[The wrestling video, which was also posted to the official @POTUS Twitter account, stirred criticism, disbelief and dumbfoundedness. Some journalists denounced its portrayal of violence as dangerous, saying it could incite attacks or threats against news media employees.]
By
Michael M. Grynbaum
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President Trump posted a
video on Twitter on Sunday that showed him running
toward a wrestling ring
to tackle a person with a CNN logo in place of his head.
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President Trump posted a short video to his
Twitter account on Sunday in which he is portrayed wrestling and punching a
figure whose head has been replaced by the logo for CNN.
The video, about 28 seconds long, appears to
be an edited clip from a years-old appearance by Mr. Trump in WrestleMania, an
annual professional wrestling event. The clip ends with an onscreen restyling
of the CNN logo as “FNN: Fraud News Network.”
Cartoonish in quality, the video is an
unorthodox way for a sitting president to express himself. But Mr. Trump has
ratcheted up his attacks on the news media in recent days — assailing CNN and
crudely insulting the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” — while defending his use
of social media as “modern day presidential.”
In a speech on Saturday at a faith rally in
Washington, Mr. Trump was met with cheers when he referred to CNN as “garbage
journalism” and said: “The fake media tried to stop us from going to the White
House. But I’m president, and they’re not.”
The wrestling video, which was also posted to
the official @POTUS Twitter account, stirred criticism, disbelief and
dumbfoundedness. Some journalists denounced its portrayal of violence as
dangerous, saying it could incite attacks or threats against news media
employees.
“I think it is unseemly that the president
would attack journalists for doing their jobs, and encourage such anger at the
media,” said Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The New York Times.
The administration did not respond to a
request for comment. Mr. Trump’s homeland security adviser, Thomas Bossert,
defended the video when he viewed it for the first time during a broadcast
interview with Martha Raddatz of ABC News. “No one would perceive that as a
threat,” Mr. Bossert said. “I hope they don’t.”
“He’s a genuine president expressing himself
genuinely,” Mr. Bossert added.
A version of Mr. Trump’s video appeared last
week on a Trump-dedicated page on the message board site Reddit, a popular
meeting ground for some of the president’s most fervent supporters. The CNN logo
is superimposed on what appears to be the head of Vince McMahon, a wrestling
magnate and a friend of Mr. Trump, who in his prepresidential years often
appeared as a guest on wrestling shows.
Mr. Trump’s fans on Reddit were exuberant
about what they viewed as validation from the country’s most powerful man. “I
love this,” wrote a user identified as American_Crusader. “You know he saw it,
chuckled, and knew he could control the media narrative for days by hitting the
‘post’ button. So he did.”
The president’s allies say that his attacks
on the news media are justified, arguing that the president is merely defending
himself from coverage that his supporters view as biased. Mr. Trump’s war of
words with CNN is especially popular with his voter base.
News media advocates, however, have raised
alarms about a recent spate of arrests and assaults on working journalists,
including a high-profile episode in which a Montana congressional candidate,
Greg Gianforte, assaulted a reporter for The Guardian, breaking his glasses.
(Mr. Gianforte, a Republican, went on to win a House seat the next day. He
later apologized to the reporter.)
Groups like the Committee to Protect
Journalists, which usually focuses on countries where reporters’ freedoms are
curtailed, say they are concerned that Mr. Trump’s campaign-trail rebukes of
news organizations are now being issued from the pulpit of the White House.
“Targeting individual journalists or media
outlets, on- or off-line, creates a chilling effect and fosters an environment
where further harassment, or even physical attack, is deemed acceptable,”
Courtney Radsch, the advocacy director for the Committee to Protect
Journalists, wrote in a statement on Sunday, adding that Mr. Trump’s comments
may embolden “autocratic leaders around the world.”
Mr. Trump, who is spending part of the
weekend at his Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., posted the wrestling
tweet just as prominent Republicans began appearing on the major Sunday news
programs. On CNN, Senator Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican and frequent Trump
critic, accused the president of “weaponizing distrust” toward the news media.
“There’s an important distinction to draw
between bad stories or crappy coverage, and the right that citizens have to
argue about that and complain about that,” Mr. Sasse said.
But Tom Price, the health and human services
secretary, bristled when asked on the NBC program “Meet the Press” about Mr.
Trump’s string of anti-media remarks.
“This is really remarkable,” Mr. Price said
to the moderator, Chuck Todd. “Your program — a program with the incredible
history of ‘Meet the Press’ — and that’s what you want to talk about?”
Some White House aides said privately on
Sunday that the president was being held to a double standard. They argued that
Mr. Trump’s video was akin to a recent exchange on MSNBC, in which the host,
Chris Matthews, was discussing Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and
jokingly praised the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini for ordering the
execution of his son-in-law.
Ari Fleischer, who was a press secretary to
President George W. Bush, wrote on Twitter that he found Mr. Trump’s video to
be “in poor taste.” But he added: “The reason POTUS does it is because the
press has made themselves so unpopular. It’s a fight POTUS actually wins w much
of the country.”
Mr. Trump regularly accuses CNN of bias, and
he taunted the network last week after it was forced to retract a story about
one of his close allies. On Saturday, hours before posting the wrestling video,
Mr. Trump tweeted to his 33 million followers, “I am thinking about changing
the name #FakeNews CNN to #FraudNewsCNN!”
On Sunday, CNN issued its response.
“It is a sad day when the president of the
United States encourages violence against reporters,” the network said in a
statement. “Instead of preparing for his overseas trip, his first meeting with
Vladimir Putin, dealing with North Korea and working on his health care bill,
he is involved in juvenile behavior far below the dignity of his office. We
will keep doing our jobs. He should start doing his.”
In keeping with the online nature of many of
Mr. Trump’s disputes, CNN also replied directly to the president on Twitter,
highlighting a quotation from a recent White House briefing by his deputy press
secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
“The president in no way form or fashion has
ever promoted or encouraged violence,” Ms. Sanders told reporters on Thursday.
“If anything, quite the contrary.”
