Donald Trump delivered a swift kick on Wednesday morning to The New York Times, blasting the newspaper for reporting that he is ill-informed and disengaged as Republicans in the Senate tiptoe toward a health care compromise.

'Some of the Fake News Media likes to say that I am not totally engaged in healthcare. Wrong, I know the subject well & want victory for U.S.,' the president tweeted.

'The failing @nytimes writes false story after false story about me. They don't even call to verify the facts of a story. A Fake News Joke!'

Donald Trump hosted all 52 Republican U.S. senators at the White House on Tuesday afternoon, a meeting reportedly requested by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell so the president could demonstrate his understanding of a crucial health care bill

After The New York Times painted the president as ill-informed and detached, he launched into a Twitter tirade

The front-page Times story that grabbed Trump's attention described an aloof and clueless president with little knowledge about the details of how one of his central campaign pledges might be fulfilled.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the paper reported, had asked the president to schedule Tuesday's White House meeting with all 52 Republican senators specifically to project the opposite image.

McConnell ignored reporters' questions outside the White House greeted McConnell with questions about the depth of Trump's understanding of the bill repealing and replacing parts of the Obamacare law.

That, the Times hinted, was evidence of the president's cluelessness.

Its reporters also noted the existence of a single Republican senator who they said 'left the meeting at the White House with a sense that the president did not have a grasp of some basic elements of the Senate plan — and seemed especially confused when a moderate Republican complained that opponents of the bill would cast it as a massive tax break for the wealthy.'

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (left) and Majority Whip John Cornyn (right) spoke to reporters at the White House bur McConnell wouldn't answer a question about whether Trump understood medical insurance legislation

Trump's all-hands meeting in the White House's East Room left one senator fearful that he didn't grasp the nuts and bolts of the bill

New York Times journalists leaped to defend their newspaper against Trump's slings and arrows on Wednesday shortly after he launched his tweeted tirade.

Glenn Thrush, the Times scribe whom White House insiders most love to hate, reacted to Trump's claim that he and his colleagues 'don't even call to verify the facts of a story.'

'Call your office, sir,' Thrush tweeted. '@nytimes spoke to many, many, many members of your staff yesterday - & ran everything by your team.'

The two Times reporters who wrote Wednesday's front-page skewering of Trump pushed back at the notion that they had done anything wrong

The Times, one of the president's least-liked news organs, is fond of painting Trump as a know-nothing

His co-author Jonathan Martin chuckled off the president's outrage du jour and said it was predictable – and actually predicted.

'One leading Trumper admitted this was his fear about our story: that Trump would go ballistic in am when he saw [it],' Martin tweeted.

Trump raised eyebrows on Tuesday when he began the all-hands meeting with senators by softening the ground for what could ultimately be a crashing legislative failure.

'This will be great if we get it done,' he said of the health care push. 'And if we don't get it done it's going to be something that we're not going to like.

'And that's OK. And I understand that very well,' he told the senators.