“I was in the headline of the Washington Post, my name associated with this crazy bomber," the president said. | Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images White House Trump detects media bias in fallout from bomb scare, synagogue shooting

Claiming the media holds him to a higher standard than his rivals, President Donald Trump doubled down Monday night on the type of rhetoric his critics have argued influenced the perpetrators of a mail bomb scare against CNN and high-profile Democrats last week and a mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue over the weekend.

"When I say the enemy of the people, I'm talking about the fake news, and you know it better than anybody,” he told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. “You have news out there that is so fake."


In his first network television interview since those stories of domestic terrorism came to dominate headlines side by side, the president said that journalists did not seek to implicate President Barack Obama in a racially motivated shooting at an African-American church in Charleston, S.C., that left nine parishioners dead in June 2015.

The president similarly claimed that the media did not tag Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to a shooting at a Republican congressional baseball practice in 2017 carried out by a former volunteer for Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) was critically wounded in that assault.

"Bernie Sanders had a fan who shot a very good friend of ours, Steve Scalise, and other people. He was a total maniac," Trump said in a prerecorded conversation with Ingraham. “Nobody puts his name in the headline — Bernie Sanders, in the headline, with the maniac who did the shooting.”

The president continued: “I was in the headline of The Washington Post, my name associated with this crazy bomber, ‘Trump bomber’ or something. But I was in the headline when they got him. They didn't say ‘Bomber found,’ they talked about Trump in the headline,“ referring to coverage of the arrest of Cesar Sayoc in Florida.

“Now, they didn't do that with Bernie Sanders when he had, they didn't do that with the Democrats when other people came out,” Trump said. “They didn't do that with President Obama, with the church, the horrible situation with the church. They didn't do that. They put my name in the headlines.”

Trump’s recollection of the Scalise shooting incident was flawed. CNN, for instance, headlined one article about James Hodgkinson: “Suspect in congressional shooting was Bernie Sanders supporter, strongly anti-Trump.” A POLITICO article was headlined: “Sanders condemns shooting by gunman who volunteered for his campaign.”

It’s also not clear how or why Trump thought Obama should have been associated with the mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015 by Dylann Roof, a white supremacist.

Saturday’s shooting at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue left 11 worshipers dead. Robert Bowers has been charged in the case; reports indicate he expressed hatred of Jewish people. Trump told Ingraham that based on statements attributed to Bowers, he didn’t think Bowers was a fan of his.

Bowers had repeatedly shared online anti-Semitic views, including a conspiracy theory that Jews and HIAS, a Jewish nonprofit organization offering aid to refugees, were helping transport migrants across Central America in the same caravan the president has increasingly attacked at campaign rallies in the final weeks before the midterm elections.

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Trump on Monday again stressed the national security threats he claims are posed by that caravan of several thousand migrants heading north through Mexico to the southern U.S. border.

"When you look at that caravan and you look, largely, very, you know, big percentage of men, young, strong, a lot of bad people, a lot of bad people in there. People that are in gangs," the president said. "We don't want them in this country."

Trump was criticized last week for tweeting that "criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in" to the caravan headed to America — a claim for which he has since acknowledged he had no proof.

The president also prolonged his feud with Democratic Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, calling the Tallahassee mayor a "stone-cold thief" and "a disaster" who would turn the Sunshine State into Venezuela. And he assailed the media for not praising him for his efforts to make a nuclear deal with North Korea.