New York Times correspondent Peter Baker says in a new interview that President Trump feels “betrayed” by the media because they’re not “nicer” to him.
“He feels like we have betrayed him because we’re not nicer to him in his view,” Baker, who is the newspaper’s chief White House correspondent, told Hill.TV during an interview that aired Tuesday.
“And we have to explain that’s not our job, we don’t do nice stories or bad stories, we just do truth and accurate if we can,” he continued, adding that covering Trump is “so personal.”
Baker said that despite Trump’s repeated attacks calling the press the “enemy of the people,” the president often tries to “charm” members of the media to get them “on his side.”
“There is this thing when he sits down with an individual or a reporter to try to charm them, to try to get them on his side,” he told Hill.TV.
Trump has long held a contentious relationship with the mainstream media, repeatedly lashing out at various news outlets. The New York Times is a frequent focus of his ire—he refers to the paper as the “failing” New York Times.
In a series of tweets on Monday, Trump renewed attacks against the Times over a report concerning some of his financial transactions.
According to the Times report, Deutsche Bank employees flagged several possible suspicious transactions by entities controlled by Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Trump slammed the report and refuted its findings.
“The Failing New York Times (it will pass away when I leave office in 6 years), and others of the Fake News Media, keep writing phony stories about how I didn’t use many banks because they didn’t want to do business with me. WRONG! It is because I didn’t need money,” he tweeted.
The Times’ financial editor later disputed Trump’s claim that he could have done business with any bank, saying Deutsche Bank was the only one willing to lend to him.
“I have spent a long time looking into this, and @DeutscheBank was the only bank willing to lend to @realDonaldTrump for 20 years because of his pattern of defaults and the bank’s hunger for growth in the US,” he tweeted.
—Tess Bonn
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