Strategist uses interview with New York Times to bash media, while president conducts freewheeling interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Donald Trump sat down for an interview on Thursday with Fox News, a network he has consistently praised, as his chief strategist used an interview with the New York Times to lash out at the mainstream American media, which he said was “the opposition party” to the current administration.

“I want you to quote this,” chief strategist Steve Bannon told the Times. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”

President Trump has long enjoyed a friendly relationship with Fox, earning favorable coverage throughout the campaign and in the early days of his presidency. Cornered during a presidential debate over his support for the Iraq war, for example, he implored the public to “call Sean Hannity” – his interviewer on Thursday – who he said would defend his opposition to it.

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On Wednesday, Trump complimented the conservative network for being “number one” in ratings while denouncing a competitor, CNN, as “FAKE NEWS”.

On Thursday morning, he described the whistleblower Chelsea Manning in a tweet as an “ungrateful traitor”, 14 minutes after Fox had broadcast the same words.

Speaking to Hannity, Trump said Islamic State fighters were “sneaky, dirty rats”.

“They’re sneaky, dirty rats and they blow people up in a shopping center and they blow people up in a church,” Trump said.

“These are bad people. When you’re fighting Germany and they had their uniforms, and Japan and they had their uniforms and they had their flags on the plane, and the whole thing. We are fighting sneaky rats right now that are sick and demented. And we’re going to win.”

The interview with Hannity ran the gamut of Trump’s preoccupations on the campaign trail and in office, including his belief in the efficacy of torture including waterboarding against those suspected of terrorist offenses and his support for “totally extreme” vetting of people seeking to enter the US from certain countries.

Immigration measures are reported to be at the heart of executive orders due to be signed on Friday or Saturday, having been postponed on Thursday after Trump fell behind his planned schedule.

Trump also gave Hannity a tour of the Oval Office, during which he offered one of many boasts: “Look at my desk, papers. You don’t see presidents with papers on that desk.”

Concluding the interview, Trump returned to his obsession with TV ratings, saying: “The ratings tonight are going to be through the roof.”

Bannon, formerly chairman of the far-right Breitbart News website, eviscerated legacy media organizations in his interview with the Times.



The media should be “embarrassed and humiliated” by its coverage of the election, he said, claiming that a number of political reporters were “outright activists of the Clinton campaign” though without naming any names.

“That’s why you have no power,” Bannon said. “You were humiliated.”

Many in the media wrongly predicted Hillary Clinton would win the election. Forecasters at the Times gave her an 85% chance of winning on election day.

Trump enjoys antagonizing the media, a routine that became habit on the campaign trail. Several reporters have also noticed that Trump has a tendency to react to Fox News segments, even on occasion parroting their language.

On Tuesday, seemingly out of nowhere, Trump used Twitter to say he would send “the feds” into Chicago if the city failed to combat an increase in violence. It soon became clear the tweet had followed an 8pm segment on Fox’s O’Reilly Factor – about an increase in violence in Chicago.

In his first public remarks after his inauguration last week, Trump used a speech at CIA headquarters to kindle a feud with the press over the size of the crowd. In a statement riddled with falsehoods the president’s spokesman, Sean Spicer, then delivered a scathing indictment of coverage of the inauguration.

“That was the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period,” Spicer said, a remark which the fact-checking website PolitiFact deemed to be “pants on fire” false.

The next day, Kellyanne Conway, a top aide to Trump, defended Spicer’s remarks, saying the White House’s false claims were “alternative facts”. Her words drew comparisons to “newspeak”, the language of a dictatorial regime featured in George Orwell’s dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four, causing sales of the book to spike.