200 witnesses and studying over 2 million pages of documents, ‘WE HAVE FOUND NO COLLUSION BETWEEN THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN AND RUSSIA,’” Trump tweeted. “The Witch Hunt, so bad for our Country, must end!”
President Trump on Wednesday tweeted out a video showing construction vehicles hoisting segments of a wall on the New Mexico border.
“We have just built this powerful Wall in New Mexico. Completed on January 30, 2019 – 47 days ahead of schedule! Many miles more now under construction! #FinishTheWall,” he wrote in a post accompanying the video.
The video, which has been sped up, shows two backhoes, one digging a trench and another helping workers place the wall, which appears to be made of steel slats.
Trump declared a national emergency last Fridayso that he can shift funds from other federal agencies to build his wall.
Congress had approved $1.3 billion for the wall, but Trump had demanded $5.7 billion.
Using the declaration to divert funds, Trump said he could come up with $8 billion.
Congress hasn’t approved any funds for new construction of the wall, but it has allocated money to replace or strengthen existing barriers.
The video Trump tweeted was not from “RIGHT NOW” but from five months ago of the repair of pre-existing fencing for Santa Theresa Project Border Wall Replacement Project, a push to upgrade a 20-mile stretch of vehicle barriers to bollard-style fence.
President Trump on Wednesday labeled The New York Times “a true enemy of the people” one day after an extensive report detailing the ways in which he has sought to influence the investigations into his presidency and allies.
“The New York Times reporting is false,” Trump tweeted. “They are a true ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!”
The president’s tweet did not refute any specific reporting from the Times, but marked yet another escalation in his sustained attacks on his hometown paper and the media as a whole.
New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger issued a statement hours later condemning the president’s use of the term “enemy of the people” as “dangerous” and inaccurate.
“It is particularly reckless coming from someone whose office gives him broad powers to fight or imprison the nation’s enemies,” Sulzberger said. “As I have repeatedly told President Trump face to face, there are mounting signs that this incendiary rhetoric is encouraging threats and violence against journalists at home and abroad.”
Sulzberger, who has met with Trump on at least two separate occasions in the past year, noted that past presidents have complained about coverage of their administration, but “fiercely defended” the free press.
Trump’s latest diatribe against the Times came after the newspaper reported Tuesday that Trump asked then-acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker late last year to put U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman in charge of the investigation in New York’s Southern District into Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen.
Berman, an ally of Trump who donated to his 2016 campaign, had been recused from the investigation, and Whitaker did not act on Trump’s request.
Trump denied that he requested Berman be put in charge of the investigation when asked about it Tuesday afternoon.
“I don’t know who gave you that,” Trump said, calling the report “fake news.”
A Justice Department spokeswoman said in a statement that the White House has not asked Whitaker to interfere in investigations, pointing to his congressional testimony from earlier this month indicating as much.
Trump has a well-documented track record of attacking the press, and the Times in particular. He has called negative coverage of him and his administration “fake news” and referred to reporters and news outlets as the “enemy of the people.”
[The Hill]
President Donald Trump issued a tweet cheering on the defamation lawsuit a Kentucky high school student filed against The Washington Post for the paper’s coverage of his encounter with a Native American activist last month.
The lawsuit, according to the Post, claims the paper “targeted and bullied” 16-year-old Nicholas Sandmann“because it wanted to advance its well-known and easily documented, biased agenda against President Donald J. Trump.”
“Go get them Nick,” Trump tweeted to the MAGA hat-wearing student. “Fake News!”
The suit was filed by Sandmann’s parents, according to the Post, who are seeking $250 million in damages — the sum Jeff Bezos paid for the paper when he bought it in 2013.
[Mediate]
President Donald Trump closed Presidents Day weekend with a repeat performance of his late Sunday night into early Monday morning tweetstorm. For the second night in a row the President was up late Monday launching angry – and this time, juvenile – tweets, attacking his favorite targets: the Mueller investigation, former Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and, as usual, the media.
And accusing some, like McCabe, of “Treason!”
Trump was clearly watching Fox News’ Sean Hannity when he tweeted that attack, and clearly he liked the “lying & leaking” part because about 30 minutes later, this juvenile attack:
Less than nine hours later, Trump was back with the attacks, again, quoting Fox News:
And then, minutes later, the media:
And then, the Democrats. Trump has literally no idea how the U.S. court system works. He thinks California has the option of filing a lawsuit in, say, Maine. They don’t. The 9th Circuit has jurisdiction over California, but Trump doesn’t understand that, so he displays his ignorance time and time again. But he’s also wrong: it’s 16 states, not cities, led by California.
“As I predicted, 16 cities, led mostly by Open Border Democrats and the Radical Left, have filed a lawsuit in, of course, the 9th Circuit! California, the state that has wasted billions of dollars on their out of control Fast Train, with no hope of completion, seems in charge!”
All in all, 10 tweets in 10 hours, including, quite ironically – and an amazing self-own – this:
On Sunday, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh denied he had influence over President Donald Trump.
