Trump Spends Labor Day Morning Attacking ‘LameStream Media’: ‘Beyond Fake, They Are Corrupt’

Colby HallSep 2nd, 2019, 8:40 am
 

Donald Trump

President Donald Trump spent Labor Day morning by sending out a series of tweets attacking what he calls the Fake News media.

While Category 5 Hurricane Dorian slowly makes its way to the South Atlantic coast of the United States, dangerously threatening coastal areas from Florida, north to the Carolinas, President Trump appears to have spent a large part of his holiday morning watching cable news and reading newspapers. Or at least that’s what his tweets seem to reveal.

He first attacked a report published Sunday night by The Washington Post, that claimed Trump aides privately, and anonymously, admit that it was a “lost summer” for the White House as President Trump got lost in a sea of controversial distractions that had little to do with his administration’s agenda.

Featuring a joint byline of Phillip Rucker an Ashley Parker, the piece takes an uncharitable view of how President Trump became something of his own worst enemy:

What followed was what some Trump advisers and allies characterize as a lost summer defined by self-inflicted controversies and squandered opportunities. Trump leveled racist attacks against four congresswomen of color dubbed “the Squad.” He derided the majority-black city of Baltimore as “rat and rodent infested.” His anti-immigrant rhetoric was echoed in a missive that authorities believe a mass shooting suspect posted. His visits to Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso after the gun massacres in those cities served to divide rather than heal.

Trump’s economy also began to falter, with the markets ping-ponging based on the president’s erratic behavior. His trade war with China grew more acrimonious. His whipsaw diplomacy at the Group of Seven summit left allies uncertain about American leadership. The president returned from his visit to France in a sour mood, frustrated by what he felt was unfairly negative news coverage of his trip.

The two months between Independence Day and Labor Day offered a fresh and vivid portrait of the president as seen by Trump’s critics — incompetent, indecisive, intolerant and ineffective.

President Trump did not care for this assessment and took particular exception with the claim that his attacks on “The Sauad” (the group of Democratic freshmen congresswomen that includes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar) were racist. Trump tweeted:

It is not clear what specifically led Trump to label the Squad as making “racist attacks against our Nation” but he has for months now seen a political opportunity in portraying the Democratic party as the “Party of the Squad!”

He then appeared to go after the entire institution of the free press shortly after, taking a page from former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin in calling out the “LameStream Media” who he sees as having gone “totally Crazy!” Trump tweeted:

After these rather predictable and almost not-newsworthy Twitter missives, the president returned to focusing on the dangers presented by Hurricane Dorian by retweeting the National Hurricane Center:

[Photo by Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images]

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Colby Hall - Founding Editor

Colby Hall is the Founding Editor of Mediaite.com. He is also a Peabody Award-winning television producer of non-fiction narrative programming as well as a terrific dancer and preparer of grilled meats.