Trump Tweets Edited Video Showing Him 'Wrestling' CNN

President Donald Trump tweeted an edited video of himself that shows him wrestling a person to the ground whose head was digitally altered to appear as the CNN logo. The video led many to question whether Trump was encouraging violence against journalists, though his aides pushed back on that narrative.

The doctored video was apparently created by a Reddit user who submitted it to the pro-Trump Reddit thread r/the_donald. The Daily Beast reported that users on the subreddit appeared to congratulate the user who created the video.

The official CNN communications account responded to the president's tweet, quoting deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who had said just days before that the president has never promoted or encouraged violence.

In a lengthier statement released later, CNN said Huckabee Sanders had lied when she said the president had never encouraged or promoted violence.

"Instead of preparing for his overseas trip, his first meeting with Vladmir Putin, dealing with North Korea and working on his healthcare bill, he is instead involved in juvenile behavior far below the dignity of his office," CNN said in a statement. "We will keep doing our jobs. He should start doing his."

As Senate Republicans try to pass their health-care bill — a vote on which was delayed until after the July 4 recess due to opposition from some Republican senators and which polls show is very unpopular among Americans — media coverage has instead been focused on Trump and his tweets. Before tweeting the CNN video, Trump's latest Twitter attack was focused on Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, part of which included a particularly vicious and sexist attack on Brzezinski. The hosts responded to the president, saying he is "not well."

Below is the video Trump tweeted Sunday. It was also retweeted by the official @POTUS twitter account.

"Isn't pro wrestling fake?" CNN's senior White House correspondent Jim Acosta tweeted. The president's son, Donald Trump Jr., who also has a fond habit of tweeting often inflammatory things, responded to Acosta's tweet, saying "yes, just like your coverage."

Ari Fleischer, who served as George W. Bush's press secretary, tweeted that the president's tweet goes too far.

In a series of tweets, Fleischer suggested that the press should treat the president more fairly and that the president should tone things down. Fleischer speculated that the reason the president does this is because the press has made themselves so unpopular.

New York Times journalists Alex Burns and Maggie Haberman, pushed back on Fleischer's suggestion that the press was to blame. Burns noted that media unpopularity was a challenge and if what he was saying was true then other presidents would have acted in the same way. Haberman noted that the New York Post, which is more conservative leaning, wrote an editorial last week regarding Trump's tweet that only consisted of three words: "stop, just stop."

"We condemn the president's threat of physical violence against journalists. This tweet is beneath the office of the presidency. Sadly, it is not beneath this president," Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said in a statement.

In an interview Sunday on ABC This Week, White House homeland security adviser Thomas Bossert, said the video is not a threat and he hopes people don't perceive it as one.

The president and the White House have an incredibly hostile relationship with the press and reporters are often barred from covering events or asking questions. In June, the administration only held seven on-camera press briefings.

Photo by Olivier Douliery-Pool via Getty Images