President Trump issued a warning to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on Tuesday after McCain offered a thinly veiled rebuke of the president’s worldview and said the senator has to “be careful, because at some point I fight back.”
McCain took a jab at Trump and his “America first” agenda on Monday night after he received the National Constitution Center’s Liberty Medal in Philadelphia.
“To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of Earth’ for the sake of home half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma that Americans cosigned to the ash heap of history,” McCain said.
When asked about the Arizona senator’s comments, Trump said Tuesday he was being “very, very nice” to McCain, but may not be in the future.
“I hear everything,” Trump told WMAL’s Chris Plante when asked if he was aware of McCain’s remarks. “People have to be careful because at some point, I fight back. I’m being very nice. I’m being very, very nice. But at some point, I fight back, and it won’t be pretty.”
In addition to issuing a warning to McCain, Trump also spoke out against the media, which he frequently refers to as “fake news.” The president told Plante the “dishonesty” of the press surprised him.
“Actually, dishonesty in the media is one of the things that surprised me most,” he said. “I thought after I won, the media would become much more stable and much more honest. They’ve gone crazy. CNN is a joke. NBC is a total joke. You watch what they report. It bears no relationship to what I’m doing. But the media is absolutely dishonest and frankly, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”
Trump went onto say he hoped the media would “shape up” once the campaign ended, but said the press has “gotten worse.”
“The New York Times, the Washington Post, they write whatever they want to write. You know, they have an agenda, and we’ll have to figure out what the agenda is, but they do have an agenda,” the president said. “I think that’s one of the biggest surprises, is the level of dishonesty. Interestingly after I won, I said, ‘Well, now I’ll bet the media starts to shape up, and you know, it’s over, so now’ — but it has actually gotten worse than during the campaign.”
