Morning Joe went after President Donald Trump for attacking the press as “fake news” during a press conference in Warsaw with Polish President Andrzej Duda.

Responding to a question about his tweet of a video showing him body-slamming a CNN logo, Trump said that the network has “been fake news for a long time,” and has “been covering me in a very dishonest way,” noting that is “despite the fact that I made them a fortune with The Apprentice.”

MSNBC political analyst Mark Halperin said on Morning Joe that Trump’s media comments are not inconsistent with everything he has said in the past, but “the timing of it, on foreign soil, before a summit in a region of the world where the question of press freedom is still a really important one — no other president in our lifetime, probably, would ever say such a thing.”

“Is there any prep for these news conferences from his team?” host Mika Brzezinski asked. “What is McMaster, or Mattis, or any of the folks in there thinking when they’re watching this? Are they psyched?”

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said that Trump delegitimizing the media in eastern Europe is “manna from heaven for the likes of the Polish president, this is good for the Erdogan’s of the world, the Xi’s of the world, the Putin’s of the world.”

“If the country that’s most associated with democracy in the world delegitimizes the press,” Haass continued, “it gives these guys license to essentially do what America does.”

“And this is just wrong, and it weakens the fabric of these countries,” he concluded.

Joe Scarborough added that the attacks on the press also damage Trump himself, noting polls that indicate Americans — outside of the president’s base — don’t approve of his viciously adversarial stance towards the media.

[image via screengrab]

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