In the face of an array of continued developments at home and abroad, President Donald Trump is continuing to press on with his agenda. He doesn’t seem to be interested in concerning himself much with the death this past weekend of U.S. Senator John McCain, who’d served in public office for decades.
Monday at the White House, ABC’s Jonathan Karl tried repeatedly to get the president’s thoughts on the late Senator, but to no avail.
Karl apparently brought McCain up for the first time at the conclusion of a phone conversation between Trump and outgoing Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto. The two countries announced a new plan for moving forward in the face of Trump’s opposition to the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement on Monday.
In a video of that moment, Trump finishes speaking about the deal and members of the press began shouting questions, as they often do in such circumstances. In the video, someone can clearly be heard asking about McCain, but the president simply sat with his arms crossed as his aides can be heard shouting at the media to leave.
Watch below.
Trump has expressed discontent with journalists shouting questions at him in the past, having been reported to have privately mulled over punishing certain specific journalists for their questions for some time. Not too long ago, those private deliberations culminated in public action when the White House banned CNN’s Kaitlan Collins from an event because they didn’t like questions she’d asked the president earlier in the day.
Concurrent to that move, President Trump has, of course, long maintained disrespect for the free press, denouncing “fake news” as the “enemy of the people.” He likes to insist that he has complete respect for the press — but to him, most of the mainstream media is “fake news” and therefore a public menace.
There’s more at play in this situation than just the same old Trump-ian disregard for the freedom of the press, though.
Before McCain’s death, he and the president sparred repeatedly on a number of topics. The late Senator frequently criticized Trump’s foreign policy involving Russia, and he also infamously helped kill the GOP’s efforts to completely repeal the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as ObamaCare.
After McCain’s death, Trump has kept up the antagonism. He’s reported to have refused to release a prepared White House statement praising the late Senator as a hero, opting instead to post a brief message to Twitter that offered support for McCain’s family and conspicuously avoided mentioning the Senator.
That’s the modus operandi that Trump has stuck to for some time now. When speaking about a defense bill that was literally named after McCain, the president avoided mentioning him, and more recently, the president declined to say anything at all about the Senator until after he died following the announcement that he’d stopped treatment for his cancer.
Apparently, he’s at least in part persisting with that method of addressing the situation.
Karl posted Monday afternoon on Twitter:
‘Standing about six feet from the President in the Oval Office, I once again asked the President about John McCain. Any thoughts on McCain? Anything at all about John McCain? Was McCain a hero? Nothing at all about McCain? He stared ahead and said nothing.’
Standing about six feet from the President in the Oval Office, I once again asked the President about John McCain. Any thoughts on McCain? Anything at all about John McCain? Was McCain a hero? Nothing at all about McCain? He stared ahead and said nothing. pic.twitter.com/2TsPYohp9K
— Jonathan Karl (@jonkarl) August 27, 2018
If only he’d say nothing about a whole host of other topics instead.
Featured Image via Screenshot from the Video
