Trump Offers Rare Praise of Media During Cabinet Meeting: ‘Many of You … Have Been Very Fair’

President Donald Trump lavished praise on the media Friday during a Cabinet meeting at Camp David.

It’s unclear what sparked the uncharacteristic move from Trump, who injected the phrase “fake news media” into the lexicon.

Trump prefaced his praise with lengthy remarks about Iran, a conflict which has dragged on for five months, and mentioned a number of “forever wars” the United States has been involved in, including Vietnam and Afghanistan:

So we were in there for five months. If you look at Vietnam they were in there for 20 years. You look at Afghanistan, they were in there for many years.

You look at any one of the wars, Korea, any one of them in they’re for many years. We’re in for five months and we have obliterated their military capacity. Again they’ve got some left. But soon they won’t have some left.

I just want to thank everybody around this table. You have been very special and I want to thank a lot of media people.

Many of you have had have been very fair and it’s one of the reasons you are here, frankly.

But you have been very fair and covered me this time much more fairly, I think, than the first term.

The praise comes a week after Trump’s disasterous turn at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, where he compared CNN’s Kaitlan Collins to trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney; seemed completely bemused after reporters from The Wall Street Journal got awards for their coverage of him; and ripped his own speech writers.

The positive remark also comes amid an ongoing battle between Trump’s Federal Communications Commission and ABC, which this week accused the administration of “attempted censorship.”

“The retaliation against ABC is a signal to every media company in the country: accommodate the Administration’s view of what news coverage should look like or pay the price,” the network wrote in its regulatory filing.

ABC currently faces the potential loss of several broadcasting licenses amid the dispute.

Watch above via Fox.

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