In the 2016 presidential campaign, then-candidate Donald Trump dropped the phrase fake news into the national lexicon to tremendous (and disastrous) effect. He understood how much people value the truth as an idea, and how much they despise being lied to.

Trump knew if you can cast doubt in someone about another entity (a person, a politician, party, a segment of the population), if you can make someone believe they’re being misled, they will revolt against the perceived offender and won’t require much, if any, evidence to do so.
Their visceral response to the mere suggestion of deception will be so great that it will supersede both clear logic and measurable proof.
In that state of scalding indignation at the supposed lie being proffered, data, facts, and objective reality will be largely irrelevant in convincing them otherwise, because they’ll inevitably contend that those arguments, too, could be fake. And down the rabbit hole they go.
Throughout the campaign and his young, myth-laden presidency, Trump’s truth-telling rating on https://t.co/9RjYg9hoNZ has continued to hover somewhere between Pants on Fire and Pinocchio.
The Washington Post reported that the president offered false or misleading statements more than two thousand times in his first year in office. And yet he himself ascended to the Oval Office largely by casting doubt on the veracity of his opponents, pundits, and critics.
By painting the media at large as untruthful, and his political adversaries as all compulsive liars, he was able to dismiss any unfavorable words and to convince a good portion of the electorate that he alone would “tell it like it is.”
Leveraging people’s aversion to deception and the resulting paranoia the suggestion breeds, he made them feel he was the only one they could trust.
Once convinced of that, the toxicity of his delivery and the incredibility of his claims were simply accepted by his duped supporters as the hallmarks of being a "straight shooter."

- Hope and Other Superpowers

https://t.co/5GeR6hcb0b

More from Trump

Long thread: Because I couldn’t find anything comprehensive, I’m just going to post everything I’ve seen in the news/Twitter about Trump’s activities related to the Jan 6th insurrection. I think the timing & context of his actions/inactions will matter a lot for a senate trial.

12/12: The earlier DC protest over the electoral college vote during clearly inspired Jan 6th. On Dec 12th, he tweeted: “Wow! Thousands of people forming in Washington (D.C.) for Stop the Steal. Didn’t know about this, but I’ll be seeing them! #MAGA.”


12/19: Trump announces the Jan. 6th event by tweeting, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” Immediately, insurrectionists begin to discuss the “Wild Protest.” Just 2 days later, this UK political analyst predicts the violence


12/26-27: Trump announces his participation on Twitter. On Dec. 29, the FBI sends out a nationwide bulletin warning legislatures about attacks https://t.co/Lgl4yk5aO1


1/1: Trump tweets the time of his protest. Then he retweets “The calvary is coming” on Jan. 6!” Sounds like a war? About this time, the FBI begins visiting right wing extremists to tell them not to go--does the FBI tell the president? https://t.co/3OxnB2AHdr
You’d think that if Pence could overturn the election like Trump claimed then Biden surely would’ve taken up that chance


Also this is such a small thing but one thing I noticed in that Trump campaign ad the defense just ran, there were no citations, unlike every clip that the impeachment managers showed

Michael Van Der Veen is giving us the full Fox News Primetime Defense.

PROCESS ARGUMENT.

DRINK.

Lol my guy this is the chance to rebut the evidence that they’ve presented against Trump.

You May Also Like