President Donald Trump early Saturday lashed out on Twitter at two reporters from The Washington Post who he said “shouldn’t even be allowed on the grounds of the White House.”
Trump called Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker “two nasty lightweight reporters” in response to their story published last weekend titled: “Trump’s lost summer: Aides claim victory, but others see incompetence and intolerance.”
The Post’s piece centered on what some White House aides and Trump allies believed were a series of opportunities that Trump had missed over the last couple of months.
Part of it read:
White House officials promote the summer of 2019 as one of historic achievement for Trump, offering up a list of more than two dozen accomplishments. But privately, many of the president’s advisers and outside allies bemoan what they consider to be a period of missed opportunity and self-sabotage.
The White House hit back via its official Twitter feed on Tuesday, with this video:
White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham and deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley have also published an essay ― titled “The Washington Post’s Lost Summer” ― in which they accused the newspaper of ignoring many of the administration’s accomplishments.
“The truth is, Trump racked up many well-documented victories that directly benefited the American people at home and abroad,” they wrote. “When the Post asked, the White House proudly provided it with a detailed list of the administration’s 26 most important successes of the summer. Of those 26 accomplishments, the Post chose to publish just four, which it buried under 11 paragraphs of editorialized critique.”
The Post denied the allegation, however.
“As subscribers are probably aware, The Post did not take the summer off,” its national correspondent Philip Bump wrote in a piece published Wednesday and then shared again Friday.
“In fact, we covered each of the major stories included in the video package. It’s just that, outside the White House, those individual accomplishments aren’t really a powerful counterweight to the self-inflicted wounds Trump’s presidency has suffered since the beginning of July,” he added. “Most of those ‘wins,’ in fact, are either executive orders making incremental changes, achievements that happened before the summer or announced changes that exist in limbo.”