Getty/Chip Somodevilla This article originally appeared on Media Matters. President Donald Trump’s defenders are attacking the media, claiming that his recent comments — in which he called some undocumented immigrants “animals” in response to a question about suspected members of the gang MS-13 — were taken out of context. But The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman explained that attacking the media for reporting on his vague, often racially coded statements has been a core part of Trump’s playbook since at least 2015. During a roundtable discussion on May 16 about California’s so-called sanctuary laws, Trump responded to a vague, hypothetical comment about suspected MS-13 members from a local sheriff by saying, “We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — we’re stopping a lot of them.