It’s telling as to the way Donald Trump approaches the U.S. presidency that over and over he finds it the best usage of his time to attack the nation’s mainstream media. Late Wednesday, he did it again, tearing into CNN and journalist Carl Bernstein for one of their previously anonymous sources coming out and walking back what they’d told the network.
Trump tweeted:
‘CNN is being torn apart from within based on their being caught in a major lie and refusing to admit the mistake. Sloppy Carl Bernstein, a man who lives in the past and thinks like a degenerate fool, making up story after story, is being laughed at all over the country! Fake News’
He’s so upset at the network having reported last month that he knew about the 2016 meeting his son and others had with Kremlin lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya beforehand after all. The Trump team has claimed time and time again that Donald Trump was not personally involved in that meeting, which happened after Donald Jr. exclaimed via email that he loved the idea of dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government. Although they’ve claimed that nothing substantive came of the meeting, Trump Jr. had been promised that Veselnitskaya would bring such dirt.
Trump most certainly got involved in the situation after the meeting took place, working on the initial misleading statement that the Trump team put out when the meeting was publicly reported on. The Trump team has admitted as much — what they’ve not claimed, though, is that he had any advance knowledge of the meeting.
It turns out that CNN reported last month that he did have such knowledge based in part on the testimony of Lanny Davis, who’s currently working as a lawyer for former Trump attorney Michael Cohen. CNN’s initial report added a claim that Cohen was willing to tell Special Counsel for the Russia investigation Robert Mueller that Trump had known of the meeting ahead of time.
After having denied being an anonymous source for the story to Anderson Cooper, Davis admitted to Buzzfeed that he couldn’t back up what he’d previously anonymously claimed to CNN and a couple other outlets.
Nowhere in that is CNN getting “torn apart,” and Carl Bernstein didn’t make anything up. They trusted someone and got burned, and that’s on Davis if it’s on anyone, not the network. Trump’s tweet is a striking over-dramatization of the situation. Donald Trump has been documented to have lied thousands and thousands of times since taking office, and yet, he’s still lambasting CNN, which is standing by its original story for now because of their claim of multiple sources besides Davis.
Trump’s late Wednesday tweet isn’t the first over the top claim he’s made in connection to the CNN story controversy.
Early Wednesday, he tweeted:
‘The fact is that many anonymous sources don’t even exist. They are fiction made up by the Fake News reporters. Look at the lie that Fake CNN is now in. They got caught red handed! Enemy of the People!’
Lanny Davis isn’t made up. Again here, Trump’s making a run-in reporters have had with the realities of shifting human accounts of situations into something much more. He’s disconnected from reality — and remains the president of the United States while off in that fairy tale.
Check out Twitter’s response below.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
