Donald Trump leveled a late-night attack against the New York Times and demanded an apology from the newspaper for its recent coverage of him.
It's not clear what triggered Trump's rant in the early hours of Tuesday. He singled out reporter Maggie Haberman, whose name he misspelled intentionally and also seemingly unintentionally, but his Truth Social post came shortly after the newspaper published a report by her and colleague Jonathan Swan on a series of passionate letters from a much younger aide.
"Will the failing New York Times apologize to its readers for getting years of 'Trump' coverage so wrong," Trump posted. "They write such phony 'junk,' knowing full well how incorrect it is, only meaning to demean. Magot Hagerman, a third rate writer and fourth rate intellect, writes story after story, always terrible, and yet I almost never speak to her. They do no fact checking, because facts don’t matter to them."
Haberman and Swan reported that Trump aide Natalie Harp would follow him to the White House after sending him a series of letters last year that raised eyebrows in his inner circle, with one letter declaring "you are all that matters to me" and another thanking him for being her "Guardian and Protector in this Life."
"I don’t believe I’ve had a legitimately good story in the NYT for years," Trump posted, "AND YET I WON, IN RECORD FASHION, THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN DECADES. WHERE IS THE APOLOGY?"
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung praised the 33-year-old Harp as a “trusted and valued” aide and said her “work ethic and dedication” had helped the candidate win re-election. Haberman also appeared Monday night on CNN to discuss the possibility that the president-elect would seek revenge against special counsel Jack Smith, who filed a motion seeking to drop the Jan. 6 case.
“There are so many unanswered questions, Kaitlan," Haberman told CNN's Kaitlan Collins. "But if the idea is that there’s lots of people around Trump and the White House who are gonna try to prevent him from doing this, I think people are sorely mistaken.”