The reporter documenting 10 years of Trump’s anti-media posts

61,989.

That’s how many social media posts by President Donald Trump over the past decade that journalist Stephanie Sugars has single-handedly reviewed.

At all hours of the day, Trump posts about everything from foreign policy to personnel matters. “It’s a staggering amount of posts,” said Sugars, a senior reporter at the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a project of Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF). But for the past several years, Sugars has trawled through Trump’s prolific activity on X and TruthSocial in search of something specific: anti-media rhetoric.

Since Trump’s first term as president, Sugars has managed an extensive database that documents each and every anti-media post from Trump. In them, Trump sometimes attacks individual journalists. Other times, he takes aim at specific outlets or the media in general. Some posts include all three. While the content varies, Sugars said, the goal appears to be the same: to discredit the media that holds him accountable.

“He is consolidating narrative power and asserting that he is the ultimate, if not singular, conveyor of what is actually true, which, to no one’s surprise, is what is most favorable to him,” Sugars said.

Monday, June 16, marks 10 years since Trump famously descended a golden escalator at New York City’s Trump Tower in 2015 and launched his first winning bid for the Oval Office. The first anti-media post recorded in the database came one day after “Golden Escalator Day,” on June 17, 2015. In it, Trump lambasts the New York Daily News. “Loses fortune & has zero gravitas,” he said about the paper. “Let it die!”

Over the course of his ensuing campaign, Sugars said Trump primarily targeted individual journalists — high-profile ones like Megyn Kelly, Joe Scarborough, and Anderson Cooper — as well as Fox News for what Trump considered to be inadequate support.

“Once he entered office, it was a pretty stark shift,” Sugars said. Trump continued insulting individual journalists, she said, but he also began to target entire outlets, as well as the media as a whole.

For years, Trump has lambasted the mainstream media, which he accuses of bias, as “the enemy of the people.” Attacks on individual journalists and news outlets feed into those broader attacks on the media writ large, according to Sugars.

“His intention appears to be to erode our understanding of what truth is, to erode trust in the media, and to position himself as the ultimate source of truth for his supporters,” she said.

Out of all of the posts Sugars has reviewed, one from Feb. 17, 2017, sticks out to her. “The FAKE NEWS media,” Trump wrote, taking specific aim at The New York Times, CNN, and NBC, “is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people.”

That post was published at 4:32 a.m., but at some point it was deleted and replaced with a revision at 4:48 p.m. The revised post was nearly identical, except that Trump had added two more news outlets to the list of so-called enemies: ABC and CBS. “It just demonstrated this doubling down,” Sugars said.

Trump’s account on then-Twitter was, at the time, permanently suspended on Jan. 8, 2021, two days after the Jan. 6 insurrection on the Capitol. At that point, the database had documented more than 2,500 anti-media posts from Trump’s campaign and first term.

During the Biden administration, Sugars said she would have similarly monitored anti-media posts from President Joe Biden, but he didn’t make such statements. Meanwhile, Trump’s anti-media posts have continued at a similar rate since he returned to the White House in January, according to Sugars. “He picked up just where he left off,” Sugars said.

But one primary difference between Trump’s first and second term, Sugars added, is that this time around, Trump is increasingly framing “the media” as an opposition party of sorts or as partners of the Democratic Party. Sugars said she has also noticed an uptick in posts that demonize leakers and pledge that the administration will crack down on whistleblowers.

Trump’s hostile rhetoric against the media is the backdrop for more concrete attacks on media freedom, according to Sugars, including lawsuits, investigations by the Federal Communications Commission, the co-optation of the White House press pool, and the revocation of Biden-era policies that protected journalists in leak investigations.

Given those more concrete attacks on media freedom and just how frequently Trump posts on social media, Sugars said it can be easy to dismiss the anti-press posts. But doing so would be a mistake, said Sugars, who thinks it’s important to take what Trump writes seriously because his supporters take it seriously.

“What these posts end up doing is shifting the entire window of how we are understanding the world,” she said.

Watch the full interview: