President Trump decisively tweeted Friday that the news media is “the enemy of the American people.”
Actually, he wasn’t that decisive: He tweeted it, deleted it, changed it, and tweeted it again.
“The FAKE NEWS media (failing @Nytimes, @CNN, @NBCNews and many more) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people. SICK!,” Trump tweeted on Friday.
The tweet was quickly replaced with a slightly modified version that added ABC and CBS. The word “SICK!” was also omitted in the second post.
The White House did not respond to TheWrap’s request for comment asking about the changes.
The tweet came just one day after the president’s contentious 77-minute news conference, in which he slammed the media as “very fake news.”
The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2017
“The press has become so dishonest, that if we don’t talk about it we are doing a tremendous disservice to the American people, a tremendous disservice, we have to talk about it,” the President said before a on Thursday. “The level of dishonesty is out of control.”
Trump has been steadily building up his anti-media campaign since the election. As TheWrap previously reported, Trump’s team sent out a bizarre email survey on Thursday asking people how they feel about the media.
Among some of the questions: “On which issues does the mainstream media do the worst job of representing Republicans?” and “Do you believe that the mainstream media does not do their due diligence fact-checking before publishing stories on the Trump administration?”