Trump Calls the News Media the ‘Enemy of the People’

President Donald Trump, in an extraordinary rebuke of the nation’s press organizations, wrote on Twitter on Feb 17 that the nation’s news media “is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people.” Even by the standards of a president who routinely castigates journalists, President Trump’s tweet was a striking escalation in his attacks on the news media.

At 4:32 p.m., shortly after arriving at his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach (FL), President Trump took to Twitter to write: "The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @CNN, @NBCNews and many more) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people. SICK!" That message was swiftly deleted, but not before being seen by thousands of social media users. Sixteen minutes later, President Trump posted a revised version of the tweet. Restricted to 140 characters, the president removed the word “sick,” and added two other television networks to his list of offending news organizations, ABC and CBS.