Donald Trump suggests the media has been covering up terrorist attacks

Impact

President Donald Trump diverged during scheduled remarks Monday at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, to one of his favorite topics: attacking the national media.

Painting an image of a Western world under constant assault from ISIS and other "radical Islamic terrorists," Trump suggested the media was deliberately failing to report on such terrorist attacks. 

"It's happening," Trump said. "It's gotten to a point where it's not even being reported, and in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn't want to report it. They have their reasons and you understand them."

He declined to specify which attacks in question went unnoticed by the media.

Trump's remarks touched upon five terrorist attacks: 9/11; the Boston Marathon bombings; a massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida; a bomb and gun assault in Paris; and a Bastille Day attacks in Nice, France, involving a truck.

In each of those cases, the attacks were widely reported and covered by the media.

Meanwhile, Trump's team recently invented a past "terrorist attack." In an interview Thursday with MSNBC, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway name-dropped the fictional "Bowling Green massacre" while defending Trump's widely criticized executive order banning refugees and nationals of seven Muslim-majority countries.