CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta recently decried the United States under President Donald Trump as “vicious” and “nasty” and even claimed the country’s condition has caused him to angrily throw empty beer cans at his television.

“We have to ask ourselves, you know, it is relieving, it is cathartic to lash out at that guy on the TV screen,” Acosta told audience members at the Hill Center in Washington, D.C. at an event to promote his book — The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America — according to footage of the event obtained by the Daily Caller on Friday.

Acosta said:

I throw my beer cans at the TV screen too when they’re empty from time to time, but I think we also have to take stock of what we’re doing at home, what we’re doing in our communities. What’s happening in our daily lives that is contributing to this culture of just viciousness? We’ve become a vicious, nasty country.

Acosta, who appeared with longtime progressive radio host Bill Press for the event, then launched into a diatribe in which he claimed he rarely hears Americans discussing the need to make the country better for future generations.

Acosta said:

My concern is, is that we’re tearing each other apart. And this is the country I love, too — my dad as I said earlier came over to this country from Cuba, came over here in 1962, three weeks before the Cuban missile crisis. [They] moved to Northern Virginia, which is where I grew up. There was a Presbyterian church in Vienna, Virginia, that gave my dad and my grandmother coats and sweaters so they could stay warm in their first winter here in the D.C. area. They had never been cold before.

“Are we still that country anymore? Did John F. Kennedy call immigrants rapists and criminals back then? No,” the CNN journalist answered rhetorically in reference to then-candidate Donald Trump’s often misreported June 2015 quip in which he is accused of referring to Mexicans being rapists and criminals.

As a Breitbart News fact-check previously explained, President Trump was referring to illegal aliens coming over the U.S.-Mexico border who commit additional crimes, such as rape — not the entire Mexican population. As Breitbart Texas has documented in depth, human traffickers often “sexually assault or rape the females” traveling to the U.S., and the smugglers are known to “remove an article of clothing from the female they rape and they tie it tightly to a tree—a rape tree.”

Of course, Acosta is no stranger to making hyperbolic statements or virtue signaling. His frequent outbursts toward President Trump and members of his administration have earned him scorn and mockery from the White House and from some of his establishment media colleagues. In his book, the reporter wrote his abrasive demeanor towards President Trump and other administration officials “bothers some people,” and he admitted to being guilty of “showboating,” even “grandstanding.”

That behavior, especially a heated exchange with the president, infamously landed him a temporary suspension from the White House in November.