U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday issued a warning to Arizona Republican Senator John McCain, saying “be careful, because at some point I fight back.”

According to Washington Examiner, Trump’s threat followed McCain’s jab at the presidency, mocking Trump’s #MAGA mantra after he received the National Constitution Center’s Liberty Medal in Philadelphia.

• McCain berates the administration

Speaking at the event, McCain said, “To fear the world we have organised and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of Earth’ for the sake of home half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma that Americans co-signed to the ash heap of history”.

• Trump’s warnings

When asked by WMAL’s Chris Plante about the Arizona senator’s comments, Trump said he was being “very, very nice” to McCain, but may not be in the future.

“I hear everything. People have to be careful because at some point, I fight back. I’m being very nice. I’m being very, very nice. But at some point, I fight back, and it won’t be pretty,” Trump warned.

• Trump heaps some blame on the media

The President also used the medium to echo his long standing feud with the media, saying the “dishonesty” of the press surprised him.

Speaking to Plante, he said, “Actually, dishonesty in the media is one of the things that surprised me most,” he said. “I thought after I won, the media would become much more stable and much more honest. They’ve gone crazy. CNN is a joke. NBC is a total joke. You watch what they report. It bears no relationship to what I’m doing. But the media is absolutely dishonest and frankly, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

Further stating his disgust, the President said he had hoped the media would “shape up” once the campaign ended, but said the press has “gotten worse.”

“The New York Times, the Washington Post, they write whatever they want to write. You know, they have an agenda, and we’ll have to figure out what the agenda is, but they do have an agenda,” the president said. “I think that’s one of the biggest surprises, is the level of dishonesty. Interestingly after I won, I said, ‘Well, now I’ll bet the media starts to shape up, and you know, it’s over, so now’ — but it has actually gotten worse than during the campaign”, he added.

Adegbite Adedotun