Donald Trump's r/The_Donald AMA: eight answers and deleted questions (2016)

On 27 July 2016, in the middle of the Democratic National Convention, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump held a Reddit 'Ask Me Anything' session. Rather than appear on the site-wide r/IAmA, where AMAs traditionally take place under that community's verification and conduct rules, Trump posted on r/The_Donald, the dedicated pro-Trump subreddit run by his supporters. The choice of venue meant the session operated under moderators sympathetic to the campaign rather than the neutral r/IAmA team.

The Hollywood Reporter reported that the thread drew enormous traffic — more than a million users and over twenty thousand comments within the first hour — but that Trump ultimately provided only about eight responses out of the thousands of questions submitted. The campaign attributed the brevity partly to technical problems, including a Wi-Fi interruption while Trump was traveling to Ohio. Several outlets noted the answers were notably thin: one reply to a question about NASA was simply 'I think NASA is wonderful!', and another redirected a question toward 'crooked Hillary Clinton.'

The more pointed criticism concerned moderation. Newsweek and other outlets reported that the session was tightly controlled, with users alleging that comments from newer accounts were automatically removed and that questions on subjects such as Trump's tax returns and Russia were deleted. Because the AMA ran on a fan-operated subreddit, the moderators had broad discretion to filter the thread, and critics argued the format produced a curated promotional exchange rather than the open question-and-answer format the 'Ask Me Anything' brand implies.

Observers across the political spectrum treated the event as an illustration of how the AMA format could be hollowed out. The traditional appeal of an r/IAmA session was the prospect of unscripted, even uncomfortable, questions reaching a public figure directly; staging the event on a friendly subreddit with aggressive moderation reversed that dynamic. A Yahoo write-up characterized the result as resembling a 're-heated press release' rather than a genuine dialogue.

The episode became a recurring reference point in coverage of r/The_Donald, a community that Reddit would later quarantine in 2019 and ban in 2020 over rule-breaking and incitement. The 2016 AMA is best understood as an early, high-profile example of a political campaign using Reddit's most participatory feature as a controlled media appearance — and of how moderator power over a thread shapes what the public is allowed to ask.