September 30, 2016 | No Comments
Donald Trump lashed out against the media Friday, continuing his overnight tweet storm by warning his followers against believing anonymously sourced stories about him and slamming newspapers that didn’t endorse him.
Trump’s media tweet blizzard started at 3:20 a.m. Friday, when the Manhattan billionaire warned: “Anytime you see a story about me or my campaign saying ‘sources said,’ DO NOT believe it. There are no sources, they are just made up lies!”
More than five hours later, at 8:50 a.m., Trump tweeted: “Remember, don’t believe ‘sources said’ by the VERY dishonest media. If they don’t name the sources, the sources don’t exist.”
He capped off the tweets at 10:21 a.m. with a message criticizing The Arizona Republic, Dallas Morning News and USA Today — newspapers that either endorsed Hillary Clinton or warned readers against supporting Trump.
“The people are really smart in cancelling subscriptions to the Dallas & Arizona papers & now USA Today will lose readers! The people get it!” he tweeted.
While Trump and his campaign have been regular critics of the media and its coverage of his candidacy, the GOP nominee’s camp has pushed back especially hard this week amid the widespread notion that he lost Monday night’s presidential debate to Hillary Clinton. Reports in the New York Times and elsewhere have suggested that Trump’s aides plan to push him to practice and rehearse more for the next presidential debate, while publicly his camp has said Trump prepared hard for Monday night’s debate.
Trump and his surrogates have also spent much of the week fighting back against Clinton’s attack against his long history of derogatory remarks towards women. Specifically, the Trump camp has worked to discredit Alicia Machado, the former Miss Universe winner who the GOP nominee called “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping,” references to her supposed weight gain and her Hispanic heritage, respectively.
“Using Alicia M in the debate as a paragon of virtue just shows that Crooked Hillary suffers from BAD JUDGEMENT! Hillary was set up by a con,” he wrote on Twitter very early Friday morning, asking in a subsequent post “Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M become a U.S. citizen so she could use her in the debate?”
Trump’s early-morning post echoed a talking point that some in his camp have used in recent days, that Machado was involved in a murder investigation in her native Venezuela in 1998 (she investigated for driving a getaway car but was never charged). Trump also accused her of starring in pornographic films, a claim that other media outlets have investigated and found to be false.