Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani suggested that the media was biased against the new president. | Getty Giuliani: Media doesn't like Trump and is against him

The media simply does not like President Donald Trump, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said Monday morning, and he would be much more comfortable if they simply admitted it.

Shown a clip of counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway’s confrontational appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” over the weekend, Giuliani suggested that the anchor of that show, Chuck Todd, was biased against the new administration. His terse back-and-forth with Conway over the weekend, Giuliani said, is only the most recent example.


“I’d feel a lot better if Chuck and the others would just admit they don't like Trump, they’re against Trump and they're going to view facts in the light most unfavorable to him,” Giuliani said on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends” Monday morning. “Look, I was on that show during the campaign under difficult circumstances any number of times, including all of the others. And my God, the venom is enormous. They just don't like him. And they're looking for things to pick on. You know, the size of the crowd.”

The size of Trump’s inaugural crowd quickly became a point of contention over the weekend, with the president’s promise of an “unbelievable, perhaps record-setting turnout” ultimately unfulfilled. Side-by-side aerial photographs comparing Trump’s inauguration to that of former President Barack Obama in 2009 show the latter to have been significantly more crowded.

Perhaps worsening the blow was the fact that hundreds of thousands of protesters flooded downtown Washington on the day after Trump’s inauguration, demonstrating their opposition to Trump’s presidency on its first full day.

Neither Giuliani nor his Fox News interviewers made mention of the fact that the weekend dust-up between the White House and the press was ignited by a Saturday evening press conference in which press secretary Sean Spicer delivered five demonstrably false statements during a brief statement admonishing reporters. Defending Spicer during her Sunday morning appearance on NBC, Conway characterized the press secretary’s falsehoods as “alternative facts.”

Monday morning on Fox News, Giuliani was also critical of a Friday evening report from the presidential press pool, which erroneously said that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office during the transition between administrations. Spicer posted a photo of the bust in the Oval Office to his Twitter account, prompting an apology and a correction from the reporter.

Spicer subsequently wrote “apology accepted” in a post to Twitter, including a link to the reporter’s mea culpa. But at Saturday’s press conference – where he did not take any reporter questions – Spicer used the incident surrounding the bust as proof that the media had engaged in “deliberately false reporting.”

“He saw the Churchill bust back where it was which is where the Martin Luther King bust used to be. And he didn't bother looking around the room to see, ‘well, do they still have Martin Luther King?" Giuliani said, referencing a bust of Winston Churchill that Obama had removed from the Oval Office that Trump had brought back. “He just assumed… that's what leads to these charges of racism and it's all based on falsehoods. I don't know if they are going to get over it. I don't know if they're going to.”

Giuliani also said he that he will travel Monday evening to Israel on business for his law firm, Greenberg Traurig. While there, the former New York mayor said he will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, something he said he does every time he visits Israel. Giuliani said Netanyahu has been a friend of his for 25 years.

Trump has promised a return to warmer relations between the U.S. and Israel after those ties chilled somewhat during the Obama administration. The president spoke to Netanyahu on the phone on Sunday and invited the Israeli prime minister for a visit next month.

Asked if he would be bringing to Netanyahu a message from Trump, Giuliani played coy.

“If I do, it’ll be from him. But I can give the general message, which is ‘I like you very much and we're very good friends,’” Giuliani said. “They were friends even before. This is not a new relationship, but now obviously it’s a much more important one.”