According to Mediate, Donald Trump’s recent fury was directed at The New York Times, a frequent target of his ire, over an innocuous comment he made during an interview with Tucker Carlson, which he used as ammunition in his ongoing battle against what he perceives as “fake news.” The comment in question related to the Panama Canal and was delivered while Trump was skipping a GOP Debate.
The former president had previously expressed his frustration with Fox News and The Wall Street Journal for discussing his age, a topic he often brings up in reference to Joe Biden. In a recent outburst, he questioned the origins of this topic, demanding an explanation for its prominence in media coverage.
New York Times writer Frank Bruni penned an op-ed titled “Trump Is Really Old, Too,” where he raised the question of how noticeable Donald Trump’s potential lapses into incoherence would be and potential brain damage, given his history of erratic behavior. Bruni cited an instance from the Carlson interview in which Trump made a reference to Joe Biden describing the Grand Canyon as one of the “Nine Wonders of the World.”
Bruni recounted Trump’s meandering discourse, including a tangent about the toll of building the Panama Canal, where he mentioned losing 35,000 people to malaria due to mosquitoes. Trump vacillated between calling it one of the “seven wonders” and then suggesting it could be “nine wonders.” Bruni, in a somewhat rhetorical tone, wondered if there would have been a media frenzy had Biden made a similar statement, seemingly unaware that it was, in fact, Biden who made the original comment about the Grand Canyon.
Trump, in his characteristic style, took issue with Bruni’s interpretation of his comments and accused him of not grasping the intended sarcasm in his remarks. Amidst this rant, Trump also managed to insert a boast about the viewership of his interview with Tucker Carlson, comparing it favorably to the viewership of the GOP Debate he chose to skip. He claimed that his interview garnered 265,000,000 views, far surpassing the 11,000,000 viewers of the debate, a statement that raised eyebrows among fact-checkers.
In his first post on the matter, Trump clarified that during the interview with Carlson, he had discussed the Panama Canal and sarcastically mimicked Joe Biden’s handling of the situation. The former president’s posts on social media once again underscored his ongoing feud with the media, particularly The New York Times, and his penchant for using numerical exaggerations to emphasize his points.
“Such dishonesty at The Failing New York Times. Recently I did an interview with Tucker Carlson, rather than the debate, which turned out to have more ‘views,’ at 265,000,000, than any interview ever done (The debate had 11,000,000),” he said. Which … nah.
“During the interview I talked about the Panama Canal, & how we so stupidly sold it back to Panama for one dollar, very sarcastically mimicking Crooked Joe Biden & how truly lost he is….” Trump wrote in his first post.
He continued in a second Truth post, which practice he has taken to old-guy labeling as “page 2.”
Page 2: You see, Crooked Joe had just called “something” the Ninth Wonder of the World, & it made headlines because it had always been the Seventh. I made it clear in the interview that by my jokingly imitating Biden’s recent gaffe, I was just trying to show how truly dumb & out of “it” this guy really is. The Times knowingly tried to make my spoof on him into my making the same mistake as Biden, no sarcasm, no nothing. The writer is untalented & bad, but we always have to call out FAKE NEWS!
