“When you see 15,000 people turn on your colleagues behind a rope, yeah, you worry about it,” George Stephanopoulos, the chief anchor for ABC News, told me on Wednesday. Mr. Trump insulted Mr. Stephanopoulos personally in Phoenix while singling out his news organization.

As usual, CNN got the worst of it, facing chants that included “CNN Sucks,” although ABC and CNN both reported that none of their personnel had been threatened physically.

I have to admit that I had started to wonder in the past few weeks what all the presidential inveighing against the news media was actually amounting to. For all of Mr. Trump’s attacks, American journalists have continued their investigative digging, aggressive fact-checking and relentless reporting inside the administration, to impressive effect (See: Flynn, Michael; Trump, Donald Jr.; and, most recently, Icahn, Carl, among many other examples).