The fact that saying something over and over again doesn’t make it true has not stopped Donald Trump in the past and doesn’t seem poised to stop him now. He is deeply attached to the idea that members of the mainstream media conspire against him en masse, and he raised that notion yet again during a Thursday appearance at a GOP rally in Montana.
The rally was meant to boost candidates like Republican Matt Rosendale, who is running against the state’s incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator Jon Tester. Trump has had a grudge against Tester ever since he helped lead scrutiny of Trump’s failed choice to lead the Veterans Administration, Dr. Ronny Jackson.
As has transpired in other instances of Trump being meant to boost lower level Republican candidacies, the Thursday presidential Montana appearance allowed him to once again flaunt himself and his own ideas above anyone else. One of those ideas is that the mainstream media regularly — and knowingly — peddles “fake news.”
He told the crowd:
‘I see the way they write. They’re so damn dishonest. And I don’t mean all of them, because some of the finest people I know are journalists really. Hard to believe when I say that. I hate to say it, but I have to say it. But 75 percent of those people are downright dishonest. Downright dishonest. They’re fake. They’re fake… They make the sources up. They don’t exist in many cases. These are really bad people.’
That’s just not true. There are not “many cases” of someone working in the mainstream media making up a source. Trump has made that claim in the past — and he’s been proven wrong in the past, too.
In May, he claimed that The New York Times made up a story that a White House official had claimed it to be impossible to reinstate a then-cancelled meeting between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that had been set for — and eventually took place on — June 12.
The New York Times didn’t make anything up, however. The official in question was National Security Council official Matt Pottinger. The name was revealed by a reporter who had not been a part of the original briefing wherein Pottinger had made those remarks and was thus unbound by any sort of agreement for anonymity.
Despite Trump having just recently been proven wrong on the exact point that he tried to make while speaking Thursday to Republican rally goers in Montana, he seems as determined as ever to blast the media as a supposed “enemy of the American people,” a descriptor that he has used multiple times in the past.
The group of the “finest people” Trump knows in the media no doubt includes people like Fox’s Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is dating his son Donald Trump Jr., and former Fox News official Bill Shine, who has recently been taken on as a White House communications official.
Trump has a long documented love affair with Fox News, so him buttressing his antagonism of the media by saying he knows a small number of good people in it is really nothing new. As journalists continue to face threats like that of the gunman who recently attacked the newsroom of the Capital Gazette in Maryland, Trump continues on with the same old antagonistic rhetoric that he’s used in the past.
Watch his Thursday Montana appearance below.
Featured Image via Screenshot from the Video
