CNN’s chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta accused President Trump of giving a campaign speech from the Rose Garden.
“Trump soiled the WH Rose Garden with that performance. Presidents do not use the Rose Garden in that kind of naked political fashion. That was not a press conference, as the WH described it. It was a campaign rally disguised as a press conference. It was a bait and switch,” he tweeted on Tuesday.
Trump soiled the WH Rose Garden with that performance. Presidents do not use the Rose Garden in that kind of naked political fashion. That was not a press conference, as the WH described it. It was a campaign rally disguised as a press conference. It was a bait and switch.
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) July 14, 2020
Prior to Acosta’s tweet, Trump held a lengthy press conference from the Rose Garden in which he addressed his plan to punish China over its recent national security laws that have limited the liberties of people in Hong Kong. In addition to his remarks on China, Trump leveled several attacks on Joe Biden, including criticisms of the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee’s campaign promises and a condemnation of the Obama administration’s foreign policy.
Acosta said on-air after the event that Trump “turned the Rose Garden into a campaign rally.”
“I’ve been here covering the White House for almost eight years. I’ve never seen a president turn the Rose Garden into a campaign rally in the way that President Trump did over the last — more than an hour. This was obviously the campaign rally he wanted to have in New Hampshire that his campaign wasn’t able to have last weekend. He instead decided to have it here in the Rose Garden,” he said.
“And the press assembles here in the Rose Garden, we expect there to be a number of questions asked of the president,” he added. “There were only three or four people called on before he raced out of here. He spent much of the time, the bulk of the time that he had here for this event, attacking Joe Biden, trying to rewrite history, and essentially create a fairy tale of his own handling of the coronavirus when, in fact, it’s been a gross mishandling of this pandemic.”
