The fake media is trying to silence us. But we will not let them.”

Developments on Day 162 of the Trump Administration:

See also Trump’s “America First” is Becoming “America Alone”

Trump Attacks Media on Twitter and in Speech

[UPDATE 1500 GMT: Donald Trump has illustrated his fight against the media by circulating a reworked video of his appearance at a World Wrestling Entertainment event in April 2007, with the head of his foe, WWE chief Vince McMahon, replaced by a CNN logo:

The “updated” video, embodying Trump’s assault on “fake media”, first appeared on a Reddit thread on Wednesday.

Observers quickly noted that the video is at odds with White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ assertion last week that Trump has never encouraged violence. They also recalled Trump’s encouragement during his campaign of rough treatment for hecklers.]

Donald Trump continues his war on the media, despite accusations of misogyny after his insulting of news presenter Mika Brzezinski.

Trump was widely denounced — including by Republican legislators — for his tweets about “crazy Mika” and her “Morning Joe” co-presenter and husband Joe Scarborough (“psycho Joe” to Trump) and the false claim that Brzezinski was bleeding from a facelift when the pair visited Trump’s Florida resort at New Year. The messages recalled the attention in the 2016 Presidential campaign to Trump’s hostility towards women, including his insults of female journalists, his boasting of sexual aggression, and first-hand testimonies from more than a dozen women of inappropriate advances.

Then on Friday, Scarborough said on Morning Joe that the White House had attempted to blackmail him and Brzezinski into better coverage of Trump, with three officials asserting that the President could quash a story about the couple in the tabloid National Enquirer.

See VideoCast: “Burn It Down” — From Trump’s War on Women to His War on the Media
Podcast: The Muslim Ban & Trump’s Attack on Mika Brzezinski

But far from retreating, Trump renewed the attack soon after he awoke on Saturday. Following a tweet on Canada Day for “my new found friend” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Trump accused NBC — the network featuring “Morning Joe” — of releasing another presenter, Greta van Susteren, “because she refused to go along w/ “Trump hate!”. He blasted CNN as “fake news” and “garbage journalism”. Then he turned again to Brzezinski and Scarborough:

A few hours later, Trump appeared to sent a message not only to the media but also to some of his own White House staff, who have been trying to keep the President off Twitter.

And in the evening, Trump used an address to a rally at the Kennedy Center — intended to celebrated US veterans and freedom — for his assault.

Returning to Washington briefly from his long July 4 weekend at his golf club in New Jersey, Trump said:

The fake media is trying to silence us. But we will not let them. Because the people know the truth. The fake media tried to stop us from going to the White House. But I’m president and they’re not.

Trump’s Frustration Over His Election Fraud Panel

Trump also used Twitter on Saturday to express his frustration that up to 25 states will not give data to his Presidential Advisory Commission on Voter Integrity, purportedly established to investigate election fraud:

The panel, chaired by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, was established last week with an initial meeting set for July 19. However, the states — beginning with the Governors of Virginia and New York and officials from Kentucky — said they would not hand over individuals’ information, in part because of privacy concerns and in part because of their belief that the panel was trying to rationalize Trump’s unsupported claims of “millions” of illegal votes for Hillary Clinton last November.

The criticism was bipartisan, with Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, saying, “My reply would be: They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.”

There have been few cases of voter fraud in Federal elections in recent years. Instead, critics worry that Trump and his allies may be using the panel to justify voter suppression.

Kobach has suffered repeated defeats in courts over his attempts to establish his Crosscheck program, with judges expressing concern about suppression of legitimate voters.

EPA Head Pruitt Shreds Regulations, Working With Industry and Lobbyists Rather Than Staff

The New York Times describes how Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt — a foe of the EPA as Oklahoma Attorney General — is shredding environmental regulations without consulting staff:

Since February, Mr. Pruitt has filed a proposal of intent to undo or weaken Mr. Obama’s climate change regulations, known as the Clean Power Plan. In late June, he filed a legal plan to repeal an Obama-era rule curbing pollution in the nation’s waterways. He delayed a rule that would require fossil fuel companies to rein in leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from oil and gas wells. He delayed the date by which companies must comply with a rule to prevent explosions and spills at chemical plants. And he reversed a ban on the use of a pesticide that the E.P.A.’s own scientists have said is linked to damage of children’s nervous systems.

In a sign of both Mr. Pruitt’s influence in the White House and the high regard in which Mr. Trump holds him, he will take a leading role in devising the legal path to withdraw from the 194-nation Paris agreement on climate change, a job that would typically fall to lawyers at the State Department.

And he is doing all this largely without the input of the 15,000 career employees at the agency he heads, according to interviews with over 20 current and former E.P.A. senior career staff members….

Instead, Mr. Pruitt has outsourced crucial work to a network of lawyers, lobbyists and other allies, especially Republican state attorneys general, a network he worked with closely as the head of the Republican Attorneys General Association. Since 2013, the group has collected $4.2 million from fossil fuel-related companies like Exxon Mobil, Koch Industries, Murray Energy and Southern Company, businesses that also worked closely with Mr. Pruitt in many of the 14 lawsuits he filed against the EPA.

Within the agency, Mr. Pruitt relies on the counsel of a small network of political appointees, including a number of former lobbyists and senior industry officials. For example, he tapped Nancy Beck, previously a policy director for the American Chemistry Council, which lobbies on behalf of companies such as Dow and DuPont, to oversee the E.P.A. office charged with enforcing regulations on hazardous chemicals.