Karoline Leavitt Rages at the Media For Accusing Trump of ‘Legitimizing’ Putin
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt raged at the media on Tuesday as she began her press briefing, accusing “clueless’ of unfairly attacking President Donald Trump for “legitimizing” Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
“One thing that has absolutely not changed is the media’s negative and downright false coverage of President Trump and his foreign policy accomplishments. From the beginning of this entire process, much of the left-wing media has been actively rooting against the President of the United States in the pursuit of peace,” fumed Leavitt, adding:
Initially, the media ridiculously claimed that President Trump was somehow beholden to Russia for even agreeing to have a face-to-face discussion with President Putin inside of the United States. The media said President Trump was making a grave mistake by, quote, ‘Legitimizing Putin.’ They were aghast that President Trump would treat another world leader like a world leader.
The media relentlessly attacked President Trump and claimed he suffered a, quote, ‘major defeat’ for not immediately emerging with a final agreement, even though he said heading into that meeting, this was a meeting to listen and to understand how to move the ball forward. All weekend following those historic U.S.-Russia bilateral talks, we listened to clueless pundits on television trying but failing to claim that the President had failed. The so-called experts in the foreign policy establishment, whose record is nothing but endless wars, trillions of wasted taxpayer dollars, and dead Americans, have the nerve to try and lecture President Trump, who has solved seven global conflicts in seven months, about peace.
This is the same president, by the way, who brokered the Abraham Accords in his first term on top of more than half a dozen other peace deals this year alone, as I just said. We also saw yesterday the president of Ukraine and all of the other major leaders of Europe fly across the Atlantic Ocean to meet President Trump at the White House because of the progress that was made and that—if you ask the media—failed meeting, but it was not.
It was highly productive and it was successful. This is why Americans’ trust in the mass media is at its lowest point in more than five decades. Diplomacy is a delicate process, and instead of reporting the facts about what is happening here at this White House and what is happening between this president and other leaders around the world, many outlets in this room continue to try to actively undermine the president and sabotage the efforts towards peace. That is why I felt the need to set the record straight.
Trump’s summit with Putin did indeed spark a wave of criticism, but both on the left and the right as Putin’s many critics were unhappy to see him receive such a warm welcome. Former Conservative British UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote in the Daily Mail that the summit “was just about the most vomit-inducing episode in all the tawdry history of international diplomacy.”
The New York Times headline, as Leavitt noted, following the summit was equally unflattering: “Trump Bows to Putin’s Approach on Ukraine: No Cease-Fire, Deadlines or Sanctions.”
Watch the clip above via Fox News.
