Donald Trump attacked the media on Wednesday in a Truth Social post, criticizing recent coverage of a clip of him that seized on an interaction where he thanked Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and shook his hand during the president’s joint address to Congress earlier this week.
“Like most people, I don’t watch Fake News CNN or MSDNC, but I understand they are going ‘crazy’ asking what is it that I was thanking Justice Roberts for?” Trump wrote, using his pejorative nickname for MSNBC. “They never called my office to ask, of course, but if they had I would have told these sleazebag ‘journalists’ that I thanked him for SWEARING ME IN ON INAUGURATION DAY, AND DOING A REALLY GOOD JOB IN SO DOING! The Fake News never quits!”
The moment at issue was relatively brief.
As Trump mingled with the crowd of dignitaries in the House who gathered Tuesday to watch the address, the president shook Roberts’s hand and was recorded saying, “Thank you again. [I] won’t forget it.”
Some argued the exchange was emblematic of how the Supreme Court has enabled Trump in recent years.
“We can’t know precisely what the president meant, but Trump does have a lot to thank Roberts for,” Adam Serwer writes in The Atlantic.
Trump said he and Supreme Court justice were talking about inauguration during hot mic moment (POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
The Supreme Court delivered Trump multiple election-year victories, including a March 2024 decision blocking Colorado’s move to strike Donald Trump from its presidential election ballot for his role in January 6, and a July ruling finding that former presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official actions, effectively ending a federal case against the Republican.
Given the administration’s broad, hyper-speed attempts to cut federal spending and shutter agencies, which critics allege overstep executive authority, the high court may also be a rare roadblock against the Trump agenda, given that Republicans control both houses of Congress.
The day after Trump’s much-discussed handshake with Roberts, the Supreme Court ruled that the administration must pay out nearly $2 billion in foreign aid to groups that work with the U.S. Agency for International Development, despite the White House’s attempt to freeze funding and shutter the agency.
Trump has a long history of criticizing the media, and his frequent attacks on the “fake news” beginning in his 2016 campaign helped the term enter the popular lexicon. Over time, the criticism has taken on a more barbed, violent edge, with Trump calling mainstream news channels the “true enemy of the people.”
Some of this rhetoric has been strategic, Trump reportedly admitted.
“‘You know why I do it?’” 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl recalled Trump once telling her in 2016. “‘I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.’”
The Republican’s relationship with one news channel in particular, Fox News, has been a defining feature of his political life.
The network helped fuel Trump’s political rise, and the Republican has staffed both of his administrations with numerous figures from the network. The current White House includes former Fox anchors and commentators as director of national intelligence and the secretaries of defense and transit.
During his first term, Trump was reported to have watched Fox for hours on end, sometimes live-tweeting his thoughts about various segments on favorite shows like Fox and Friends.
The relationship grew more fraught by 2020, when Fox News angered MAGAworld by accurately calling the Arizona presidential election results as a win for Joe Biden, despite reported attempts from Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner to lobby network leaders to revoke the call.
Fox’s alignment with Trump proved problematic for the network in other ways, too, including having to pay $785 million to elections contractor Dominion Voting Systems to settle a defamation suit, stemming from repeated reporting agreeing with the Trump campaign’s false claims of a rigged 2020 election.
The relationship got so tense that in 2023, network star Sean Hannity reportedly tried to appeal to Trump directly to stop attacking Fox and its owners, the Murdoch family, after Trump accused the network of “collusion” to boost the political fortunes of his GOP primary rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
“Mr. President, I’m trying to help you out here with the Fox people here,” Hannity reportedly told Trump, according to Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power, a forthcoming book from Axios journalist Alex Isenstadt. “But you’re not making it easy for me by going after the Murdochs. You’re not helping me. You’re not helping yourself. If you can just lay off, we can start making some moves and getting back to normal.”
The attacks on the press have continued now that Trump is back in office, including blocking Associated Press reporters from covering official appearances because the wire service’s influential style handbook has not adopted the administration’s unilateral attempt to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
The administration, frustrated with the pace of deportations, has also cracked down on leakers speaking to the media about impending removal operations against migrants.
