Before he was sworn in as president, Donald Trump confided there's a dark strategy behind his attacks on journalists

Lesley Stahl, the veteran CBS 60 Minutes correspondent, is freshly dishing on her huge scoop in 2016—landing the first post-election interview with then-President-elect Donald Trump after the 2016 election.

Before the interview took place, Stahl and her boss—without cameras in tow—met with Trump in his office at Trump Tower, where, Stahl says, he launched a rant attacking the press.

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“I said, ‘You know, that is getting tired. Why are you doing this?” Stahl recalled at a Deadline Club journalism awards dinner Monday night in New York City.

“And he said, ‘You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you,'” Stahl recalled.

Image zoom CBS via Getty; Johnny Louis/FilmMagic

On the stage with Stahl, Judy Woodruff, the anchor of PBS’s Newshour, looked at Stahl with concern.

“He said that,” Stahl said. “Put that in your head for a minute.”

Stahl’s remark about Trump’s attacks being contrived was made public the same day as The Boston Globe reported that some of the grammatical, punctuation and capitalization errors in Trump’s tweets are also contrived “to fortify the belief within his base that he has the common touch.”

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Trump’s attacks on the press since his off-camera conversation with Stahl have continued at a relentless pace, troubling historians and scholars who see his words as dangerous and a threat to the fabric of democracy. As the Associated Press reported earlier this year, elected officials around the country are now copying Trump’s strategy and liberally crying “‘fake news’ as a weapon against unflattering stories.”

Under the headline “‘Fake news’ smear takes hold among politicians at all levels,” the AP’s Ryan J. Foley wrote in March: “It’s become ubiquitous as a signal to a politician’s supporters to ignore legitimate reporting and hard questions, as a smear of the beleaguered and dwindling local press corps, and as a way for conservatives to push back against what they call biased stories.”

For veteran White House reporter Woodruff, her blood “boils” when she hears political leaders and others say journalists are enemies of the American people and their reporting is fake.

“It makes me very angry. I’ve been doing this for 50 years almost and the finest people I know are journalists who devote their lives to getting the facts and getting the story right,” she said.

Stahl’s favorite president to cover in her long, storied career? George H.W. Bush.