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On 7 April 2017, one day after President Trump ordered a missile strike against Syria in response to a deadly chemical weapons attack on civilians carried out by the Bashar al-Assad regime, some anti-Trump news and opinion web sites posted articles declaring that the White House admitted that the attack was nothing more than a publicity stunt. NewCenturyTimes.com reported: PoliticsUSA.com stated: The only evidence advanced by either source to support these claims was a pair of tweets sent by CNN reporter Jim Acosta on the morning of 7 April: So in other words, there was no thought or plan put into this strike, NewCenturyTimes.com concluded on the basis of Acosta's tweets. This was Trump’s way of saying 'hey, look what I can do.' Similarly, PoliticsUSA.com took Acosta's reports as evidence that the missile strike was an empty gesture (a phrase to which the author resorts three paragraphs in a row): On the question of whether or not President Trump's military action against Syria was an empty gesture or a publicity stunt we take no position, but we find nothing in Jim Acosta's tweets to support these judgments. Acosta reported two unambiguous statements from a White House source: 1) the strike wasn't the beginning of a wider campaign to weaken or remove Assad, and 2) its mission was to demonstrate to Assad that his actions were unacceptable. Neither can be accurately characterized as an admission, much less that of an empty gesture or publicity stunt.
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