After promises to restrain Twitter use, Donald Trump tweets rant on New York Times
After promises last week to curb his sometimes controversial use of Twitter, President-elect Donald Trump went on another of his infamous tweetstorms early Sunday, targeting the New York Times for their “BAD coverage” of his presidential campaign.
Here are Trump’s critical tweets about the Times, in which he claims the newspaper had sent a letter to their subscribers apologizing for their election reporting:
Trump was likely referring to a letter to readers sent from the paper’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and their executive editor, Dean Baquet, on Friday. But the tweet from the president-elect mischaracterizes what Sulzberger and Baquet wrote in their message, which contained no apology and maintained that the Times covered the election “with agility and creativity.”
“We believe we reported on both candidates fairly during the presidential campaign,” the letter reads. “You can rely on The New York Times to bring the same fairness, the same level of scrutiny, the same independence to our coverage of the new president and his team.”
Here’s the full text of the letter, from a media reporter at the Times:
Later on Sunday, The Times’ communications team responded to Trump’s charge that the paper was “losing thousands of subscribers” in a tweet of their own.
Trump blasted the paper once more later in the day about their reporting on his stance of nuclear weapons:
Trump, however, is wrong about his past stance on more countries acquiring nuclear capabilities. At a televised town hall in March, Trump said this: “You have so many countries already -- China, Pakistan, you have so many countries, Russia -- you have so many countries right now that have them,” he said in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. “Now, wouldn’t you rather, in a certain sense, have Japan have nuclear weapons when North Korea has nuclear weapons?”
In an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” scheduled to air Sunday, Trump said he would be “very restrained” with his use of Twitter in the Oval Office. In the days leading up to the election, Trump’s team had deemed that social media account so damaging to his presidential chances that aides actually wrested control of his tweets from him.
Since that interview, taped Friday, Trump has teed off on protesters and the press on the social media platform. Minutes after his attack on the Times, Trump also paid compliments to another vocal critic of his campaign, former GOP nominee Mitt Romney:
