Donald Trump may be flip-flopping on his war in the Middle East, but one thing hasn’t changed: he still can’t stomach bad news.
A PBS reporter said Wednesday morning that the 79-year-old president abruptly hung up on her after she brought up the backlash he’s received over his threat to wipe out a “whole civilization” and bomb Iranian bridges and power plants—remarks he backtracked on hours later.
Journalist Liz Landers wrote on X that she called Trump after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s press briefing Wednesday morning, where he referred to Trump, who threatened to murder an entire country’s civilians one day prior, as a “president of peace.”
“I tried to ask if he regretted that Truth Social post about wiping out an entire civilization and noted that there was a huge push back to that statement from Democrats,” Landers recounted. “Then he hung up.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
Prior to Trump’s Tuesday night announcement that he agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran in the war he started without congressional approval, his menacing Truth Social post threatening the murder of civilians sparked backlash—even from his own party, a worrying sign ahead of midterms already fraught with concern among Republicans.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” Trump wrote. “We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”
The infighting among Republicans went so far as to spark calls for the 25th Amendment to be invoked to remove Trump from office.
“25TH AMENDMENT!!!” former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on X. “Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness.”
Since Trump and Israel launched their war on Iran on Feb. 28, the president has reportedly enjoyed answering cold calls from reporters on his cellphone, “loosely chatting and has fun messing with them,” a White House official told Semafor last month.
The official, whose name was withheld, noted that reporters “ought to realize: Trump isn’t taking these calls that seriously.”
That remains true. Within a few days’ time, the president has fielded calls from ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl, Fox News fixtures Bret Baier, Jaqui Heinrich, and Laura Ingraham, NBC’s Kristin Welker, the New York Post, the Washingtonian—likely among others.
But it seems “messing with reporters” isn’t as fun for the president when they’re delivering bad news—as numerous polls reflecting bleeding support from key blocs have reportedly stirred anxiety amongst his most trusted advisers.
On the same night of Trump’s so-called ceasefire, Democratic and liberal candidates either won or performed massively better than expected in state and local elections across Wisconsin, Georgia, Missouri, and Oklahoma.
In Georgia, Democratic candidate Shawn Harris lost the special run-off against Republican Clay Fuller to replace friend-turned-foe Greene in what has long been one of Georgia’s reddest areas.
However, Harris trailed Fuller by a whopping 11.8 points—delivering the largest Democratic overperformance in a House special election since Trump’s return to office, running 25 points ahead of the 2024 presidential polls.
Landers, the PBS journalist, also pressed the president on Wednesday over Lebanon still being struck by Israeli forces hours after the U.S. reached its deal with Iran.
“I asked him, ‘and you’re okay with the Israelis continuing to hit them,’?” she recounted, to which he responded: “It’s part of the deal, everyone knows that. It’s a separate skirmish, okay? You gotta talk faster.”