Calling it a false narrative spread in the media, Limbaugh said this to Fox’s Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday: “If these people in the media, Chris, really thought that I was telling Trump what to do and when, they’d be calling me, they’d be asking me about it, they’d want to get down to the dirty details.”
He added: “People don’t really believe what they’re saying about this…It’s just another effort to continue to try to diminish the president, diminish Trump, as somebody who doesn’t know what he’s doing, can’t do it without guidance from the so-called wacko right.”
Yet, hours later, Trump tweeted out this, quoting Limbaugh’s claim of a “silent coup” against the president:
[Mediaite]
Donald Trump‘s Sunday morning rage-tweet began with the suggestion of “retribution” against Saturday Night Live after the sketch show lampooned his “national emergency” press conference, in a pair of tweets that could serve as the script for next week’s show.
Trump slammed SNL and “many other shows,” called for “retribution,” and suggested that comedy shows be investigated for “collusion”:
Saturday night’s episode of SNL featured a cold-open that tore into the press conference at which Trump admitted his national emergence was not a national emergency while he was declaring a national emergency. There was also a biting segment during Weekend Update in which Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi rubbed Trump’s nose in the border compromise deal.
This is not the first time Trump has levelled accusations of “collusion” and suggested action against this particular television program. In December, Trump said that SNL and “unfair news coverage” should be “tested in courts.”
It is unclear what, exactly, Trump wants investigated, or what “retribution” he thinks is in order, but the First Amendment appears to protect comedy shows, even if they all make fun of the same guy.
[Mediaite]
After battling for weeks over funding for a border wall, overseeing the longest government shutdown in US history, and finally signing on to a deal to fund the government, President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency over a contrived crisis at the US-Mexico border.
On Friday, Trump invoked his power to declare a national emergency in a unilateral effort to make progress on the border wall Congress has thus far denied him. He initially demanded $5 billion for the construction of about 200 miles of barrier at the border, and Democrats in Congress have repeatedly refused to go anywhere near that figure. He got about $1.3 billion for border fencing in the deal he finally agreed to, a far cry from the desired amount. So he’s going with a national emergency to get more.
“We’re going to confront the national security crisis on our southern border, and we’re going to do it, one way or another, we have to do it,” he said in a speech at the White House Rose Garden on Friday.
Trump will try to cobble together funds from a number of areas and redirect them toward border wall construction. White House officials ahead of the announcement on Friday said he would redirect about $600 million from the Treasury Forfeiture Fund, an account funded by money seized by the US government; $2.5 billion from the Department of Defense’s counter-drug activities; and $3.6 billion from other military construction accounts. Trump won’t try to take anything from disaster relief.
“I didn’t need to do this,” Trump said on Friday. “But I’d rather do it much faster.”
That the president has finally decided to declare an emergency isn’t entirely surprising — he has been wavering on the idea for weeks.
So why declare a national emergency in addition to the spending deal? The short answer is that Trump doesn’t want to admit he lost. He’s already getting less for border fencing than was in the original spending bill he refused to sign in December — and caused a 35-day government shutdown over — so he’s looking to executive action instead.
There has been some debate about whether Trump can indeed declare an emergency at the border considering there isn’t really one, and the answer, at least initially, seems to be that he can.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on the Senate floor on Thursday that he would support the emergency declaration.
[Vox]
A man wearing a Make America Great Again hat barreled into the press pit at Trump’s rally in El Paso, Texas, Monday night and started shoving reporters, knocking over their equipment, and yelled “fuck the media,” minutes after the president had lashed out at journalists.
About half way through his lengthy, campaign-style speech, Trump ridiculed the media for “refusing to acknowledge” his administration’s successes, invoking loud boos and jeers from the crowd.
“I guess 93% of the stories are negative. No matter what we do, they figure out a way to make it that,” the president said, rattling off topics, such as North Korea, the economy, and manufacturing, which he feels that the media has unfairly skewed.
As Trump went on touting how his successes, a man in a red MAGA hat suddenly burst toward the group of reporters and photographers who were covering the speech, pushing them over, knocking their cameras and tripods, and repeatedly yelling, “fuck the media.”
“I was trying to tweet and watch the president and all of the sudden the riser started shaking and two tripods in front of me fell on top of one another and then a guy almost fell on me,” Yasmine El-Sabawi, a producer with TRT World, a Turkish news channel, told BuzzFeed News.
A photographer dropped his camera as she and other reporters quickly tried to figure out what was happening.
“Then it set in that someone was here who wasn’t supposed to be here and then you saw the red hat and it sinks in and you get it,” El-Sabawi said.
The attacker “went straight for the BBC camera man,” El-Sabawi added.
Several members of the BBC who were at the rally shared their footage and accounts on Twitter.
In one clip, a BBC camera steadily trained on Trump’s podium suddenly falters and blurs. Eleanor Montague, the outlet’s Washington editor, tweeted that it was because he was “attacked by a Trump supporter.”
“The crowd had been whipped into a frenzy against the media by Trump and other speakers all night,” she wrote.