New York Post:
A former senior reporter at the New York Times has come under fire for an ugly attack on Melania Trump — saying he was “furious” that the first lady is a “foreigner” who “had the audacity to wreck the Rose Garden.”
Kurt Eichenwald — who spent two decades at the Gray Lady — was ripped for a series of tweets in apparent fury at the Slovenia-born first lady’s proud reveal of the freshly renovated White House Rose Garden.
“It is a destruction of our history, something no other First Lady would have had the gall to do,” said the now-bestselling author who was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
“This is the first time I have been furious that @FLOTUS is a foreigner. She has no right to wreck our history,” he said.
The 59-year-old journalist followed it up with a second attack on her immigrant status in a seemingly now-deleted tweet preserved by Fox News.
“I still find it unbelievable that @FLOTUS who has only been a citizen since the middle of GW Bush’s second term had the audacity to wreck the Rose Garden, to pull up history dating back a lifetime,” he wrote.
“These trashy, evil, stupid people need to get out of our house. What GALL she has.”
Eichenwald faced immediate backlash for the tweets — including by other high profile journalists.
“This is a horrible anti-immigrant take, Kurt, and you should delete it and apologize,” replied Mehdi Hasan, a columnist with The Intercept and a host on Al Jazeera.
“Call Melania awful, fine. Call her a hypocrite, fine. But don’t question her naturalized citizenship or suggest immigrants have second-class or inferior citizenship rights to the rest of the citizenry,” he warned.
