Though Trump is a thousand times more vile than those passing the latter, there's no difference between Trump's "plane loaded with thugs" conspiracy theory—NBC calls it a "months-old rumor"—and the #TrumpStroke "news." Neither is factual or worth our time. nbcnews.com/politics/polit…
When we on the left turn reasonable observations on Trump's occasionally odd physical behavior into ironclad "breaking news" claims about a supposed stroke—and can't see the difference between making observations and falsely claiming media has reported their explanation—we lose.
That Trump took an insane conspiracy-theory rumor he saw on far-right social media and turned it into a false claim of him having special presidential intel in an interview with Fox News is a signal that he'd love nothing more than for his opponents to start acting the same way.
I'm *not* making the old "When they go low, we go high" argument. I'm saying that Trump's long history of pretending that garbage he saw on social media is "reported news" cannot and must not be *normalized*. And the only way for us to help him normalize it is to do it ourselves.
When I called out Don Winslow and Zev Shalev for spreading rumors as "news"—which 10,000+ retweeted them doing, and celebrated—not only wouldn't they respond to criticism or amend their claims, I got attacked by people who just want to read as "news" what they *feel* as opinion.
The reason I curated 12,000 major-media cites across the 2,500 pages of the Proof series is because—while I often express my feelings here on Twitter—my feelings aren't news. While I enjoy expressing them, they have no place—outside a few spots in the epilogues—in my Trump books.
There's certainly public evidence that we have all seen suggesting that Trump has a neurological issue. There's no problem with people pointing out some of those signals so long as we all agree that we don't know what's going on because the White House has—provably—lied about it.
Things are about to get hairier in the US than we've ever seen in our lifetimes. Even worse than it's been—which seems impossible. If we go into this preternaturally dark period in American history confusing our mere feelings and observations with reported news, we're in trouble.
At times I've made mistakes here—because I'm human. Sometimes when I or others caught them, I immediately fixed them. Other times I whined for 15 minutes before accepting the inevitable. I'm very suspicious of those who don't respond at all when they've clearly posted false info.
It may be that Trump had a series of strokes. Or it may be that there was a fear he had a virus back when he was ill in November 2019 and the White House had just gotten intel on COVID-19. Or something else. Until we know, all we can report are pieces of evidence—not conclusions.
