US President Donald Trump on Friday blamed the news media for inciting violence by “not writing the truth”.
Speaking to reporters, Trump, when asked whether his inflammatory rhetoric might lead to violent behavior, said it was questions of this nature that fueled violence and not his words.
“You’re creating violence by your question. The fake news is creating violence!” the president said as he was leaving the White House for a campaign rally in West Virginia.
“If the media would write correctly and write accurately and write fairly, you’d have a lot less violence in the country,” he said.
Trump’s comments stand in stark contrast to those made by White House press secretary Sarah Hucakbee Sanders, who said Monday that “the president is not placing blame” on the media for growing violence around the country.
The controversial exchange came in the wake of explosive devices being mailed to prominent Democratic politicians, and the news outlet CNN over the past few days and and after an anti-immigrant loon murdered 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.
This is while the Republican head of state has ignored calls from both sides of the aisle to tone down his divisive rhetoric, which some analysts say is radicalizing people on the far ends of the political spectrum.
According to police, the suspect behind the attempted mail bombings was a Florida man who was a registered Republican and a vocal Trump supporter.
He was charged with sending pipe bombs to more than a dozen Democratic figures, celebrities and a media organization all of whom Trump had openly spoken against before.
The synagogue shooting suspect was also a man who on social media echoed Trump’s fiery rhetoric about a caravan of Central American migrants that is currently moving through Mexico towards the US border.
On Thursday, Trump implied that thousands of military forces he had sent to the border might open fire on the caravan if the immigrants start to fight them.
However, he walked back those remarks on Friday, saying the migrants would be arrested and not fired upon.