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The president is unhappy with the network’s reporting on the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
President Trump called NBC “fake news” for their report on nuclear weapons in remarks to the press from the Oval Office on Wednesday.
NBC reported earlier Wednesday that the president had asked for a tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear stockpile:
President Donald Trump said he wanted what amounted to a nearly tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during a gathering this past summer of the nation’s highest-ranking national security leaders, according to three officials who were in the room.
Trump’s comments, the officials said, came in response to a briefing slide he was shown that charted the steady reduction of U.S. nuclear weapons since the late 1960s. Trump indicated he wanted a bigger stockpile, not the bottom position on that downward-sloping curve.
“That was just fake news by NBC, which gives a lot of fake news lately,” he said.
Trump denied that he ever asked for such an increase in the arsenal. Instead, he said that he only asked for modernization of the stockpile.
“It’s frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write,” he added.