1/ This nicely illustrates the hypocritical craving of Trumpists for mainstream intellectual credibility. The Trumpist right loves to talk down expertise, but Dobson, Gorka, and Navarro rountinely hype their doctorates, and Trump loves to talk up Wharton and his ‘very, very large
2/ brain. This should give us a bit of hope. It means that for all the alternative reality-building MAGA does on Fox and talk radio, they know deep down that a lot of it is ridiculous and that mainstream institutions in media and education have a credibility they’ll never match.
3/ They are lying to themselves and built a media/think-tank ecosphere to reflect that lying back to them. But it can’t compete in the real world of, say, graduate education, or NYT fact-checking. That they spend so much time running those institutions down while also trying to
4/ claim some of those institutions’ credibility via their degrees or when mainstream outlets occasionally agree with them, admits that at least the clever MAGA pundit does know MAGA world is a fakery. Reality still exists.
