Chris Wallace Criticizes Media for Falling Into Trump’s ‘Trap’: He ‘Suckered Them Into Becoming Antagonists On The Field’

Chris Wallace is calling out members of the media who became “antagonists on the field” against former President Donald Trump.

Wallace was a guest on the Thursday edition of The Axe Files alongside host David Axelrod— where the conversation largely centered on Wallace’s career. Inevitably, though, the topic of the 45th president and his relationship with the media was broached.

Axelrod asked Wallace to weigh in on how Trump’s time in office shaped the landscape of journalism and media.

“That’s had implications for journalism because he had a very calculated plan to color the media as partisan players,” Axelrod said. “And so anytime you or anyone else, reports facts that he finds inconvenient, he fits it into that paradigm… it seems like that’s played havoc in some ways with the news media and how it covers politics.”

Wallace referenced an infamous Trump tweet which he believes set the tone for the former president’s frosty dealings with the fourth estate.

“I think was in February of 2017, so it was really only a month after he was in office, that he sent out the first tweet that said, ‘ABC, NBC, the Times, the Post are not just my enemy, they’re the enemy of the state.’ Which is Stalin-esque language and really chilling. And you know, again, this is a guy who had just won the election who had tens of millions of supporters and still does,” Wallace replied.

Wallace said this kind of rhetoric not only damaged the audience’s trust of the profession, but also impacted the tactics of some of his peers.

“So, you know, if he said, ‘They’re not my enemy, they’re your enemy. They’re the enemy of America.’ That has a big impact in terms of our acceptance and credibility. The other, which to me is more interesting is what it did to the media and what I think it did is it pushed some people, some of our colleagues over the line that I think people pushed back in a very unfortunate way,” Wallace said.

“And you know, he in effect suckered them into becoming antagonists on the field when what we should have been doing. And I tried to do, is, you know, not play into that, you know, stay in our position,” He added.

“We’re not for Trump. We’re not against Trump. We’re just gonna, you know, play it straight and cover the news. But I think that some people fell into a kind of a trap he set in becoming, antagonistic oppositional, and to a certain degree, I think kind of fulfilled that tweet that he sent,” he explained.

Listen above via The Axe Files.

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