The country that has given him so much — given him so much opportunity — is not a place he apparently likes very much these days.

Or likes at all.

That’s right: CNN correspondent Jim Acosta recently referred to the United States as a “vicious, nasty country.”

Criticizing President Donald Trump’s putdown of most of the media as the “enemy of the people” — which, not coincidentally, is the title of Acosta’s new book — the reporter ripped the president.

He told an audience, “I throw my beer cans at the TV screen” when Trump appears on the television.

Nice. 

“Do you remember, Bill, when we used to say, ‘I’d like to leave this country better off [for] our kids and our grandkids?” Acosta reportedly said to liberal journalist Bill Press during a speech at the Hill Center in Washington, D.C., last week.

“Does anybody say that anymore?” asked Acosta.

The correspondent maintained that the lives of Americans had degenerated into “viciousness,” adding ridiculously, “We’ve become a vicious, nasty country.”

Related: Jim Acosta Tries (and Fails) to Mock Trump

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He also expanded on that line, according to The Daily Caller: “I think we also have to take stock of what we’re doing at home, what we’re doing in our communities, what’s happening in our daily lives that is contributing to this culture of just viciousness.”

Acosta said this as well: “And my concern is — is that we’re tearing each other apart. And this is the country I love to — my dad, as I said earlier, came over to this country from Cuba — came over here in 1962, three weeks before the Cuban missile crisis. Moved to Northern Virginia, which is where I grew up. I’m a Fairfax County native. I was born at Fairfax County hospital. My mom was born at the Washington Women’s Hospital in Georgetown. Her parents are buried at Arlington National Cemetery.”

“And my dad tells me the story that when he came to this country, he was taken out of the classroom by a teacher who would teach him how to read and write English. There was a Presbyterian church in Vienna, Virginia, that gave my dad and my grandmother coats and sweaters so they could stay warm in their first winter here in the D.C. area. They had never been cold before.”

The CNN reporter has become known more for his clashes with Trump and the Trump White House more than his work, in many cases.

Last year Acosta lost his press pass temporarily after he got into an altercation with a White House intern during a press conference.

He refused to give the microphone back to her after he asked a question of Trump — and instead hung onto it far beyond the appropriate time.

He has repeatedly tried to bait the president or members of the administration in his questioning — and almost always bakes in an opinion or a provocative point of view in his “questioning.”.

Back in June, Acosta shared this comment: “To our friends in conservative media … I say this: It is no guarantee that you get to stay in power forever. And so, another administration could come in and do the very same thing to them and say, ‘Well, Donald Trump did it. Guess what, we’re going to do it to you, too.'”

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