As Americans prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving, President Donald Trump took to social media Wednesday morning to dispute an article published by the New York Times that said Trump is showing “signs of fatigue” as the 79-year-old “faces the realities of aging in office.”
“The Creeps at the Failing New York Times are at it again,” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social account. The president said that “I have never worked so hard in my life. However, despite all this, the Radical Left Lunatics in the soon-to-be-closed New York Times did a hit piece on me that I may be losing my Energy, despite facts that show the exact opposite. They know this is wrong, as is almost everything they write about me, including the election results, ALL NEGATIVE PURPOSE.”
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“This cheap ‘RAG’ is truly an ‘ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE,'” Trump wrote, a phrase he has previously lashed out at news outlets he doesn’t like.
According to Trump, “The writer of the story, Katie Rogers, who is assigned to write only bad things about me, is a third-rate reporter who is ugly, both inside and out.”
Trump concluded his post, “There will be a day when I run out of Energy, it happens to everyone, but with a PERFECT PHYSICAL EXAMINATION AND COMPREHENSIVE COGNITIVE TEST (‘That was aced’) IT WILL BE TAKEN LAST, certainly not now! GOD BLESS AMERICA & MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”
Over 10 years, Trump has written nearly 3,500 social media posts attacking the press, according to an analysis by the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation. This averages out to about one a day.
The Times article was written by Rogers, a White House correspondent who covered Trump’s two terms in office, and Dylan Freedman, the paper’s AI projects editor. Representatives for the New York Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s complaints.
The New York Times article, published Tuesday, said that Trump “remains almost omnipresent in American life. He appears in front of the news media and takes questions much more often” than his predecessor, former President Joe Biden. However, the paper reported, “almost a year into his second term, Americans see Mr. Trump less than they used to, according to a New York Times analysis of his schedule.” The president “keeps a shorter public schedule than he used to,” according to the article. “And when he is in public, sometimes, his battery shows signs of wear.” The Times article reported that during an Oval Office press conference on weight loss drugs that began around noon on November 6, “At one point, Mr. Trump’s eyelids drooped until his eyes were almost closed, and he appeared to blink on and off for several seconds.”
Meanwhile, Trump sued The New York Times, alleging that its reporting on his finances and business career defamed him, in a lawsuit seeking at least $15 billion in damages. (Trump’s lawyers refiled the suit in October after a judge dismissed the original complaint as “vexatious and burdensome.”) The New York Times, in a statement last month, reiterated its position that Trump’s lawsuit was without merit and said it was “simply an attempt to stifle independent reporting and generate PR attention.”
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