President-Elect Donald Trump Cancels Meeting With New York Times on Twitter, Says They're 'Not Nice' (UPDATE)

President-elect Donald Trump abruptly canceled a meeting with the New York Times over Twitter, saying they changed the conditions and are "not nice."

Donald Trump 60 Minutes
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Image via CBS/The CW

Donald Trump 60 Minutes

UPDATED 11/22/16, 10:10 a.m. ET:

CNN is now reporting that, hours after canceling the meeting, Donald Trump will meet with the New York Times after all. Press secretary Hope Hicks said Trump was heading over to the meeting at around 9:45 a.m. As originally planned, part of the meeting will be an on-the-record interview. "Mr. Trump's staff has told us that the President-elect's meeting with The Times is on again," New York Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy said in a statement. "He will meet with our publisher off-the-record and that session will be followed by an on-the-record meeting with our journalists and editorial columnists."

See below for original story.

The tough guy president-elect who wants to Make America Great Again has embarrassed himself with yet another petty Twitter rant. This time, he didn't lose his cool over a play or television show, but a newspaper. The New York Times previously printed pages-worth of Donald Trump's Twitter insults, and now the president-elect has added a handful of other insults against the paper to that list. On Tuesday morning, Trump went on a Twitter tirade in which he abruptly canceled a scheduled meeting with the New York Times and took a series of shots at the prestigious paper.

According to the Associated Press, Trump—along with chief of staff Reince Priebus, his daughter Ivanka, and top advisor Kellyanne Conway—was scheduled to meet with New York Times' reporters, editors, and columnists on Tuesday. Not only did Trump cancel the meeting—he did so over Twitter. Early this morning, Trump tweeted:

He at least gave the NYT a heads-up before, right? Nah:

The NYT is also denying Trump's accusations against them. While Trump claimed "the terms and conditions of the meeting were changed at the last moment," the NYT denies that and said it was actually Trump's team who tried to change the rules. NYT spokesperson Eileen Murphy said, "We did not change the ground rules at all and made no attempt to. They tried to yesterday—asking for only a private meeting and no on-the-record segment, which we refused to agree to. In the end, we concluded with them that we would go back to the original plan of a small off-the-record session and a larger on-the-record session with reporters and columnists."

In addition to the tweet canceling the meeting and calling the NYT "not nice," Trump fired off a few more insults at the paper, saying they cover him "inaccurately and with a nasty tone!" (I guess that means The Gray Lady is, like Hillary Clinton, a "nasty woman.")

Then he fired off another tweet, going back to his usual description of the NYT as "failing."

The New York Times' public editor Liz Spayd did write last week that, during the presidential election, "the number of complaints coming into the public editor’s office is five times the normal level." Notably the letters, which are coming in at one of the highest rates since 9/11, are not necessarily criticism of the New York Times—many of them commented on the presidential election itself.

Furthermore, contrary to Trump's claims that the paper is "failing," the New York Timessaw a huge increase in subscriptions following the election.

Donald Trump has been a consistent critic of the New York Times. Trump has tweeted complaints about the paper more than 60 times and counting since he entered the presidential race. Of those, according to the Washington Post, "every case where we could link Trump's tweets back to his complaints, the Times' reporting has held up." Of course, though, the truth has never been all that important to Trump.

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