In the first 100 days of President Trump’s administration, the Washington Post decided to begin tallying the false and misleading statements made by the white supremacist in chief. According to the newspaper, it needed to do so “largely because we could not possibly keep up with the pace and volume of the president’s misstatements.” As of the two-year mark, according to the Post, Trump has made “8,158 false or misleading claims,” about everyone and everything.
However, this isn’t simply the output of a consistently lying xenophobic fascist. This is the result of a powerful acceleration in the Trump administration’s proliferation of misinformation. Whereas Trump averaged around 5.9 false or “misleading” claims every day in 2017, the Washington Post says that he almost tripled that output in 2018, lying on average 16.5 times every 24 hours.
The content of the bubble of poisoned reality enclosing Trump and those that believe the vomit that passes for his speech has a direct correlation to what he is trying to sell his adoring fanbase. Right now it’s a wall that will solve crime and job loss and the opioid epidemic, and maybe it will give your skin that glow it has lost with age? However, Trump’s proliferation of lies in his second year isn’t the result of the orange racist making up new and more varied lies. It has to do with a big boost in the repetition of his lies and false claims.
“It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas in disguise.”
That’s Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’ opinion of repetition. Goebbels is a likely hero of Trump—and the Republican Party—at least if you believe The Donald’s first wife Ivana’s testimony concerning such things.