One day after Kremlin says it’s sick of Trump-Russia stories, Donald Trump attacks U.S. media for it
Yesterday afternoon, Russia admitted that it was frustrated with the growing amount of reporting on the Trump-Russia scandal in the American media. And in what is unlikely to have been a coincidence, Donald Trump rolled out of bed this morning and promptly broke his prolonged streak of behaving on twitter by attacking the American media for precisely that same reporting.
Yesterday afternoon, John Aravosis from AMERICAblog shared the following: “CNN reporter in Moscow says Russia is “frustrated” with all the American talk of Trump complicity. And they ‘warned’ US media to stop it” (link). Russian media is largely controlled by the Kremlin, so this warning essentially came from Putin. It was unclear what weight this kind of warning was supposed to have carried, as American media doesn’t bow to pressure from the Kremlin. But it turns out someone else in America does in fact bow to that pressure.
This morning Donald Trump used a series of angry tweets to post the following rant: “It is my opinion that many of the leaks coming out of the White House are fabricated lies made up by the #FakeNews media. Whenever you see the words ‘sources say’ in the fake news media, and they don’t mention names it is very possible that those sources don’t exist but are made up by fake news writers. #FakeNews is the enemy!”
Donald Trump’s sudden return to angry Twitter ranting, after having largely shied away from it for more than a week, seemed to have been timed a little too well with yesterday’s complaint from Russia. Did Russia use backchannels to ask Trump to openly attack the American media for covering the Trump-Russia scandal? Or did Trump simply pick up on the reports of Russia’s frustration with the story, and decide to demonstrate his loyalty to the Kremlin by launching into his tweet-rant this morning? If you’re a regular reader, feel free to support Palmer Report
