This is why Trump can attack the media, and see his poll numbers rise

Because the media, by and large, are a bunch of lying Democrat partisan hacks with no shame and even fewer morals.

The media reaction to both the redacted Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) wiretap applications and President Trump’s tweets was pure gaslighting. They claimed the FISA applications hurt the critics’ case. It wasn’t that they reported the news that critics of the FISA application felt vindicated while defenders of the wiretap applications also felt vindicated. They wrote as partisans in a war with those skeptical of FISA abuse.
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This is part of a pattern for the media when they encounter facts related to the surveillance of the Trump campaign. When Department of Justice officials leaked to the media that they had run at least one informant against the Trump campaign, a breathtaking admission by any sense of news judgment, the news was buried in the middle of the story and completely downplayed. 

Others joined in with the gaslighting, spending weeks arguing — and I’m not joking here — that running a secret government informant against a campaign is not spying on a campaign.

She then goes on to list the facts as they are, and they are damning.  The Obama administration weaponized the government in order to help Clinton win the election, which explains why so many of them were shell-shocked when she lost.  They had literally broken the law in order to drag her sick, coughing corpse over the finish line, and they still failed.

And now the same media that was slavishly giving Obama's scrotum a tongue-bath every single day, and who worships the ground that Felonia von Pantsuit walks on, is out for blood.  And so they lie, lie, and lie again in their attacks against Trump.  Watching CNN is painful.  Sitting in airports last week made me want to take a baseball bat to every TV in the place.  I can only imagine the fever swamps of MSNBC right now.

So when Trump calls the media the Fake News, and a pack of liars, well...  the reason the public responds to that is because the media is a pack of liars peddling Fake News.  I think I saw John Nolte say it first:  We, the Normal Americans, have been waiting decades for a President to treat the press with the disrespect it deserves.  Oh, some NY newspaper is laying people off?  Fuck 'em.  Maybe if they weren't just another pack of lying, anti-Trump, anti-American jackoffs, they wouldn't be going out of business.  Now extrapolate that out to all the Fake News.  90% of the major newspapers in America could go out of business tomorrow, and I'd cry for the folks who sell paper, but I wouldn't shed one single tear for the "reporters" or "journalists" who get laid off.  And yeah, I put air quotes around those titles.  They're just Democrat activists with by-lines who found a way to get paid for their political activism.  But I ain't buying.