Carefully screened

At Trump's 'Ask Me Anything,' questions get carefully screened

By Tyler Pager

Donald Trump on Wednesday hosted an "Ask Me Anything" session on Reddit, a typically freewheeling session aimed at providing public figures an opportunity to interact directly with readers.

But at Trump's AMA, the audience wasn't allowed to ask Trump just anything.

The AMA was hosted in a thread of Trump supporters where only established Reddit users could ask questions. The rules of the AMA stated any comments from brand new or inexperienced users were automatically deleted. Additionally, questions were first sent to a Trump aide by the thread's moderators.

Trump ended up answering 13 questions over the course of the roughly hour-long session.

In outlining the security measures for the forum, the moderators borrowed a line from Trump to explain their approach.

“For this AMA we have temporarily taken extra security measures to keep our community free from troublemakers,” they wrote. “We built the wall 10 ft taller, you might say.”

That's a contrast from how such AMA sessions typically go. Most AMAs are hosted in a channel exclusively for these types of Q&A sessions. For example, both President Barack Obama and Sen. Bernie Sanders have hosted their own AMAs in that channel where any user can pose a question.

"The left wing subreddits were openly planning to crash the AMA," one of the moderators of the forum told POLITICO in an email when asked why extra security measures were put in place. "We took steps to make sure that the AMA was not disrupted."

The moderator, who declined to provide his full name but operates under the username /u/TheModelRedditor, said the AMA came out of a discussion with Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign’s digital director.

A four-page memo of the AMA pitch to the Trump campaign shows the Reddit moderators felt Trump’s participation would help him reach the millennial demographic with “Trump’s own message” and interact with users “without the filter of the biased mainstream media.”

The moderator added that questions were fed to Parscale for Trump to answer and no topics were prohibited. Parscale did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump, who participated in the AMA while on the plane to a rally in Ohio, landed some punchy answers during the sessions.

In response to a question about how to keep money out of politics, for example, Trump wrote, “Keeping Crooked Hillary Clinton out of the White House!”

On which president he admires the most, he said, “There have been many amazing Presidents in American history, including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, all of whom I greatly admire."

Another questioner asked if Trump was "tired of winning." He was not.

"I am never tired of winning, and as your president I will win for you, the American people. I'm with you!"he replied.

Despite the relatively few and short answers, moderators said they were pleased with the AMA.

“The AMA was a tremendous success,” the lead moderator told POLITICO. “At one point we had more than 60,000 users at our subreddit. We were brigaded hard by left wing trolls but our moderator team handled everything.”

"The left wing subreddits were openly planning to crash the AMA," the moderator said. "We took steps to make sure that the AMA was not disrupted."