“The level of dishonesty is out of control,” said Trump at the Feb.16 press conference that has been described as a surreal event for a sitting president.

“The press has become so dishonest that if we don’t talk about it,” he said at one point, “we are doing a tremendous disservice to the American people – a tremendous disservice.”

Trump never raised his voice in the hour-plus event, though the tongue lashing was described as a “rant” in various headlines that described his verbal fight with CNN, The New York Times, and other media outlets.

The anti-media hits kept on coming, too: in a Tweet posted last Friday, Trump referred to major news outlets as the “enemy of the people,” calling out The New York Times, NBC News, ABC News, and CNN.

Trump “crossed an important line” by calling the media the enemy of the people, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace said over the weekend.

Wallace went on to stay that Trump has not complained about Fox News – in fact, he’s complimented the right-leaning news channel – but suggested it’s wrong for the President to call any media outlet the “enemy” of the people.

The media is attempting to destroy Trump but it will fail in that attempt, talk radio pioneer Rush Limbaugh told “Fox News Sunday,” The Washington Examiner reported.

The media follows a “blueprint” for destroying Republicans but Trump “doesn’t fit that mold,” said Limbaugh, who has survived attacks from liberals in politics and the mainstream media for two decades.

Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media tells OneNewsNow that Trump has ample reason to go after a biased media, but the President’s anger toward the media last Thursday should be aimed at the leakers inside his administration.

“I know that was a news conference and he was forced to respond to the media,” says Kincaid, “but as we know, the big issue here is the intelligence community going after Trump.”

Just one example of such leaks is an Associated Press story last week alleging the Trump-led White House is studying a plan to use 100,000 National Guard troops to arrest and deport illegal immigrants.

That idea originated at the Department of Homeland Security in a draft memo and never reached the White House, Trump officials later said.

Others who viewed the document said it specifically states criminal illegal aliens would be targeted, not “millions of immigrants” as the AP claimed, and the word “deportation” and the figure of 100,000 troops are not found in the document, The Washington Examiner reported.