President Donald Trump Friday was trying to collect supporters' input on the media outlets he has spent that last few days trying to delegitimize. First issuing a survey, then a follow-up email, saying the Democrats and the media were attacking it viciously and Democrats were trying to sabotage it.
"You know that I don’t trust the media to report on anything we achieve," he said in an email. "Instead, you—the American people—are our last line of defense against the media’s hit jobs." He said he needed that input to help fight the media's "attacks and deceptions." The email includes asking whether Republicans—the Republican National Committee also sponsored the survey—should marshal more resources to fight the media, "Do you believe that our Party should spend more time and resources holding the mainstream media accountable," it asks.
The Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a joint fundraising committee of Donald J. Trump for President and the Republican National Committee, issued the Mainstream Media Accountability Survey, which included leading questions like "Do you agree with President Trump’s media strategy to cut through the media’s noise and deliver our message straight to the people?" and "Do you believe that if Republicans were obstructing Obama like Democrats are doing to President Trump, the mainstream media would attack Republicans?"
The survey was getting a lot of coverage online and on cable news as the capper on a week when the President, in his first news conference, called both The New York Times and Wall Street Journal disgraceful and failing, though he said the Journal was not quite as disgraceful and failing, and upped his dismissal of CNN from "fake news" to "very fake news."
In the wake of that attention, the Republicans sent out a second email later Friday, saying that since the initial email survey solicitation "mainstream media outlets have viciously attacked it… and thousands of Democrats have taken it to try to sabotage the results."
