President Trump's relationship with the press hit a new low after the president unleashed a multi-tweet frenzy Sunday accusing the "unpatriotic" mainstream media of endangering American lives by generating negative coverage on the mechanics of the Trump administration.

"When the media -- driven insane by their Trump Derangement Syndrome -- reveals internal deliberations of our government, it truly puts the lives of many, not just journalists, at risk! Very unpatriotic!" Trump wrote on Twitter. "Freedom of the press also comes with a responsibility to report the news... accurately."

Trump's refusal to dispense with his "enemy of the people" epithet for reporters, used in greater frequency since a February 2017 tweet and his Conservative Political Action Conference speech a couple of days later, capped a week of high drama between the Washington press corps and a combative presidential protagonist.

New York Times publisher Arthur Gregg Sulzberger was quick to push back on Trump's description Sunday morning of a supposedly off-the-record July 20 meeting, which touched on the sensitive topic.

"Had a very good and interesting meeting at the White House with A.G. Sulzberger, Publisher of the New York Times," Trump wrote. "Spent much time talking about the vast amounts of Fake News being put out by the media & how that Fake News has morphed into phrase, 'Enemy of the People.' Sad!"

"I warned that it was putting lives at risk, that it was undermining the democratic ideals of our nation, and that it was eroding one of our country's greatest exports: a commitment to free speech and a free press," Sulzberger shot back, referring to the derogatory expression.

While Sulzberger said he did not discourage Trump from criticizing the Times "if he felt our coverage was unfair," he claimed to have "implored him to reconsider his broader attacks on journalism, which I believe are dangerous and harmful to our country."

The exchange, the latest in Trump's tumultuous interactions with members of the media since launching his bid for the White House in 2015, demonstrated that Trump did not heed Sulzberger's cautionary advice, earning sharp rebukes from the left and right of the political spectrum.

"Not sure there’s enough appreciation on the right for how moronic calling the press the 'enemy of the people' will look with a long lens," Tim Miller, the former communications director for Jeb Bush's 2016 presidential campaign, tweeted Sunday. "It may not seem so now but presidential rhetoric has a shelf life of longer than a twitter news cycle."

Trump's comments follow CNN White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins being disinvited from an open press event between Trump and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in the Rose Garden on Wednesday after shouting questions at the president about Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump’s former longtime lawyer Michael Cohen.

[Carl Bernstein: CNN is to the Trump era what the Washington Post was to Watergate]

In addition, Trump's Sunday tweet storm comes after statements he made Tuesday during a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention in Kansas City, Mo., about alleged disinformation disseminated by news outlets. "Stick with us. Don't believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news," he told the crowd. "What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening."

Despite widespread protests to Trump's rhetoric, his sentiment is gaining growing traction among his grassroots constituency.

In the CBS News 2018 Battleground Tracker, conducted with YouGov, the majority of 2,420 U.S. adults surveyed between July 26 and July 28 did not have much confidence in "the media." By way of comparison, about a third of respondents told researchers they did not trust the FBI, another favorite target of Trump's.

While it is unknown what lasting effect Trump's language will have on American public institutions in the future, efforts are being made now to shift the narrative.

Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron, at a benefit concert held Saturday for the families of five Capital Gazette employees slain in June by a gunman, called the victims "friends of the people."

"Not one of them deserved to be seen as an enemy because of the profession they choose or the place they worked,” he said, according to multiple reports. "To demean people like these, to demonize, to dehumanize them, is to debase yourself.”

[Also read: Trump pounds media as 'really bad people', ending post-shooting detente]