Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer asked press secretary Karoline Leavitt Monday why President Donald Trump is “rewarding” outlets who repeatedly “express disdain” for him.
Trump raised eyebrows when he announced on Thursday that would be sitting down with The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, along with staff writers Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker, to see if it is “possible for The Atlantic to be ‘truthful.’” During a new media briefing, Leavitt said that Trump is “unafraid” to “take [the media] to task” by telling them the truth.
“The second thing is just a question that I get a lot and that I have to address to you. You’ve done a phenomenal job opening up the briefing room, bringing in new voices. The president’s commitment during the campaign to do long form podcasts was, I think, extremely helpful to this new media environment that we live in,” Spicer began. “But, a lot of conservatives ask me ‘why does [Trump] sit down with people like Terry Moran of ABC or Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic?’ What is the rationale behind that? Rewarding people who have very vehemently expressed disdain for him personally?”
“Because the president is unafraid and he is inspired by competition and he likes to talk to people face to face,” Leavitt responded. “It’s one of his best attributes and qualities. We live in an incredibly divisive country, unfortunately that has really been the result and consequence, frankly, of the fake news and the hoaxes and lies they have driven at this president for the better part of the last decade now. But the fact that we still have a president who has been a victim of these hoaxes, these lies, these smears by so many of these legacy media outlets and reporters and yet he’s still willing to sit down with them, look them in the eye, look them face to face and take them to task and share the truth with them and his perspective is what I think the American people deserve in a president it’s certainly a stark contrast to what we had in the previous administration.”
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After Parker, an MSNBC analyst, and Scherer first asked for an interview, Trump referred to Parker as a “Radical Left Lunatic” and stated that Scherer “had never written a fair story” about him. They then called the president in late March, where he told them that if he liked the first story they wrote, he would consider talking to them again, according to The Atlantic.
On MSNBC, Parker had been widely critical of Trump’s COVID-19 response during his first term, telling “Deadline Whitehouse” in November 2020 that he had not been doing his job by allegedly “ignoring” the pandemic. Scherer has published scathing headlines about Trump, including one piece where he suggested that Trump views himself as a king.
Goldberg had accidentally been added to a Signal chat where government officials discussed the Pentagon’s plans to attack the Houthis in Yemen. He then published the messages from the chat, which included the timing and the weaponry intended to be used in the attack, in The Atlantic.
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In 2020, Goldberg angered Trump after he published a piece claiming that he referred to Americans who died for the U.S. as “suckers and losers.”
The president is also planning to sit down with ABC News’ Terry Moran in the first broadcast interview of his second term to mark his 100 days in office. ABC News has notably shown anti-Trump bias, including during the Sept. 11 presidential debate, when the moderators fact-checked Trump far more often than former Vice President Kamala Harris, despite her having made several false claims.
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
