In what is quickly becoming a ritual of his presidency, Trump unleashed a Twitter rant on Thursday morning—this one aimed at Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, calling her a “traitor.”
The timing of the President’s tweets corresponded with a segment that aired on Fox News minutes earlier, which was also heavily critical of Manning.
“Ungrateful TRAITOR Chelsea Manning, who should never have been released from prison, is now calling President Obama a weak leader. Terrible!” Trump tweeted shortly after 6am.
As CNN’s Brian Stelter reported, Trump’s message came 14 minutes after Fox and Friends ran a segment also describing Manning as a “traitor,” while reporting on an op-ed she wrote for The Guardian on Thursday.
Manning, who was convicted of passing Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and State Department cables to WikiLeaks, had her prison sentence commuted by former President Obama earlier this month. She is now expected to be released in May, having previously faced decades in a military prison.
“The one simple lesson to draw from President Obama’s legacy: do not start off with a compromise. They won’t meet you in the middle. Instead, what we need is an unapologetic progressive leader,” Manning wrote.
While both Trump and Fox News claimed that Manning described Obama as “weak,” she never actually used those words in her op-ed.
WikiLeaks, which has shown deference to Trump at times in recent months, rushed to condemn the President’s tweet.
“Trump is wrong. Manning was found innocent of ‘aiding the enemy’ & Pentagon admitted under oath no-one harmed,” the publishing platform tweeted. WikiLeaks also noted that Trump had previously called Obama “weak.”
This isn’t the first time that the new President of the United States has used a segment on Fox News as a basis for his twitter activity.
On Tuesday evening, Trump tweeted about violence in Chicago, remarking that “If Chicago doesn’t fix the horrible ‘carnage’ going on, 228 shootings in 2017 with 42 killings (up 24% from 2016), I will send in the Feds!”
Roughly an hour earlier, Fox News had done a report on shootings in the Windy City, in which one of the guests described the violence as “carnage.”
While running for office, too, Trump had a habit of relying on the conservative cable news channel as fodder for his tweets. One of the more infamous examples happened in November, when Trump tweeted that burning the US flag should be punishable by jail or loss of citizenship.
A half-hour earlier, Fox News was covering anti-Trump protests at a Massachusetts college that involved burning American flags.
