The popularizer of “fake news” conspired to create it
Projection. Long has the left used that term to describe conservative accusations against the left. When Republicans allege the left commits some infraction against, what — Decency? Patriotism? Rule of law? Election integrity? — then likely they themselves are secretly or more subtly doing the same.
Inoculation is the underlying purpose. Loudly and often accuse your opponent of misbehavior in which you engage so that if ever caught in the act you can both-sides the affair. “Well, they do it too.”
Fake news is another Donald Trump effort at inverting reality. Trump, authoritarian-in-training, has long attempted bending reality to his will. His inauguration crowd was not more bigly than Barack Obama’s? Photographs prove it? Fake news! His team would present “alternative facts” they knew were untrue but were the Trump-approved version of history. Period!
Now on trial on criminal charges in Manhattan, Trump has summoned the MAGA cult, as he did on Jan. 6, 2021, to come by the thousands to protest unfairness like you’ve never seen. Only a handful of pro-Trump protesters answered the call on Monday.
Ah, but that is fake news! Time to invert reality again.
Trump on Tuesday repeated his summons when supporters failed to show up for the second day of his trial. They were out there, Trump insisted, but complained that “for blocks , you can’t get near this courthouse.” By the thousands MAGA cultists were kept away from the courthouse by a massive police cordon!
Reporter Vaughn Hillyard captured what Tuesday actually looked like outside the New York courthouse.
Inside the courthouse, what testimony by David Pecker, former publisher of The National Enquirer, revealed is that Trump and Pecker conspired in 2016 both to suppress stories harmful to Trump and to publish fabricated stories harmful to his primary opponents.
From The New York Times:
Prosecutors called it the “Trump Tower conspiracy,” arguing that Mr. Pecker, Mr. Trump and Michael D. Cohen, who was then Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer, hatched a plot at the meeting to conceal sex scandals looming over Mr. Trump’s campaign.
Their effort led Mr. Pecker’s tabloids to buy and bury two damaging stories about Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen purchased the silence of a porn star, a deal at the heart of the case against the former president.
Trump asked Pecker and his tabloids “to help the campaign,” to “catch and kill” stories harmful to Trump’s political fortunes. That was the suppress-the-truth part of the conspiracy. Then came the damage-opponents part:
The tabloid, for example, ran stories about Mr. Trump’s primary opponents, including Ben Carson, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. The prosecutors illustrated the point for jurors, posting several lurid headlines on screens: “Donald Trump Blasts Ted Cruz’s Dad for Photo with J.F.K. Assassin,” “Bungling Surgeon Ben Carson left Sponge in Patient’s Brain!” and, in a moment of ironic foreshadowing, “Ted Cruz Shamed by Porn Star.”
Stories Pecker fabricated on Trump’s behalf are, in Trump’s parlance, fake news. Trump’s fake news claims are, in Pee Wee Herman’s schoolyard vernacular, a case of he who smelt it, dealt it.
That is the supreme irony of what we have learned so far in the Trump trial. The man who popularized “fake news” for discrediting unfavorable stories, the man who insists on bending reality to his will, was himself complicit in creating and disseminating phony stories. Trump was accusing opponents of exactly what he and his confederates were engaged in.
That fact didn’t escape notice by comedian Trae Crowder, the “Liberal Redneck”:
I do think it’s kind of poetic that while [Trump] was out in public popularizing the concept of fake news, at that same time, behind the scenes he had a full fake news team making fake news arrangements with Big Fake News in an effort to fake as much news as possible. Just kind of sums him up, I think.
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