CNN reporter Jim Acosta said his network hired a team of bodyguards to watch his back at President Trump’s hostile campaign rallies during the 2018 midterms.
“I do get death threats,” he told the Daily Beast podcast “The New Abnormal” on Monday. “It is a part of our culture now that I just think is unacceptable.”
According to Acosta, a Trump supporter charged with sending pipe bombs to news stations including CNN in October 2018 had sent him personal threats, too.
“You have journalists in this country who were being threatened on a regular basis,” Acosta said. “Campaign reporters should not need bodyguards to go to political rallies, but that’s the environment we’re in right now.”
According to Acosta, regardless of one’s political orientation, Americans need to think about where this sort of hostility toward the free press is headed.
“It’s gotta stop,” he said. “For everybody’s sake.”
Covering the president has been especially challenging during the pandemic, which has seen Trump invite press members to events billed as White House press conferences that wind up being thinly veiled campaign rallies. A pair of those ambushes took place over the weekend at Trump’s Westminster country club where the administration welcomed unmasked, boisterous supporters to taunt reporters who tried to ask questions about issues including the pandemic.
On Saturday, one of those briefings came to an abrupt end when the president was called out for taking credit for the Veterans Choice program, which was signed into law by former President Barack Obama in 2014. Trump’s cheering section applauded the president’s retreat.
Acosta, whom Trump frequently accuses of representing “fake news,” blamed White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany for “performing for an audience of one” and serving as “an attack dog for the president” rather than a representative of the federal government at press briefings.
“She has a big briefing book of full of falsehoods, half-truths and attacks on the press and she’ll be at the podium flipping through the pages and she’ll get on the page where she attacks us,” he told the Daily Beast.
Acosta said presidential appearances in the U.S. have become strikingly similar to what he’s seen in countries that don’t have democratic governments.
“There is very little difference what you see in those countries and some of the videos they’re putting up in the White House briefing room, which are just political videos — campaign-like videos,” he said.
Acosta compared McEnany’s sensational presentations to the brand of programming seen on Fox News. While he said mocking this White House may seem therapeutic for some media outlets, the reality is no joke.
“These kinds of attacks on us and on the notion of the truth, that should not be the role of the White House press secretary,” he suggested.
Trump has referred to reporters as “the enemy of the people” and has been especially critical of Acosta and CNN.
“What about all the other phony stories they do?” Trump tweeted in 2017, when CNN retracted an article incorrectly claiming Congress was investigating one of his aides.
Acosta was banned from the White House following the 2018 midterms, when he continued asking questions after being asked to pass a house microphone to another reporter. He told the Daily Beast Monday that being assertive became necessary when the president refused to answer his questions.
Former White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said that act was “absolutely unacceptable” to the White House and “completely disrespectful” to other reporters.
