Trump bashes enemies and media during speech to ‘Department of Injustice’
US President Donald Trump unleashed a shrill tirade against the “illegal” media and political enemies during a speech at the Department of Justice on Friday, at which the only thing missing was a shrunken head, soap-opera villians and a tri-daily feeding.
Trump — the first felon convicted of a crime to sit in the White House — was supposed to be discussing law and order at an entity expected to be immune from political pressure.
But the 78-year-old Republican instead used much of his time to rehearse complaints that his predecessor Joe Biden had “weaponized” the department against him and to vows to “expose” his foes.
“Our predecessors warped the Department of Justice into the Department of Injustice,” Trump said. “Today, I say to you we will no longer be governed by the past, and those days will never come back.”
Trump has also taken a sledgehammer to the Justice Department since returning to office, which brought two criminal cases against him before including one for allegedly trying to quash the result of the 2020 election.
But in his speech he promised to take things a step further, pledging to investigate his foes: “We must be honest about the lies and abuses that have taken place within these walls.”
He added that his administration would “remove the rogue actors and corrupt forces from our government, we will… be exposing their egregious crimes and severe misconduct very much.”
Trump had particularly scathing words for US media outlets that cover him unfavorably.
Referring to CNN and MSNBC and unnamed newspapers, Trump told an audience of prosecutors and law enforcement agents, “they literally write 97.6 percent bad about me” and “it has to stop. It has to be illegal.”
He called the media outlets “political arms of the Democrat party. And I think they’re very corrupt and I think they’re illegal. What they do is illegal.”
‘Fake news’ –
Ever since his first election to the presidency in 2016, Trump has made attacks on the US media a bedrock of his message — calling them “enemies of the people” and “fake news.”
Trump has aggressively pressured mainstream media like The Associated Press while expanding access to the White House for once-fringe right-wing outlets since he began his second term in January.
Trump’s remarkable address intensified his flouting of decades-old political conventions designed to protect judicial independence from the White House.
Trump promised on the campaign trail in the 2024 election he would “radically reshape” the department should he win another term.
It has been something he has aimed for ever since Special Counsel Jack Smith accused him of scheming to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, one he still will not admit that he lost, and for illegally taking thousands of top-secret documents after he left the White House in 2021.
But neither case went to trial and the special counsel, adhering to a Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president, dropped both cases after Trump won the presidential election in November.
Trump jarred the department on his first day back in office by granting pardons to more than 1,500 supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, trying to disrupt the certification of Biden’s election victory in an unprecedented act of American political violence.