What Trump (or some designated flunky) tweeted this morning:

Had a very good and interesting meeting at the White House with A.G. Sulzberger, Publisher of the New York Times. Spent much time talking about the vast amounts of Fake News being put out by the media & how that Fake News has morphed into phrase, “Enemy of the People.” Sad!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2018

What A.G. Sulzberger says what happened:

My main purpose for accepting the meeting was to raise concerns about the president’s deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric.

I told the president directly that I thought that his language was not just divisive but increasingly dangerous.

I told him that although the phrase “fake news” is untrue and harmful, I am far more concerned about his labeling journalists “the enemy of the people.” I warned that this inflammatory language is contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence.

I repeatedly stressed that this is particularly true abroad, where the president’s rhetoric is being used by some regimes to justify sweeping crackdowns on journalists. I warned that it was putting lives at risk, that it was undermining the democratic ideals of our nation, and that it was eroding one of our country’s greatest exports: a commitment to free speech and a free press.

Throughout the conversation I emphasized that if President Trump, like previous presidents, was upset with coverage of his administration he was of course free to tell the world. I made clear repeatedly that I was not asking for him to soften his attacks on The Times if he felt our coverage was unfair. Instead, I implored him to reconsider his broader attacks on journalism, which I believe are dangerous and harmful to our country.

Sad!

Here are two opinion pieces to read together; they are saying about the same thing.

One, and IMO the better of the two, is Andrew O’Hehir, Democratic moderates fear the “socialist left” will wreck the party: They want to keep that gig.

Just a taste:

Hubert Humphrey, the leading Democratic moderate of Hillary Clinton’s youth, would find little to object to in Ocasio-Cortez’s platform, beyond the labeling on the package. (Once the Happy Warrior figured out what ICE and super PACs were, and what they had done to America, he’d go out and ring doorbells in her district.) Then again, Humphrey had no fear of open and often heated ideological conflict, which was a staple of Democratic discourse for decades and is exactly what the “democratic socialist” insurrection has reintroduced since 2016.

For all their cunning, Republicans are a known quantity. Their motives are simple: they will do anything, say anything, profess faith in anything to get tax cuts, deregulation and a little help keeping workers in line. Nothing else is sacred to them. Rules, norms, traditions, deficits, the Bible, the constitution, whatever. They don’t care, and in this they have proven utterly predictable.

The Democrats, however, remain a mystery. We watch them hesitate at crucial moments, betray the movements that support them, and even try to suppress the leaders and ideas that generate any kind of populist electricity. Not only do they seem uninterested in doing their duty toward the middle class, but sometimes we suspect they don’t even want to win.

Do read them both. Frank is perhaps a degree more “shrill” than I am, but I am not going to say he’s wrong.

Just this morning I saw a paid ad on social media with Nancy Pelosi asking for donations to help the Democrats “protect Obama’s legacy.” I wanted to throw rocks at her.  Not that I wouldn’t give a lot to just put everything back to where it was before Trump took office, but I always saw “Obama’s legacy” — which was mostly Obamacare — as just provisional, just a foot in the door that might be built into something better. But the establishment Dems want to sell it as the whole pie and not just a taste.

For your daily dose of Why Trump is a Pile of Crap, do read ‘Deleted’ families: What went wrong with Trump’s family-separation effort.