President Donald Trump took aim at the “Fake News” again Friday and called journalists “sick degenerates” for suggesting that his special envoy Steve Witkoff waited eight to nine hours to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Several outlets reported that Witkoff left Moscow on Friday without a ceasefire deal after Putin rejected Trump’s proposal. Trump has said that he’s working to get Russia and Ukraine to end the war, and that he and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky outlined a proposal earlier this week. Although Trump claimed that the discussions were “productive,” Putin voiced doubts on Thursday, leaving Ukrainians to worry that the Kremlin wasn’t going to agree to lasting peace.
Those reporting on the story looked at flight tracking data and Russian reports to discover that Putin met with Witkoff late Thursday, even though the envoy arrived hours before. Photos prove that Witkoff’s motorcade arrived around midday, but he did not end up fully delivering the proposal until that night.
Trump, however, took to Truth Social to call the reporting dishonest; he said there was “no wait whatsoever.” The president conceded that there were in fact meetings with “other Representatives of Russia” that “took some time,” but that they were very “productive.”
“From there, things went quickly and efficiently, and all signs seem to be, hopefully, very good!” he wrote. “In conclusion, there was no nine-hour wait, or any wait at all!”
He added that journalists “made up” the story “to try and DEMEAN, because they are sick degenerates, that have to start reporting the News correctly.”
The accusation follows Trump’s controversial move to determine which journalists will make up the White House press pool and to ban legacy outlets like the Associated Press (AP) for refusing to comply with his orders. The AP was specifically barred after journalists continued to call the southern body of water the “Gulf of Mexico” instead of “Gulf of America,” as Trump demanded. New media outlets are invited instead in order to spread “President Trump’s message,” according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Trump has launched a significant assault on news outlets since he first took office in 2016. His criticisms have left many journalists and free press organizations concerned about how his policies may violate the Constitution. He expanded his attacks Friday by insinuating that some press actions should be deemed “illegal.”
“I believe that CNN and MS-DNC, who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat [sic] party and in my opinion, they’re really corrupt and they’re illegal, what do they do is illegal,” Trump said during a speech at the Department of Justice.
He added that CNN and MSNBC are corrupt and no different than a “highly paid political operative.”
The Trump administration also put government-employed journalists at Voice of America (VoA) on administrative leave after eliminating the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) on Thursday.
