Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: US President Donald Trump hit the road on Saturday to celebrate his first 100 days in office with cheering supporters at a campaign-style rally touting his initial achievements, blasting the media for “misleading the people with fake news” and slamming his predecessor Barack Obama.
Declaring himself “thrilled” to be far from “the Washington swamp” and the “very boring” White House Correspond-ents’ Dinner, which he skipped, Mr Trump sneered at “fake news” CNN and the “failing” New York Times. “They are a disgrace,” he said.
“The media deserves a very big, fat, failing grade,” Mr Trump said sarcastically over the media’s coverage of his achievements during his first 100 days in office.
This was for the first time in decades that a serving US President didn’t attend the annual event. None of the White House staff were present on the occasion in support of Mr Trump’s decision. The last President to miss the dinner was Ronald Reagan while he was recovering from an assassination attempt in 1981.
The dinner was headlined by veteran investigative journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who gained fame in the Watergate scandal, which prompted the resignation of then-President Richard Nixon.
“Mr President, the media is not fake news —let’s take that off the table as we proceed. Whatever the climate, whether the media is revered or reviled, we should and must persist and I believe we will,” said Woodward.
White House Correspon-dents Association president Jeff Mason joined Woodward. “We cannot ignore the rhetoric that has been employed by the President about who we are and what we do. Freedom of the press is a building block of our democracy. “ he said.
Trump blasted Obama saying that his health care legislation is “dying” and would be repealed.
