President Donald Trump continued his tradition of antagonizing U.S. allies via Twitter this Saturday morning, ranting about Canada’s supposed negative behavior against the United States and adding a note about the supposed failings of the national news media.
First, he posted that message accusing the media of wrongdoing, writing:
‘“I think today what has happened is that news reporting has become part of the adversary system.” Alan Dershowitz It has become tainted and corrupt! DJT’
Trump has certainly gone after the news media in the past, paining journalists as the “enemy of the people.” Faced with backlash, the president has mostly doubled down, although he has at times sought to emphasize a qualifier that he thinks makes his remarks perfectly acceptable.
According to the president, only the “fake news” is the enemy of the people and not the news as a whole. (Imagine the depravity required to assert that the news is the enemy of the people.) Pressed on the subject, he’s said he thinks some 80 percent of the national media is fake news. Thus, he claims, his comments are okay! He’s not going after the media as a whole, just the components of it spreading legitimately fake news — right?
Wrong. His claim that his dismissal of vast swaths of media as the enemy of the people is irrelevant because he didn’t attack every member of the media was a flimsy at best defense anyway. Now though, he’s shown his true colors, yet again. He contradicted his own past assertions about there being some pockets of good left in the news media and dismissed news reporting as a whole as tainted and corrupt.
He prefers sticking to that modus operandi above actually dealing with the negative behavior the media reports on.
He added yet another jab at Canada after that familiar attack on the press.
He tweeted:
‘I love Canada, but they’ve taken advantage of our Country for many years!’
His tweet comes as trade negotiations between the U.S. and Canada continue. Trump can’t just let the negotiators do their job — he feels compelled to meddle. On Friday, it surfaced that he’d revealed to Bloomberg that he had no intention of making any concessions to Canada at all, which threw yet another Trump-ian wrench in the process. (He eventually confirmed those remarks on Twitter.)
The U.S.-Canada negotiations center on the future of the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. The U.S. and Mexico have come to an agreement regarding the future of that deal — one of Trump’s favorite economic targets — but an agreement with Canada has been less forthcoming.
Meanwhile, it’s not even as though there’s some kind of dramatic economic situation defining the U.S.-Canada economic relationship outside of Trump’s purview. According to U.S. numbers, the United States runs a trade surplus with Canada, exporting more than it imports. Canada, on the other hand, estimates that they run a trade surplus with the U.S., and although strictly speaking, both things can’t be true, the size of the purported deficit with Canada isn’t even as large as confirmed U.S. trade deficits with other countries like Mexico and China.
Trump just prefers to stick to antagonism and lying. He added some attacks against the Justice Department along these lines on Saturday morning.
Some of Twitter’s response is below.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
