Speaking to Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s The Situation Room on Tuesday night, Donald Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway agreed to speak to Trump about the increasingly hostile environment for the press at Trump rallies.
“The working journalists who are traveling with them all the time — they go to all these rallies, they’re in this pen, he points to them — he sort of eggs the crowd on to go after them. There are a lot of young journalists,” said Blitzer before asking Conway, “can you talk to him and say to him ‘Mr. Trump, we only have a few days left. These are hardworking, young journalists and they deserve to have some security.”
Conway quickly agreed, saying that she would “tell him that,” and also that Trump was “probably watching right now.”
As Trump’s rhetoric against what he says is a biased media has grown more heated, Trump supporters have increasingly vented their frustration at the press at his rallies, using lewd gestures, shouting at them, and yelling obscenities.
In one video that recently went viral, a Trump supporter even calls some members of the press Lügenpresse, a German Nazi–era word meaning “lying press.” The word is considered dangerously provocative by many in Germany, but has recently come back into vogue for Germany’s far-right political activists. Some feel it has anti-Semitic undertones.
During the interview, Conway did not back down from her position that the media is biased against Trump, but she did agree that Blitzer was right.
“I am open press,” she said, “I believe in a free press, and I believe in an honest press.”
