“The FAKE MSM is working so hard trying to get me not to use Social Media," President Donald Trump tweets. | Getty Defiant Trump claims media trying to push him off Twitter

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he uses social media to present his “honest an unfiltered message,” a tactic that he said the “fake” mainstream media would like him to stop.

The remark, made via Twitter, came one day after counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway criticized the press for having “this obsession with covering everything he says on Twitter and very little of what he does as president.”


“The FAKE MSM is working so hard trying to get me not to use Social Media. They hate that I can get the honest and unfiltered message out,” the president wrote on Twitter Tuesday morning. “Sorry folks, but if I would have relied on the Fake News of CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, washpost or nytimes, I would have had ZERO chance winning WH.”

Trump has been especially active on Twitter in recent days, launching multi-post flurries that have gotten him into hot water. Over the weekend, amid a series of posts about a terrorist attack in London, Trump misquoted the city’s mayor in a post suggesting that he had downplayed the seriousness of the attacks. That post, and others since, have launched criticism that Trump sought to score political points off of a deadly terrorist attack.

Stirring up Twitter controversy is nothing new for Trump, who has at times used the platform to feud with political opponents, former pageant winners and the Gold Star families of fallen soldiers. But Monday’s effort by Conway to direct attention away from the president’s tweets seemed a relatively new tact for an administration that has long pointed to social media as the purest distillation of the commander-in-chief’s thinking, free from media spin.

Speaking to NBC's "Today" show on Monday, Conway said reporters should pay attention to what the president does, not the missives he pecks out 140 characters at a time.

“For every time you said Russia, imagine if you said ISIS. Every time you say Twitter, imagine if you said terrorist,” she said.