The journalist whom Donald Trump ordered to be quiet, asked if he was a “sick person” and told “I actually think there’s something wrong with you” during an Oval Office event has hit back at the president.
“For the record, I had an annual physical earlier this month, and I can report I’m in perfect health,” Andrew Feinberg, White House correspondent for The Independent, wrote in a first-person piece published Tuesday.
“I was doing my job, and I’ll be right back at it tomorrow,” he added.
Read Feinberg’s essay at The Independent.
Feinberg chronicled the events leading up to Trump’s verbal attack, which began after the reporter questioned a new program offering financial rewards for reporting fraud against the federal government, flagging how the False Claims Act already gives whistleblowers a share of money recovered in fraud cases for potentially far larger rewards.
“For doing my job, I became the target of Trump and his team. Soon after, Trump lectured and unleashed at me his White House rapid response, who called me a “Mongoloid Moron” — which is a slur for someone with development disabilities, a phrase I would never use — and the Vice President on his official government account labeled me an ‘imbecile,’” he wrote.
Feinberg said he found it strange that Trump asked him to identify himself during the exchange, given their history.
The question “was odd because he had definitely recognized me earlier when he winked at me as Vance delivered remarks earlier in the event,” he wrote. “I’ve been around him in the Oval, aboard Air Force One and elsewhere countless times over the decade I’ve covered him, and we’ve even spoken on the phone on a number of occasions.”
Feinberg also explained how the confrontation appeared to have unfolded:
“Trump appeared to point to me more than once, but on each occasion he had apparently intended to call on the Agence France-Presse reporter directly behind me. Because from my vantage point he was pointing directly at my face, I started to speak up. He didn’t like that.”