Donald Trump continued his assault on the press in front of the nation’s top federal law enforcement officials on Friday while taking a victory lap against a justice system that failed to hold him to account.
In remarks at the Department of Justice, which presidents typically avoid to preserve the independence of the work of law enforcement agencies, Trump labelled news outlets with adversarial coverage of his administration “political arms of the Democratic party.”
CNN and MSNBC “literally write 97.6 percent bad about me” and are “political arms of the Democrat Party,” Trump said.
“In my opinion they’re really corrupt and they’re illegal. What they do is illegal,” he said.
He also listed off a list of what he called “fake news” outlets including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, baselessly alleging they are conspiring with Democratic officials to influence prosecutions and investigations against him.
“It’s totally illegal what they do,” he said.
He suggested that press coverage that criticized judges influenced their decisions in cases against him and should be “illegal.” Trump himself, however, continues to rage against judges that have blocked parts of his agenda, while his allies call for their impeachment and removal from the bench.
Newspapers “are really no different than a highly paid political operative,” Trump said.
“And it has to stop. It has to be illegal,” he said. “It’s influencing judges. It’s really changing law. And it just cannot be legal. I do not believe it is legal.”
The president spent his three presidential campaigns and first four years in office raging against a free press he calls “fake news” and the “enemy of the people” while waging a legal war against the media in courtrooms across the country.
He repeatedly threatened to revoke broadcast licenses for news networks over critical coverage or stories he didn’t like and then sued top networks for defamation. He is currently trying to force CBS to pay him $10 billion over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris he claims was edited to illegally influence the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.
Trump’s attorneys also made legal threats to The Daily Beast, The New York Times and Penguin Random House while Trump demanded that congressional Republicans block a bipartisan bill intended to safeguard confidential sources, what civil rights groups have called the most significant measure for press freedoms in modern history.
In office, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission’s chair Brendan Carr has launched probes into public broadcasting services NPR and PBS and revived complaints into CBS, ABC, and NBC – but has not touched any explicitly right-wing news outlets.
His allies, meanwhile, are asking the Supreme Court to toss long-standing, landmark precedent that has shielded the press from defamation lawsuits over their coverage of public officials. Trump has tried, and failed, to make the same argument in several lawsuits against news outlets.
Trump’s administration is also moving control of the press pool that follows the president’s daily travel and activities into the White House, which has also invited far-right media personalities into briefings.
The White House also has effectively barred the Associated Press from closely following White House events after the global news agency refused to adopt the name “Gulf of America” instead of the Gulf of Mexico, the name that most of the world continues to recognize.
While condemning what he characterized as the “weaponization” of a Justice Department that handled investigations into allegations of election interference and obstruction, Trump turned to the officials in front of him to suggest they must face the “scum” that is challenging him now.
He called his criminal defense attorneys Todd Blanche and Emil Bove — now top Justice Department officials — “warriors” for him in his criminal cases.
He then called a prominent attorney and legal analyst who has been critical of his agenda “vicious and violent.”
Lawyers who have opposed his agenda are “horrible people, they’re scum, and you have to know that,” he told them.
