NYT Editor Dean Baquet: Trump’s ‘Personal Attacks’ on Our Journalists Put ‘Their Lives at Risk’

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New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet warned President Donald Trump on Monday that his “personal attacks” against journalists at the company, including White House Correspondent Maggie Haberman, “puts their lives at risk.”

“I think his personal attacks on reporters, including Maggie, are pretty awful and pretty unpresidential,” said Baquet in an interview with the Guardian. “I think personal attacks on journalists, when he calls them names, I think he puts their lives at risk.”

“I think that when he actually calls reporters names, says they’re un-American, says they’re enemies of the people… that phrase has a deep history,” he elaborated. “I think when he says that, it is an appalling attack on the press.”

In 2018, President Trump called out Haberman by name on Twitter, calling her “a third rate reporter” and “a Crooked H flunkie.”

After the Guardian asked Baquet, the New York Times’ first black executive editor, whether he believes President Trump is “racist,” Baquet responded, “I don’t know. I think Donald Trump says racially divisive things. I think that’s a little bit different. I’m not in his head enough to know whether he says them because he wants to stoke his base.”

“I will tell you the most powerful writing I’ve ever seen about race, as a black man who grew up in the south, did not use the word ‘racist’. It quoted people saying what they had to say, and described the world they live in. And you made your own judgment. And the judgment was pretty clear,” he explained. “And I think that’s the way to write about Donald Trump and everybody else. It’s just to let them talk.”