It was May 2014.

I was interviewing then-private citizen Donald Trump for The American Spectator in his Trump Tower office. The subject in general was his view on issues of the day, along with a possible presidential run in 2016. But I had one question in particular that I wanted to ask.

The question: There were a lot of Republicans who felt their presidential nominees, the perpetual targets of the media, never fought back when attacked. Were he to run, not to mention were he elected, would he fight back? And note: the mention of Donald Sterling, the then-owner of the Los Angeles Clippers NBA franchise, revolved around a just-released secret recording of racist remarks made by Sterling to his mistress, who had recorded him and released the tape to the media. It was, for a moment, the news story of the day, and as such Trump was asked to comment in an appearance on Fox and Friends. His response to me as follows, verbatim:

Well, I see firsthand the dishonesty of the press, because probably nobody gets more press than I do. As an example, last week I was on a Fox program, and I very much lambasted Donald Sterling. And then at the very end I said, “On top of which, he has the girlfriend from hell.” And the haters and the very dishonest reporters who have their own agenda, they didn’t cover what I said about Donald Sterling. They only took the girlfriend from hell and they said, “Oh he’s not blaming Donald Sterling. He’s defending Donald Sterling. He’s blaming the girlfriend.”

The press is extremely dishonest. Much of it. Some of it I have great respect for, and they’re great people and honorable people. But there’s a large segment of the press that’s more dishonest than anybody I’ve seen in business or anywhere else. And the one thing you have to do is you have to inform the public. The public has to know about the dishonesty of the press because they are really bad people and they don’t tell the truth and have no intention of telling the truth. And I know who they are and I would expose them 100 percent. And I will be doing that. I mean, as I go down the line, I enjoy exposing people for being frauds and, you know, I would be definitely doing that. I think it’s important to know. Because a lot of the public, they think, oh, they read it in the newspaper, and therefore it must be true. Well many of the things you read in the newspaper are absolutely false and really disgustingly false.

And right there is the key to the White House presidential briefing Monday night. There was now-President Trump using two videos — found right here — filled with clips of one media figure after another suggesting the approaching virus was no more dangerous than the flu. There was an audio clip of New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman saying that yes, in fact, the president’s China travel ban, for which he was widely criticized, had been a good thing, after all. Also featured were Democratic governors praising the president for his actions.

In other words, there was the president fighting back against what in fact has been an “absolutely false and really disgustingly false” portrayal by the media of the president’s response to the coronavirus. True to his word to me that day in 2014, President Trump fought back against a dishonest media that was deliberately, willfully misrepresenting what he had said and done — and more to the point what they themselves had said. So he showcased these two short videos, a major showcasing of just how deceptive the media is.

The instant media reaction was a meltdown. Hysteria. How dare the president have the nerve to fight back at the false portrayals of his actions in this fight against the virus? This was just not to be done!

In a classic move, CNN ran the following chyrons that read as follows:

“Angry Trump Turns Briefings into Propaganda Sessions”

“Trump Refuses to Acknowledge Any Mistakes”

“Trump Uses Task Force Briefing To Try To Rewrite History On Coronavirus Response”