President Trump has once again lashed out at a journalist with a heated outburst, labeling them ‘obnoxious’ and ‘terrible’, this instance for merely quoting his previous statements back to him.
This isn’t the president’s first instance of berating a White House correspondent, and it follows an incident less than a month ago where he dismissively said ‘quiet piggy’ to a reporter inquiring about his potential involvement in the Jeffrey Epstein files.
In this latest occurrence, Trump deflected from answering a straightforward question by focusing on personal attacks. The query was a simple follow-up on a statement he made five days prior, where he promised to release a video of a potentially illegal strike on a purported drug boat.
On Monday, ABC News journalist Rachel Scott asked Trump when the video from the second strike would be made public, stating: “You said you would have no problem with releasing the full video of that strike on September 2 off the coast of Venezuela…”
Trump interrupted her, wrongly denying that he had agreed to the video’s release, and said: “I didn’t say that, you said that, I didn’t say that, this is ABC fake news.”
Nevertheless, a transcript from December 3 confirms that he did make that promise.
ABC’s Selina Wang directly questioned the president if the video of the second strike would be made public so ‘the American people can see for themselves’.
At that time, Trump seemed optimistic and responded: “I don’t know what they have, but whatever they have we’d certainly release, no problem.”
Five days later, he seemed to have forgotten this commitment, and the ABC reporter pursued this line of questioning before shifting to ask if Trump would instruct Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to release the video. Trump stated he was leaving the decision to Hegseth.
Trump then defended his administration’s attacks on unidentified vessels alleged to be trafficking drugs.
He made the unsubstantiated claim that the ‘kinetic strikes’ had halted ’94 percent’ of all drugs entering the U.S. by sea, asserting that each boat sunk saves thousands of lives.
“Every boat we sink, we save 25,000 American lives,” he stated.
As the 79-year-old president began to veer off-topic, ABC’s reporter attempted to direct his attention back to the video release, which had been shown to Congress in a private session.
Scott’s persistence seemed to irritate the President, prompting him to attack her directly, saying: “You are the most obnoxious reporter in the whole place, let me just tell you, you are an obnoxious, actually, a terrible reporter.”
In past administrations, such criticism from the President could have been detrimental to a reporter’s career, but in this case, Trump’s remarks garnered sympathy from some viewers.
“At this point, him calling a reporter terrible is a sign they are doing their job,” one viewer noted on Reddit.
Another sarcastically commented: “He is an obnoxious President. Actually, a terrible President.”