The presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, said that he had raised $5.6 million for veterans.  He called a news conference ostensibly to answer questions about his fund-raising for charities that benefit military veterans. But Donald J. Trump instead spent most of his time on live television Tuesday berating the journalists covering his presidential campaign in unusually vitriolic and personal terms.  “You’re a sleaze,” he told a reporter for ABC.  “You’re a real beauty,” he told a reporter for CNN, snidely denigrating the man’s competence.  For 40 minutes, Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, assailed those reporting on his candidacy with a level of venom rarely seen at all, let alone in public, from the standard-bearer of a major political party. Then he warned that a Trump White House would feature more of the same.  Historians reached back to the Nixon administration, with its reporter-stocked enemies list, for a fair comparison. Other scholars and political analysts suggested that Mr. Trump failed to appreciate the role journalists play in scrutinizing candidates as surrogates for the public, or drew connections to his denunciations of other adversaries and critics — like a federal judge in a case where Mr. Trump is being sued, or the Republican governor of New Mexico, whom Mr. Trump denigrated while campaigning in her state last week.  Mr. Trump’s broadside was especially provocative given that concerns have been raised throughout the campaign about whether the news media collectively have failed to subject his candidacy to enough scrutiny and skepticism.  The particular knot in which Mr. Trump entangled himself on Tuesday had come to light through simple fact-checking.  In January, fuming at Fox News, he skipped the final Republican debate before the Iowa caucuses because that network was hosting it. He held his own competing event, a televised fund-raiser that he said would benefit military veterans, and announced from the stage that he had raised more than $6 million, including $1 million he was donating himself.  But the full amount did not materialize quickly, and The Washington Post reported a week ago that Mr. Trump had yet to make his own donation.  In his news conference, Mr. Trump produced and read aloud a list of charitable groups and the exact amounts he said each had received, interrupting himself frequently to condemn individual journalists, the news media in general, or political reporters as an exceptionally odious class.  “Unbelievably dishonest,” he called them.  To show that he had finally made his own million-dollar donation, Mr. Trump produced a photocopy of a check. (His litany of recipients glossed over an admission that his January boast had indeed been an exaggeration: All told, he said, $5.6 million has been provided to or earmarked for charities so far.)  “The press should be ashamed of themselves,” Mr. Trump said. Veterans are “calling me, and they are furious,” he said, adding, “You make me look very bad.”  Kathleen Hall Jamieson, an expert on the presidency and director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said Mr. Trump appeared to be making assumptions about journalism that were “so faulty as to be bizarre.”  “The notion that the press would be writing stories praising him for keeping a promise he made in public to veterans, months after he made the promise, suggests he simply does not understand the function of the press,” she said.  While Donald J. Trump explained his aid for charities that help military veterans, a group of veterans expressed disapproval of comments he has made.  And the president of the National Press Club, Thomas Burr, issued a blistering statement suggesting that Mr. Trump “misunderstands — or, more likely, simply opposes — the role a free press plays in a democratic society.”  “Any American political candidate who attacks the press for doing its job is campaigning in the wrong country,” Mr. Burr said.  Mr. Trump has routinely treated journalists as foils, and those covering his campaign appearances as unwitting, unspeaking extras good for a joke or two.  On Tuesday, however, reporters played a sharply different role, repeatedly pressing him for answers.  Why had he waited so long to make his own donation? Several times, Mr. Trump said that it had taken time to scrutinize charities to make sure they were legitimate, though the recipient of his $1 million check was a group well known to him: Its vice chairman is the managing director of the Trump SoHo hotel, and the group gave Mr. Trump an award last year.  Strangely, Mr. Trump also suggested that the delays somehow owed to a desire to keep a low profile.  “I didn’t want the credit for it,” he said, adding moments later, “I’m not looking for credit.”  Yet Mr. Trump had announced his fund-raising for veterans on national television in January and had trumpeted it several times since, a reporter countered. Wasn’t that taking credit?  “I don’t think so,” Mr. Trump replied tersely, quickly taking another question.  In the past, Mr. Trump has used evasive maneuvers to sidestep difficult questions and made less-than-truthful statements that often went unchallenged at the time.  But even after a query about the shooting of a gorilla at an Ohio zoo over the weekend, reporters brought Mr. Trump back to the matter at hand.  If he had intended to deliver a cogent attack on his likely Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, or to promote his plans for how to improve veterans’ assistance as president, his performance squashed it.  The pro-Clinton group Correct the Record responded by saying the performance raised new questions about Mr. Trump’s temperament.  “Under pressure for lying about his monetary support for our veterans, Trump threw a tantrum — hurling insults at reporters instead of owning up to his broken promise to veterans,” the group said in a statement.  “Trump’s failure to face even the tiniest amount of media scrutiny about his supposed support for America’s veterans exposes just how unqualified he is to be our country’s commander in chief.”  But Mr. Trump, in the moment at least, seemed unconcerned.  A reporter asked if Mr. Trump’s demeanor was an indication of what White House news conferences would be like if he were elected.  “Yes, it is,” he said. “It is going to be like this.”  An earlier version of this article misstated, at one point, the date of Donald J. Trump’s news conference. As was correctly noted elsewhere, it took place on Tuesday, not Monday.
Mr. Trump angrily listed veterans’ groups that he said had received $5.6 million in gifts and demanded that journalists credit his act of charity.