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If ever there were a “fake news” story, it’s this one.

At a roundtable meeting on Wednesday about U.S. immigration policies, including California’s so-called “sanctuary law,” President Trump referred to “bad people” being deported from the United States as “animals,” sparking intense backlash from the everything-Trump-says-and-does-is-racist media.

“We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — and we’re stopping a lot of them — but we’re taking people out of the country,” Trump said. “You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals. And we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before. And because of the weak laws, they come in fast, we get them, we release them, we get them again, we bring them out. It’s crazy.”

Writing for the Miami Herald, Fabiola Santiago said Trump’s comment was “a calibrated move to stoke anti-immigrant furor in a midterm election year” and an example of “hate speech” against “people seeking refuge.”

HuffPost writer Ellse Foley titled her hit piece, “Trump Refers To Immigrants As ‘Animals.’ Again.”

The New York Times wrote on Twitter, “Trump lashed out at undocumented immigrants during a White House meeting, calling those trying to breach the country’s borders ‘animals.’”

What all these media outlets, and the countless others making similar claims, left out of their accusations against the president is the context of the conversation. Just prior to Trump’s “animals” remark, a California sheriff concerned about her community said to Trump, “There could be an MS-13 member I know about — if they don’t reach a certain threshold, I cannot tell ICE about it.”

Any fair-minded person who doesn’t assume everything Trump says is a “dog whistle” meant to send neo-Nazis into a furor knows Trump was referring specifically to MS-13, a ruthless, murderous gang that has a tremendous amount of power in California and has been the subject of conversation for Trump on numerous occasions. Trump was clearly not referring to all “undocumented immigrants” as animals, as the Times’ tweet suggested.

The news media knows this, of course, but it would rather spend its time and resources trying to destroy the president than report what’s happening in the world or discuss real issues—like, you know, out-of-control gangs that rape and murder people.

The hatred for Donald Trump in some corners of the left has now surpassed its hatred of even vile, disgusting, and, dare I say, animalistic cartels and murderers. This is the sort of thing you expect from radical socialist-types, sure, but to see numerous mainstream outlets suggest Trump is reckless, stupid, and racist enough to call all people crossing the border “animals” proves media standards have reached an all-time low.

This isn’t to say Trump is a saint, or that he hasn’t made inappropriate (to say the least) comments in the past. Trump has made more than enough real gaffes in his decades-long career that the media doesn’t need to spend its time inventing non-existent ones. Why, then, is the media so interested in this “animal” comment? Because they’ve become so blinded by their hatred that many of them can no longer perform their jobs in a rational way. Their hatred has become an obsession, and as a result, literally everything Trump says has become for some of them an opportunity to create mayhem meant to derail the president’s agenda.

This sort of anger can only be fueled by one thing: fear. Many in the media desperately fear Donald Trump—not because they think he’s going to deport every Mexican-American or mass-murder people, but rather because he represents, albeit in a limited way, a part of America they hate more than anything else, an aspect of the nation they thought they killed when Supreme Leader Obama won his reelection in 2012.

Like sobbing children, the left-wing media can’t get over the fact Trump beat Hillary Clinton and is systematically dismantling President Obama’s policy legacy, and it’s driving some of them, quite literally, insane.