In announcing his 2020 presidential campaign in Orlando last night, President Trump delivered Make America Great Again 2.0. Now, he says, voters must “Keep America Great” by giving him another four-year term.
Yet Trump also returned to the issues that helped him defeat Hillary Clinton, such as trade and immigration, the latter now a major crisis that the president vowed to resolve with mass deportations.
And The Donald hit another favorite topic that sends those who hate him the most, the leftist legacy media, into a fuming rage: fake news. He raised the topic multiple times. The crowd responded with its own full-throated denunciation of CNN.
Fakes, Fakers, and Fakery
Trump hit the fake news media seven times during the 78-minute speech, about once every 11 minutes, just enough to remind the crowd that Trump’s enemies aren’t just on Capitol Hill but in the newsroom of every major media outlet.
Trump opened his attack by predicting what they would report if just a few seats in the arena were empty: “I said, you know, if we have about three or four empty seats, the fake news will say, Headlines: ‘He didn’t fill up the arena.’”
Explaining that “the American Dream is back, it’s bigger and better, and stronger than ever before,” Trump said that 2016 “was a defining moment in American history.”
“Ask them right there,” he said of the reporters there. “By the way, that is a lot of fake news back there, that’s a lot. You know what I say, the amount of press we have tonight reminds me of the Academy Awards before it went political and their ratings went down the tubes.”
Trump also hit the media for its role in pushing the bogus “Russia collusion” story:
Nobody’s done what we have done in two and a half years. We went through the greatest witch hunt in political history. The only collusion was committed by the Democrats, the fake news media and their operatives and the people who funded the phony dossier, crooked Hillary Clinton and the DNC. It was all an illegal attempt to overturn the results of the election and spy on our campaign, which is what they did and subvert our democracy.
And Clinton’s operation to destroy Trump with the trumped-up dossier wasn’t the only hoax, he said. The other was Barack Hussein Obama’s, which the media didn’t care much about:
We call it The Russian hoax. Remember, President Obama’s famous line caught on the open mic, secretly telling the Russian president to quote, “Inform Vladimir that after my election I’ll have more flexibility.” Okay. Remember that? Remember that? Lot of people remember that, I remembered it. I saw it happen, I didn’t like it. They don’t bring it up. The fake news will never bring it up.
Trump denounced the “career politicians who presided over decades of flat wages” and said that if his claim that the United States had shuttered 60,000 factories since China joined the World Trade Organization were untrue, the media would have pounced. “And you know how I know it’s true?” he asked. Because “the fake news would have headlines: Trump used a phony number. They’ll have headlines.”
CNN Bails
That aside, tough as the media pretend to be, one fake news outlet couldn’t stand the heat and cut away from the coverage.
After Trump noted how many reporters were in the room, the crowd began chanting “CNN sucks,” and the network cut away.
Explained CNN’s John Berman: “All right. We’ve been watching the president kick off his reelection bid. He’s been on stage for about six minutes. Within two minutes he did talk about the economy, but within four minutes it was attacks on the media.”
CNN, apparently, was upset that Trump still doesn’t care for the media that has been trying to destroy him since he announced his candidacy in 2016.
“He was talking about a bright rosy future,” Berman said, “but then quickly reverted to some of the same themes he’s been talking about since he began running four years ago today.”
Trump crowds are notoriously hostile to CNN, not least because the network’s White House reporter, Jim Acosta, is notoriously hostile to and biased against the president.
Acosta once pronounced himself “worried” at a Trump rally because he learned that neither he nor his anti-Trump network are very popular with Trump supporters.
Photo: AP Images
