President Donald Trump woke up Saturday morning, and, as has become the norm now, started tweeting. But he did not comment on the bombshell news that a federal grand jury had issued the first charges in the investigation into Russia’s alleged meddling in the presidential election. Instead, the president did something that is rare for his Saturday morning tweetstorms: praise a Democrat. Trump thanked former President Jimmy Carter for saying the news media have been uncharacteristically harsh on his administration. “Just read the nice remarks by President Jimmy Carter about me and how badly I am treated by the press (Fake News),” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Thank you Mr. President!”
Trump was referring to an interview Carter did with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd in which he said the media “have been harder on Trump than any other president certainly that I’ve known about.” In the piece in which Carter talked of his desire to be a special envoy to North Korea, the former president said journalists “feel free to claim that Trump is mentally deranged and everything else without hesitation.”
Years earlier, Trump sang a very different tune about Carter. In September 2013, Trump wrote on Twitter that Carter “is so happy that he is no longer considered the worst President in the history of the United States!”
By praising the former president, Trump was continuing a theme he began with an earlier tweet on Saturday in which he complained that the media is ignoring his administration’s economic success. “Very little reporting about the GREAT GDP numbers announced yesterday,” Trump wrote.
