A White House reporter President Donald Trump berated in the Oval Office is firing back with a scathing account of the president's meltdown.
Andrew Feinberg, White House correspondent for The Independent, published a first-person piece Tuesday detailing how an event meant to unveil the Trump administration's new fraud tip line turned into a personal attack on him after he questioned the program.
Trump and Vice President JD Vance had rolled out a plan offering whistleblowers rewards of up to $30,000, or 1 percent of the recovered funds, for exposing what the Trump administration considers fraud. Feinberg noted the program was pitched as something new, even though a Civil War-era law, the False Claims Act, already lets whistleblowers sue on the government's behalf and collect as much as a quarter of what's recovered.
"Who could have guessed that Trump would get so spun up over a law that's been on the books since Abraham Lincoln was president?" Feinberg wrote.
He said he asked Trump why anyone would use the new tip line over the existing system. "His response? 'Because it's a lot of money,'" Feinberg wrote, adding that the president "may not have understood the question or was unable to fathom that ten to 25 percent is far more than one percent."
Feinberg said Vance then jumped in to call the question "dishonest," which prompted Trump to ask, "Who are you?" Feinberg wrote that the moment struck him as strange because Trump had winked at him earlier in the event, and the two have crossed paths countless times over the past decade, including phone calls.
The confrontation escalated as Feinberg tried to ask follow-up questions. Trump warned him, "I don't know who the hell you are, but you better be careful," then later called him a "sick person" and said, "I actually think there's something wrong with you."
Feinberg pushed back on social media as clips of the exchange circulated. "I had told him exactly who I was not five minutes before this exchange," he posted on X.
In his piece, Feinberg also took a swipe at the "sick person" insult. "For the record, I had an annual physical earlier this month, and I can report I'm in perfect health," Feinberg wrote.
He closed with a vow to keep showing up. "I was doing my job, and I'll be right back at it tomorrow," he wrote.
I had told him exactly who I was not five minutes before this exchange.
— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) October 20, 2026