Asked at an Axios
event at the Newseum in Washington if she believes "the media is the enemy
of the people," Ivanka Trump, a White House senior adviser, replied,
"No, I do not."
"I've
certainly received my fair share of reporting on me personally that I know not
to be fully accurate, so I have some sensitivity around why people have
concerns and gripe, especially when they're sort of targeted," she
continued. "But no, I do not feel that the media is the enemy of the
people."
President Trump,
moments before leaving the White House for a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on
Thursday, defended his daughter's remarks.
"They asked my daughter Ivanka whether or not the media is the enemy of the people. She correctly said no. It is the FAKE NEWS, which is a large percentage of the media, that is the enemy of the people!" he wrote on Twitter.
Asked at the White
House briefing Thursday about Ivanka Trump's remarks, press secretary Sarah
Sanders refused to reject the President's statements that the media is the
enemy of the people, saying he is "rightly frustrated" with the
negative coverage of his presidency.
Responding to CNN's Jim Acosta, who pressed her repeatedly to condemn the "enemy" label, Sanders, who read from prepared remarks, aired her own grievances about the press, saying the media have "attacked me on a number of occasions."
"The media
continues to ratchet up the verbal assault against the President and everyone
in this administration, and certainly we have a role to play, but the media has
a role to play for the discourse in this country as well," she added.
Trump and Sanders'
remarks come at a contentious time between the White House and the press.
Earlier this week,
Eric Trump and the President both a shared video of Trump rallygoers in Tampa,
Florida, shouting "CNN sucks" at the press while exiting the rally
venue.
And in late July,
a CNN reporter was banned from an open press event after she asked the
President questions regarding Trump's embattled attorney, Michael Cohen, and
Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Oval Office that the White House press
team deemed inappropriate. The frequency of White House "daily" press
briefings also diminished substantially. There were only three briefings over
the course of the month, and they lasted 58 minutes altogether.
The President also
revealed an off-the-record late-July meeting with New York Times publisher A.G.
Sulzberger.
"Had a very
good and interesting meeting at the White House with A.G. Sulzberger, Publisher
of the New York Times," Trump tweeted. "Spent much time talking about
the vast amounts of Fake News being put out by the media & how that Fake
News has morphed into phrase, 'Enemy of the People.' Sad!"
In a lengthy
statement released after Trump's tweet, The New York Times said that it was the
White House who invited the Times, and that it requested the meeting be
off-the-record. But with Trump's tweet, a Times spokeswoman said the newspaper
decided to publicize Sulzberger's "detailed notes."
Sulzberger said he accepted the meeting to raise concerns about "the president's deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric" and that he told Trump his language was divisive and "increasingly dangerous."
