Donald Trump has a nebulous grasp of the truth. He does. It’s why media originally introduced the term fake news in the first place — to describe the random bullshit he would retweet without vetting — before he and his followers reappropriated the term to mean “liberal news that says things I don’t like” and used it as an alt-right dogwhistle.
This means that his supporters are constantly bombarded with statements that are simply not true about the world, like a dodgy credit card advert, because finding the best credit cards requires work. For example, most recently Trump has earned the ire of the Evil Liberal Media for referring to a non-existence attack in Sweden. “Look what’s happening last night in Sweden,” Trump said at a re-election campaign rally in Florida (yes, you read that correctly — he has already started his re-election campaign).
The problem was no one in Sweden really knew what he was talking about. He later tweeted explaining that he was responding to a Fox News documentary about immigration in Sweden that claimed crime had risen, which he had somehow mistaken for a breaking news report of a terrorist attack.
This follows the well-publicized incident of Kellyanne Conway claiming multiple times that a Bowling Green Massacre had occurred, despite none ever taking place. The incident she was referring to was an FBI sting operation for plans for an attack in the Middle East, which means, in fact, that there was no real danger that ever existed before two assailants were arrested for planning a terrorist attack, let alone a massacre in Bowling Green.
This also follows the time Sean Spicer referred to a mysterious Atlanta incident three times in a press conference before later claiming he was “clearly” referring to the Orlando Pulse shooting.
In other words, Trump’s administration has a stunning total lack of fact checking involved before any representative addresses the news. This is obvious. What is less obvious is whether these are genuine cases of ignorance, or whether this is part of an intentional campaign of misinformation to leave his supporters, the ones he knows will believe anything he says no matter how divorced from reality it is, riled up.
It sounds conspiratorial, but look at the facts. In recent polls, Trump supporters have shown a tendency towards believing false facts like the Bowling Green Massacre that support their worldview. They tend to get all their news from Fox News, never perusing other media and allowing Trump to tell them what the mainstream media is saying (and allegedly lying about) without ever bothering to fact check it. That makes a large portion of the country willingly vulnerable to the misinformation Trump and his White House administration release.
And he’s already started his re-election campaign, telling voters at rallies not to listen to the fake news, listen to him instead. If it isn’t an intentional misinformation campaign, it sure looks like one. Trump is attempting to divorce Americans from the fact checkers that would question his judgment and point out the falsehoods, inaccuracies and misrepresentations of his statements, which means he has little tolerance for them. There’s no obvious solution to the problem, but it’s growing, it’s alarming and it’s headed towards a 2020 re-election.