"I thought after I won, the media would become much more stable and much more honest. They’ve gone crazy,” President Donald Trump said. | Susan Walsh/AP Trump 'surprised' by 'dishonesty in the media'

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he was “surprised” by what he perceived as the media’s continued antipathy towards him after last year’s election, characterizing CNN and NBC News “a joke” and “a total joke,” respectively.

“Actually, dishonesty in the media is one of the things that surprised me the most. I thought after I won, the media would become much more stable and much more honest. They’ve gone crazy,” Trump told radio host Chris Plante Tuesday. “CNN is a joke. NBC is a total joke. You watch what they report, it bears no relationship to what I’m doing. But the media is absolutely dishonest and frankly, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”


Trump has sparred regularly with the media, often pinning a “fake news” label to outlets whose coverage he does not like. The president has previously suggested he would seek to loosen libel laws, allowing him to sue outlets whose coverage he believes is inaccurate or unfair.

More recently, Trump has lashed out specifically at NBC News, who reported this month that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “moron” following a meeting last summer nearly resigned over frustrations with the president. Tillerson held a press conference hours after that report was published to deny that he had ever considered resignation. He did not directly deny calling the president a “moron,” although a State Department spokesman later did so on his behalf.

A subsequent NBC News story reported that Trump had sought a tenfold increase in the nation’s nuclear arsenal, a report that both Trump and Defense Secretary James Mattis said was untrue.

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“But The New York Times, The Washington Post, they write whatever they want to write. You know, they have an agenda. We’ll have to figure out what their agenda is, but they do have an agenda,” the president said Tuesday. “I think that’s one of the biggest surprises, is the level of dishonesty. Interestingly, after I won, I said ‘well now I’ll bet the media starts to shape up, and you know, it’s over, so now’ – and it actually has gotten worse than during the campaign.”

