All the president’s invective

As a candidate and a president, Donald Trump has spent the last decade broadcasting his disdain for journalists in interviews, at rallies and — most prolifically — online.

To document this, we began cataloging every post on Twitter, now X, in which he degraded journalists, news outlets or the news media as a whole, dating back to June 16, 2015, when he descended the escalator in his eponymous tower in New York City. In total, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker documented more than 2,500 anti-press tweets posted by Trump before he left office in January 2021. That’s more than once a day for 5 ½ years.

Trump’s posts decried the “fake news media” and called journalists critical of his administration “the enemy of the people,” demanded that journalists be fired and the Federal Communications Commission strip broadcasters of their licenses and used whatever levers of power were available to him to punish reporting he felt was unfair.

During that candidacy, Trump directed the bulk of his ire at individual journalists and specific outlets, with CNN, The New York Times, MSNBC and Fox News as frequent targets.

Once president, his focus shifted to the news media as a whole. During his third and fourth years in office, he rapidly accelerated his rate of anti-press tweets, with most referring to the news media as the “opposition party” or framing the press as an active participant in a conspiracy against him and his administration.

The Tracker’s documentation of his posts ended when Trump’s personal Twitter account was suspended on Jan. 8, 2021, following the insurrection at the Capitol.

Though Trump’s account on Twitter/X was reinstated in November 2022 by the platform’s new owner, Elon Musk, he did not post again until August 2023, and has never resumed the frenzied pace he once maintained.

So, when Trump was declared the winner of the 2024 presidential election, the Tracker began documenting his social media posts once again, focusing on his new platform of choice: Truth Social.

On that site — which is owned by Trump Media & Technology Group — Trump’s anti-press fervor is still on full display.

To date, Trump has returned to the same phrases and targets that dominated his social media feed during his first term: It is still “Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd” and “The Failing New York Times,” “fake news” and “the enemy of the people.” And as president-elect, he accused The Washington Post of making up sources, celebrated Neil Cavuto’s departure from Fox News and used his platform to pressure congressional Republicans into killing a bill that would have protected journalists and their sources.

Read our analyses of Trump’s negative social posts about the press

• Jan. 11, 2021: The last Trump tweet about the media
• Oct. 1, 2020: Rather than denounce attacks on press, Trump doubles down on negative tweets
• April 20, 2020: Trump, in crisis mode, tweets his 2,000th attack on the press
• Jan. 20, 2020: Back on the campaign trail, President Trump increases his anti-press tweet offensive
• Jan. 30, 2019: From fake news to enemy of the people: An anatomy of Trump’s tweets

Trump remains the only sitting president since the Tracker’s launch to attack the media with routine vitriol through social media, so only his posts have been systematically documented.

Our dataset relies on archives of Trump’s social media posts, using the Trump Twitter Archive for his first term and Trump’s Truth for the second.

Each post from Trump’s official account is then reviewed to determine whether it fits into at least one of five categories: insult of an individual journalist or news outlet; denigration of the media as a whole; call for boycotting, firing or other action against a journalist or outlet; accusation of media bias; or attack of a leaker for sharing information with the press.

The targets of the posts are listed as primary if the news outlet or journalist was named in the post, while the newsroom where a named journalist is employed is listed as secondary. The databases only include reposts of others’ content when Trump added a comment, or “manually” reposted by copying and pasting another user’s post in quotes or by sharing a screenshot.

Video clips under 10 minutes in length and other visual or audio mediums are also evaluated for inclusion. Posts that only included a link to another website or news article, however, are not.

As established by a series of court decisions, all tweets from Trump’s personal handle are official statements from the president and carry the same import and influence as any other presidential remark. Further, his anti-press missives have been direct reflections of his attitudes and his administration’s actions toward the media.

For instance, less than a month after Trump first took office in 2017, he urged then-FBI Director James Comey to jail journalists. In the years that followed, he threatened to revoke White House press credentials and did so for journalists Jim Acosta and Brian Karem, halted regular press briefings and fondly recalled the assault of Guardian U.S. reporter Ben Jacobs.

Officials in his first administration took their cues from him as well: The vice president and cabinet members punitively excluded journalists following reporting they didn’t like, staffers threatened to delve into reporters’ lives, and the secretary of homeland security even joked to Trump about using a sword on the press.

During his most recent campaign, Trump and his team revoked reporters’ credentials following unfavorable coverage, called for the FCC to revoke broadcast licenses for ABC and CBS and said that he wouldn’t mind if a would-be assassin’s shots hit journalists instead. He has also demonstrated an eagerness to pursue legal action against outlets for reporting that he argues is biased or unfair.

While Trump has redirected his megaphone from one platform to another since leaving office, the reverberations as he retakes office will be the same. To find all press freedom aggressions by Trump or under the auspices of his White House, use the Donald Trump tag to search the database.

This article was first published on Jan. 14, 2025.