Greg Sargent is the author of
An Uncivil War, Taking Back Our Democracy In an Age of Trumpian Disinformation and Tunderdome Politics. In a Twitter thread he talks about
how the nasty guy works.
Trump isn't “twisting the truth” or “stubbornly refusing to admit error.”
Trump is engaged in *disinformation.*
This is a different thing entirely.
The nasty guy’s falsehoods are converted into “alternative facts” through “sheer force of repetition.” But why so much effort to lie?
Why does Trump lie *all the time* about *everything,* even the most trivial, easily disprovable matters?
The frequency and the audacity of Trump’s disinformation is the *whole point* of it -- to wear you down. More and more of the lies slip past, undetected and uncorrected.
…
Those are features of the lying. They are central to declaring the power to say what reality is.
The other crucial half of this is to destroy the credibility of the institutional press.
Previous presidents have tangled with the media. But Trump’s ongoing casting of the press as the "enemy of the people" is in important respects something new.
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