Trump Campaign Video Names Journalists as ‘Enemies’

Donald Trump has started his reelection campaign for 2020. After being criticized over the weekend for failing to condemn white supremacists and neo-Nazis for the violence in Charlottesville, Va., Trump released a video referring to journalists as his “enemies” in a pointed, 30-second clip that assails those who it says are not allowing him to “do his job.”

The video, released by the president’s reelection campaign and posted on his official website, denounces the media for “attacking the president” and “career politicians” for “standing in the way of success.” New York Sen. Chuck Schumer is the first figure in the video, followed by a montage of such prominent network anchors as Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Brian Williams. One of the featured journalist “enemies,” April Ryan, a veteran White House correspondent for the American Urban Radio Networks and a political analyst for CNN, cited what she saw as the racial tone of the video.

The Independent reports:

Ms. Ryan, who is black, responded to the video in a tweet in which she slammed the “racial hate” promoted by the Trump campaign team and added she had been singled out as “an enemy of the White House”.

She said: “Sad day I am singled out as an enemy of the White House as this racial hate is going on just for asking real questions and speaking truth.”

Alexis Simendinger, the White House correspondent for Real Clear Politics, also pointed to the racial tone of the video.

In a tweet, she said: “Trump campaign ad incl. images of African-Americans as “enemies”. Journalist @AprilDRyan is included. STOP.

The video also claims that Trump has added a million jobs to the American economy and says that the unemployment rate is the lowest since 2001. But prominent economists have pointed out how misleading this claim is. The Washington Post contends that Trump hasn’t actually done anything for the economy other than cut a few regulations, and that the economy and jobs are growing at exactly the same rate as before he took office:

The economy added an average of 181,000 jobs a month in Obama’s last six months in office compared to an average of 179,000 a month in President Trump’s first six months. That’s a statistically insignificant difference—and a negative one at that—which shows that Trump hasn’t made a difference on the economy. And why would he have? He hasn’t cut taxes or increased infrastructure spending or done anything else that would meaningfully boost GDP. (Going golfing and tweeting #MAGA a lot don’t count.)

This, in a lot of ways, is the archetypal Trump story: trying to take credit for something he inherited. In his business career, that was all the money and connections he got from this father. Indeed, while Trump likes to say that he turned a “small” $1 million loan from his father into a “massive empire,” the truth is that Trump’s father arranged and guaranteed all of the bank loans that made his son’s first big project possible.

It’s been the same with the economy. Trump hasn’t actually done anything other than cut a few regulations, but he’s made it sound like he’s passed a new New Deal. (“No administration has accomplished more in the first 90 days,” he rather ludicrously claimed.) He brags about a “surging economy and jobs,” despite the fact that the economy and jobs are growing at exactly the same rate as before he took office. And, after disparaging the official unemployment rate as being “fake” and “phony” and “totally fiction” while Obama was president, he has apparently decided that it’s “very real now.” In other words, Trump has done nothing and has congratulated himself for the economy Obama left behind.