The mainstream media is too used to lies. Now they’re believing their own.
Because an ABC reporter made a dumbfounding comment about Donald Trump that the president had to respond to.
A DISPUTED ACCOUNT ON NATIONAL TELEVISION
It was a heartwarming story when ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl told it on live television the morning after the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner attack. His phone rang early — a landline, at an unusual hour, at a number few people call. And on the other end: President Donald Trump, calling to check on a journalist he has spent years publicly feuding with.
“My phone rang shortly after 7 a.m.… my landline, George, actually a number that few people call, and it was President Trump calling. He said, at first, he was calling to see if I was OK with what happened last night, ‘Are you OK?’ Then he reiterated many of the things he said in his press conference,” Karl told anchor George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week.”
The problem with the story, according to President Trump: it didn’t happen.
“Jonathan Karl, of ABC Fake News, made a statement that I called him early in the morning, the day after the assassination attempt, to ask whether or not HE was OK. No, this was a hit on ME, not HIM, and I didn’t make such a call, why would I do that? He called me, but I didn’t take his call — He just confirmed that to me when he called again. I would say that’s very dishonest reporting,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
The president, rarely one to leave a point unmade, continued: “He’s trying to make himself look important but, I’m not surprised, because it comes from ABC Fake News!”
THE BROADER CONTEXT: A NETWORK WITH CREDIBILITY PROBLEMS
For ABC News, the timing is particularly uncomfortable. The network is already under pressure from multiple directions. The FCC has announced a review of ABC’s broadcast licenses in connection with a separate DEI-related probe. Trump has been publicly demanding the firing of late-night host Jimmy Kimmel over a widely condemned joke. And the network is still living down a $15 million defamation settlement from 2025, reached after anchor George Stephanopoulos — the same anchor who aired Karl’s disputed account — repeatedly and incorrectly characterized Trump as having been found “liable for rape” in a civil trial. ABC paid an additional $1 million in Trump’s legal fees as part of that settlement.
Into that fraught institutional environment steps a story about a White House correspondent claiming the president called him the morning after an armed gunman attempted to kill the president and members of his Cabinet, at an event attended by thousands of Washington’s press and political elite — and the president’s response is a flat denial and an accusation of dishonesty.
ABC News did not respond to requests for comment. The story remains unresolved: two diametrically contradictory accounts, one from a prominent journalist claiming a conciliatory gesture, one from the president calling it an invention. What is unambiguous is that one of them is not telling the truth — and given ABC’s recent track record with factual claims about this president, many Americans will have little difficulty deciding which account they find more plausible.
WHAT THE WHCA ATTACK ACTUALLY WAS
Lost in the dispute over the phone call is the magnitude of what actually occurred at the Washington Hilton on April 25. Cole Allen, 31, is now facing federal charges of attempting to assassinate the President of the United States after allegedly rushing past a Secret Service checkpoint and opening fire one floor below where Trump and multiple senior Cabinet officials were attending the gala. Authorities have identified an alleged manifesto indicating that Allen intended to target the president and members of his administration over political grievances — an act of politically motivated violence that, in a saner media environment, would command far more sustained attention than a disputed early-morning phone call between a president and a reporter who has spent years portraying him as a threat to democracy.
