Since taking office, U.S. President Donald Trump has cast himself as a champion of the American worker. In reality, though, his actions have at repeated instances dragged American workers down, serving more as a front for him to enact his personal agenda than anything.
That’s what happened this weekend with a tweet from the president. He seized on a letter hundreds of employees of The Washington Post recently sent to the paper’s owner Jeff Bezos demanding better working conditions and benefits and wrote:
‘Washington Post employees want to go on strike because Bezos isn’t paying them enough. I think a really long strike would be a great idea. Employees would get more money and we would get rid of Fake News for an extended period of time! Is
@WaPo a registered lobbyist?’
Even when it comes to an issue as seemingly straightforward as the above, Trump fails to grasp the actual reality of the situation.
The aforementioned letter demanding better working conditions from WaPo owner Jeff Bezos does not include the threat of a strike. Even at that point, Trump is reaching.
Once you get to the end of his tweet, where he suggests that the paper carries out lobbying activities as an arm of Bezos’ main company Amazon, he has fully disconnected himself from the truth. He doesn’t explicitly connect the alleged lobbying to Amazon here but he has in the past. Either way, the assertion that The Washington Post is a lobbying arm of anything is false; that’s all there is to it. That’s not the way it works. The paper operates independently of Amazon.
He’s not going to be able to get out of scrutiny from the free press that easily. His latest lashing out at WaPo comes after the paper reported that his adviser Roger Stone was offered dirt on Hillary Clinton from a Russian interest in exchange for $2 million. Every single revelation like this, no matter what came of the interactions or not, is ironic because of the sheer volume of times that Trump — and others in his circle — claimed his team to not even have any hints of connections to Russia.
Those claims were lies, which begs the question of why the president and his allies felt compelled to hide the truth. The answer to that question is the focus of the currently very much alive Russia investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Meanwhile, as we wait for that answer, the president continues to dismiss the free press in ways that you’d like to hope would have no place in the United States, where free press is a foundation of sorts to the society. We know Trump at this point, though; it wasn’t that long ago at all at this point that he heaped rounds and rounds of praise on the murderous dictatorial leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un. It all fits into a familiar pattern of Trump’s behavior while he’s been in office — he’s there to serve his personal agenda, and no matter who you are, he doesn’t seem to care what you think about that.
Check out Twitter’s response to him below.
Featured Image via Win McNamee/Getty Images
