The New York Times is flush with new cash thanks to increasing subscriptions, and the paper's executive editor says President Trump is to thank.

"Trump is the best thing to happen to the Times' subscription strategy," said Dean Baquet, executive editor of the Times on CNN Sunday. "Every time he tweets it drives subscriptions wildly."

He added, "Our digital subscriptions are through the roof, our print subscriptions are up."

Trump has long derided the Times for critical coverage of his campaign and administration, deeming it the "failing New York Times" whenever he speaks about the paper publicly.

Baquet said Trump's criticism of the Times is not aimed at fairly critiquing the paper's work, but instead he wants to make the paper's reputation fall to the point that voters will not trust it anymore.

"If you look at the pattern of the president's tweets, they're actually designed to minimize the institutions who are charged with holding him accountable, and I think that's dangerous," he said.

Baquet defended the paper's usage of anonymous sources, which was slammed by Trump in a speech on Friday, as a useful way to hold the powerful accountable.

Baquet said Trump has often been an anonymous source himself. Reports during the campaign indicated Trump used to call up reporters posing as his own spokesman to plant stories in gossip pages in New York during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

"In an administration that has expressed so much distaste for the press and so much distaste for our role, are you surprised that some of the people who want to criticize the administration want to do it without their names attached?" Baquet said. "I'm not."

He added, "He's been an anonymous source throughout his career, especially when it helped him and when it burnished his reputation," Baquet said.