“The press is your enemy,” Richard Nixon told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a taped conversation written about by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in a retrospective of the scandal they exposed in The Washington Post. “Enemies. Understand that? … Because they’re trying to stick the knife right in our groin.”

Nixon’s media strategy playbook is being recreated by President Donald Trump, whose anti-media tweets continued this morning with this amazing gif image:

#FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017

The tweet occurred during the “This Week” Sunday morning show on ABC, and caught the panelists off guard.

“I know a lot of people who work for CNN who have to be scared and wondering why the president has decided to physically pummel someone wearing the CNN logo on his face,” said Jake Sherman, senior writer, Politico.

“Nobody at CNN is scared,” chimed in CNN correspondent Ana Navarro. “If anything, this is making each and every one of us more resolute not to cower at the bullying of this president. This is a free press, this is a free country, this is a democracy, and if he thinks with these tricks he is going to scare anyone at CNN, he’s got something different coming. We are resolute to continue searching the truth, speaking the truth, and calling out right versus wrong.”

Host Martha Raddatz then said, “I’m sitting here thinking, what do Americans think when they look at that?”

What the gif image shows is a video of Trump appearing in a professional wrestling entertainment event, Wrestlemania XXIII:

We can only guess at this point what point Trump may have been trying to make — perhaps that CNN is fake like pro wrestling? The fear of many is that the message many Trump supporters will glean from the tweet is the encouragement of physical assault of media members.

Roger Stone, a Trump confidant, also worked in the 1972 Richard Nixon re-election campaign famous for “dirty tricks.” It is fair to suggest that Stone has shared Nixon’s rationale and strategies for diminishing the credibility of the media.

There is no question the media has brought much of the credibility issues it currently faces upon itself. According to the newly released book, “Fixing Post-Truth Politics:”

There once was a time when politicians, Nixon initially being one of them, felt sincerity was a virtue. But it was soon realized that clutching to such a concept in the television age was a political death knell. It was manipulation of the media — the message — that was most important.

Trump has taken manipulation of the media to its most extreme form — basically bypassing all of the legacy media except those which he feels are in his corner, and using Twitter to get his messages out to the masses.

The reaction to this tweet in the coming hours and days will be very interesting and telling. We hope that that reaction does not include physically acting out against CNN reporters and other media.