Thread by @johnpavlovitz

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 PolitiFact.com 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

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