During ABC News special report coverage following President Trump’s press conference on Thursday, anchor George Stephanopoulos seemed to be in a state of shock over the commander-in-chief’s hostility to the liberal media: “What a remarkable window into the state of mind of the President of the United States right there....lashed out at the press, made it very clear he thinks the press is dishonest....never seen anything like that.”

Special correspondent Matthew Dowd agreed: “No, that was the most amazing press conference by a president I have ever seen and I've been watching it since the mid-70s. And I don't mean amazing in great, I mean amazing in spectacular insight into Donald Trump and his state of mind today.” The political analyst noted how presidents usually “are empowered and get bigger” after they take office, but argued that Trump “looked smaller and actually more insecure in his position...”

Dowd then compared the President to a paranoid and delusional movie character: “...it was reminiscent of Captain Queeg in a Caine Mutiny and somebody saying, ‘I’m going to search for their strawberries.’ He's in full-on conflict with the intelligence community and he’s in full-on conflict with the media.”

IMDB describes the plot of the 1954 film that Dowd referenced: “When a U.S. Naval captain shows signs of mental instability that jeopardizes the ship, the first officer relieves him of command and faces court martial for mutiny.”

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White House correspondent Cecilia Vega chimed in:

I mean, just a couple of the words that I jotted down over the course of the last hour and a half, “bizarre,” “contentious,” if we’re looking – we’re getting insight into the mind of our president, that he is just obsessed with coverage. He's clearly watching television at all hours, talking about late-night programming on cable. He shouted down reporters, he told people to sit down. It seemed as if this is something he had been wanting to do, to get off of his chest for the last few weeks...

Later in coverage, Stephanopoulos wondered: “...it's clearly clear that the President likes having the press as a foil, we see that right there. It worked for him in the campaign, does it work as president?” Dowd replied: “...he walked in there with a hornet's nest of the press. What he did coming out of there was poke it even more. And so, I don’t think he calmed that media down...He actually stirred it up more. So there's going to be a hundred more stories that are going to come out of this.”

Here are excerpts of the February 16 special coverage: