It’s no secret that President Trump and ABC White House reporter Jonathan Karl don’t see eye to eye. Trump thinks he’s a hack, and Karl’s critical book, Front Row at the Trump Show, is a bestseller.
But at last night’s coronavirus briefing in the White House press room, both Trump and Karl declared war.
It came as Trump was ripping the media for finding failure in his handling of the crisis, this time on tests.
“Let’s say we had 350 million people in the United States, right? Let’s say. And if we gave every one of those people a test 10 times — so we give 350 [million] people a test 10 times — the fake news media would say, ‘Where’s the 11th time? He didn’t do his job. Trump didn’t do his job,’ because you have a lot of bad reporting out there. It’s very sad. And it’s so bad,” said Trump.
Good for @WHCA president @JonKarl — speaking up after Trump says the press would criticize him even if the government tested every American ten times — “that’s not true,” Karl said. pic.twitter.com/05CpibkwPT
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) April 22, 2020
From the front row, Karl asserted, “But that’s not true. That’s not true. That wouldn’t be the case.”
Dismissing him, Trump said, “You’re one of the leaders of the bad reporting. You know?”
Typically, the daily briefing room fights end there, but last night, Karl was hosted on a podcast of the famous Washington bookstore Politics and Prose to talk about his book with Clinton-era press secretary Mike McCurry.
Just an hour after the flare-up, Karl said that he burst out because he couldn’t take Trump’s “insults” anymore. He described himself as a “truth-teller, truth-seeker,” facing a “guy who we’re covering” who calls the media “the ‘enemy of the people, a traitor to your country.’”
On the podcast, he said, “The instinct of a reporter is to fight back. And today, at today’s briefing, I finally blurted out, in the front row, and I couldn’t frankly help myself,” as the president hit the media over testing.
Karl: “And I just blurted out, I said, ‘That’s not true, Mr. President.’”
McCurry: “You kind of lost it.”
Karl: “Yeah. And I don’t like that. That’s not what we’re supposed to do. That’s not the job.”
McCurry: “Why not? Why not?”
Karl: “I felt it was entirely appropriate because I finally, like, I mean — are you out of your mind? You can’t just say stuff that is completely and totally false — I know it’s false because you are talking about me. You know? You’re talking about us.”
