US president Donald Trump celebrated his first 100 days in office by bathing in the support of his bedrock supporters at a farm expo centre in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, reprising the populist themes of his campaign and savaging a familiar foe: the news media.
In a rally timed to coincide with an annual dinner of the White House press corps in Washington, which he declined to attend, Mr Trump milled into what he referred to as "the failing New York Times", as well as CNN and MSNBC, which he accused of incompetence and dishonesty.
“Their priorities are not my priorities, and not your priorities,” Mr Trump said to a sea of supporters, many in familiar red “Make America Great Again” caps. “If the media’s job is to be honest and tell the truth, the media deserves a very, very big fat failing grade,” he said, adding they were “very dishonest people”.
Mr Trump revelled in his decision to skip the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, describing a scene in which Hollywood stars and reporters consoled themselves in a Washington hotel ballroom, while he mixed with a better class of people in the American heartland.
Chorus of boos
The crowd responded with a chorus of boos and chants of “CNN sucks”, some turning to jeer reporters. Mr Trump was interrupted several times by protesters, who were escorted out of the arena by the police, under a rain of catcalls that recalled the most bitter days of the campaign.
He saved some of his most colourful vitriol for the New York Times, lampooning its sale of its headquarters near Times Square – a "cathedral to journalism" – to move into a "very ugly office building in a very crummy location". The new Times Tower, designed by architect Renzo Piano, sits across from the Port Authority bus terminal on the west side of Manhattan.
"They covered it so badly," he said of the presidential campaign, "that they felt they were forced to apologise because their predictions were so bad." The Times did not apologise for its election coverage.
After a turbulent debut in the White House, Mr Trump spent the past week celebrating the achievements of his first 100 days. But his weekend rally took on a darker hue, filled with anger and resentment. He touched on familiar themes of lawless immigrants, unfair trade deals and a corrupt Washington establishment.
Yet Mr Trump reversed his hard line on another adversary: China. Citing the support of President Xi Jinping in pressuring the rogue government in North Korea, he said it would have been counterproductive to label the Chinese as currency manipulators.
“I don’t think right now is the best time to call China a currency manipulator,” Mr Trump said, adding that the news media had been wrong in saying he had reversed a campaign promise on that issue. He hailed his administration’s efforts to reduce illegal crossings into the US, and he vowed to fulfill his promise to build a wall on the southern border. “If the Democrats knew what the hell they were doing, they would approve it,” he said. “Obviously they don’t mind the illegals pouring in, the drugs pouring in. They don’t mind.”
Financing the wall
To some extent, Mr Trump’s red-meat tone may have been a political necessity to shore up his base after a week in which he vacillated in budget negotiations with Congress on immediately financing the wall. His wavering drew charges from conservative radio hosts that he was a flip-flopper.
The president’s attack on the news media started earlier in the day, when he said on Twitter that the “mainstream media refuses to state our long list of achievements, including 28 legislative signings, strong borders and great optimism!”
The split-screen image that followed showed journalists dining in black ties at what is normally one of the most fashionable events on the capital’s social calendar while Mr Trump spoke to the crowd at the farm show centre and, before that, toured a factory that makes landscaping and gardening tools clearly delighted the White House.
Still, Mr Trump’s thumb in the eye to the press corps felt a bit manufactured. He spent much of the past week giving interviews to the same reporters he was to snub on Saturday night, including Jeff Mason of Reuters, who serves as president of the Correspondents’ Association.
White House officials had hoped to further vex the journalists by having Mr Trump announce news in Harrisburg, which would spoil their evening, forcing them to set down their forks and knives and go to work. But a plan for the president to announce in Harrisburg that the US was pulling out of the North American Free Trade Agreement fell through when Mr Trump decided, after urgent phone calls on Wednesday from the leaders of Canada and Mexico, not to do it at least for now.
‘A horrible deal’
The White House then toyed with the idea of having him announce that he was ripping up the Korea Free Trade Agreement. But he stole his own thunder, telling the Washington Post on Thursday that the US might terminate the five-year-old agreement.
“It’s a horrible deal. It was a Hillary Clinton disaster, a deal that should’ve never been made,” Mr Trump said. In fact, George W Bush negotiated the agreement with South Korea in 2007, and Barack Obama renegotiated it in 2010, which is effectively what Mr Trump is now proposing to do.
The choice of Pennsylvania for the rally and factory tour was predictable, given the state’s crucial role in propelling him past Ms Clinton in the electoral college. It seemed calculated to produce a reliable crowd rather than, for example, helping the White House turn wavering Republican votes in its effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
It also allowed Mr Trump to escape the capital on a sweltering day when thousands rallied to protest his policies on climate change. Marching past Mr Trump's luxury hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, some carried placards that said, "100 Days of Destruction. Resist." – (New York Times service)