Politico has a story up about how part-time White House resident Donald Trump keeps getting fake news delivered to him despite having, at least in theory, access to the most elaborate intelligence-gathering mechanisms the world has to offer. The anecdote it leads with, though, pretty much sums it up.
Just days earlier, K.T. McFarland, the deputy national security adviser, had given Trump a printout of two Time magazine covers. One, supposedly from the 1970s, warned of a coming ice age; the other, from 2008, about surviving global warming, according to four White House officials familiar with the matter.
Trump quickly got lathered up about the media’s hypocrisy. But there was a problem. The 1970s cover was fake, part of an Internet hoax that’s circulated for years. Staff chased down the truth and intervened before Trump tweeted or talked publicly about it.
All right, full stop—the deputy national security adviser, in an effort to bend Trump's brain to her own agenda, delivered to his desk a well-known internet hoax. The deputy national security adviser did this. During the course of her regular duties advising him about national security, for which purpose she has been given access to whichever intelligence resources are necessary, which she can request at will ... or she can just forward on stuff she sees on Breitbart, it's all good.
By golly, I'd say we've stumbled on the problem right there. Part-time White House resident Donald Trump keeps getting fake news delivered to him because he is surrounded by ex-Fox News morons.
You still occasionally run into pundit pieces earnestly supposing Trump is going to pivot into not being a delusional, volatile nut; the problem with all these pieces is that they fail to address the overall problem, which is that he and his far-right campaign team have staffed the White House with people just as stupid and misinformed as he himself is. That is not a recipe for moderation. That is a recipe for exactly what we have been seeing, for four months: the administrative version of doing donuts in a Walmart parking lot while yelling to onlookers about the relative qualities of each major mainstream brand of beer.