I collected some stories going back to 2017 and forgot to post them. See if they may be useful still.
In December 2017, without backing up her claim, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders accused journalists of "purposefully misleading" the public:
"There's a very big difference between making honest mistakes and purposefully misleading the American people, something that happens regularly. You can't say that it's an honest mistake when you're purposefully putting out information that you know to be false. Or when you're taking information that hasn't been validated, that hasn't been offered any credibility, and that has been continually denied by a number of people, including people with direct knowledge of an instance."
Anderson Cooper said he wondered how the press secretary has "credibility" telling news organizations to fact-check since he hadn't "heard this White House admitting a mistake at all."
Peter Baker and Sydney Ember wrote for the New York Times that "Mr. Trump has never backed down, for instance, from unsubstantiated claims that President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower or that millions of illegal immigrants cast votes last year" and that last month he retweeted anti-Muslim content supposedly showing "a Dutch boy being beaten by a 'Muslim migrant' who in fact was not a Muslim migrant. Mr. Trump issued no correction, and Ms. Sanders at the time said it did not matter if the video were real..."
Honesty as part of character
"I spent the first two decades of my career as a social scientist studying liars and their lies," wrote Bella DePaulo on Dec. 8, 2017. The president's lies "are both more frequent and more malicious than ordinary people's." Two recent polls in October/November 2017 found that just over a third of American voters believe that Trump is honest. Indeed, based on The Washington Post's "Fact Checker" feature, the president lies to the public about six times each day, "far higher than the average rate in our studies" for people even even including both public and private statements. And for Trump, "that rate has been accelerating. Starting in early October, The Post's tracking showed that Trump told a remarkable nine lies a day, outpacing even the biggest liars in our research." Furthermore, in DePaulo's earlier studies about people more generally, the motivation for a lie is typically easily pigeonholed and only a tiny fraction of lies were "mean-spirited." For Trump's lies, however, she found that two-thirds were self-serving, half were cruel, and a quarter seemed to serve multiple purposes.
When you don't have good information, you can't make real choices
"Whether information is tightly controlled by a dictator or distorted by tech billionaires and the clicks of conspiratorial crackpots, its quality determines the quality of a democracy. When bad information constructs a fake reality, voters will make choices based on lies, conspiracy theories, and mass delusions. If you break the information pipelines, democracy will break—and that is currently happening in the United States.
Last April, an NBC News poll showed an astonishing Trump/Biden preference divide based on information consumption habits. Among voters who reported that they read newspapers, 70 percent favored Biden, compared to just 21 percent for Trump. Meanwhile, Trump had a distinct edge among those who reported that they didn’t follow the news, with a 53 percent to 27 percent edge. That’s compelling evidence that informational divides are the hidden fissure in American politics. Given that democracy relies on a shared sense of reality to solve problems through compromise, the splintering of that shared reality is arguably the most serious overarching problem facing American democracy."
—Brian Klaas, The Democratization of Information Production is Killing Democracy: The way we receive information about our world is unlike any previous generations of humanity. Paradoxically, it's destroying democracy—and Trump's America is the main canary in the coal mine., Brian Klaas, Jan 30, 2025
Other disinformation stories
"Fox News: The Transition From Unfair and Unbalanced to Dangerous." Craig Benedict. Polityke. Dec. 11, 2017.
"Fox News journalists were outraged and disgusted after Sean Hannity, the network's star host, campaigned with President Donald Trump on Monday night ahead of the midterm elections, more than half a dozen employees told CNN Business.
* * *
'We were all told that Hannity was going to interview the president, but no one that I spoke with expected what happened last night,' added a third senior Fox News employee. 'I'm aghast as are a number of other people.'"
— "'It disturbs me to my core': Fox News staffers express outrage over Hannity's rally appearance." Oliver Darcy. CNN, Nov. 6, 2018.
Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works, "said the news cycle’s lightning-fast pace in the social media age is helping President Donald Trump blur the line between truth and fiction" specifically insofar as "the accelerated news cycle undermines democratic institutions that rely on an informed electorate." Interviewed on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” in October 2018, Stanley warned, "It’s an old tactic to attack the mainstream press, so there is no uniform reality on which to base our shared citizenship, so when we can just pick and choose among any news stream that fits our proclivities, we can just think that reality is, in fact, vacuous and it’s our team versus your team."
For Democrats, the benefits of going on Fox are illusory at best: Few benefits, heavy costs to appearing on the GOP’s propaganda network. Matt Gertz, April 20, 2022
"She [Naomi Wolf] was just 'raising flags' and 'asking questions,' and then she invariably moved on. This is classic 'conspiracy without the theory,' as described by Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum in their 2020 book, A Lot of People Are Saying, part of the growing body of literature attempting to make sense of the surge in belief in a wide range of off-the-wall, unproven claims."
— Naomi Klein. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.
Seth Abramson, "MAGA Radicals Got a Major Disinformation Reporting Center Shut Down for Exactly the Terrifying Reason You Might Expect. Here’s What to Do About It." Proof, June 16, 2024:
"...major media is doing less to report the reality of the American economy right now than it has in any of our lifetimes, almost certainly because of a dangerous feedback loop:
- If Americans think the economy is doing poorly, then
- whether or not it is, major media reporting otherwise is likely to anger rather than illuminate them (because we live in a time when we want the news to coddle our emotions rather than inform us), and
- major media is already struggling financially and can’t afford to anger its viewership, so
- it does not so much misreport the state of the economy as (a) wildly under-report it (both in terms of the number of reports it publishes and the comprehensiveness of each report), and (b) feels compelled to occasionally publish op-eds that use “weasel words”, incomplete data, false conclusions, and misleading framings to downplay the actually fairly strong economy we’re all living in right now.
Trump II: 2025...
See also: "Rightsplaining Reality: A linguistic perspective on Trump’s territoriality of truth," Martina Wiltschko, Medium, September 3, 2025
Of ongoing election denial in any election in which Republicans lose, Hauselman says:
"Overnight, [Spencer] Pratt goes to third [in the election count]. ... This is honestly [what they cite as] their evidence [of election fraud]. Because he dropped down a couple points overnight to the exact same spot where Trump had been in 2024, that is their evidence. Here we go: I can envision it, therefore it is. ... [This science professor is] now talking about how we'll never be able to prove any of this stuff, but we just somehow know that it's true. ... It'll only apply to the races that their guys lose."
— Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman, "Iran Out of Good Options," June 12, 2026 (35:28–36:28)
Sexton responds that MAGA operates on their own feelings:
"This is their [MAGA] worldview: What is true for them is capital-T True. [They maintain that] nobody else could feel different [from MAGA] unless they're corrupted, they're being paid by billionaires, they're possessed by demons, they're evil, they're a rapist, whatever it is. They [MAGA] have total control of reality, which is why, when you interact with one of these assholes, it becomes dangerous. They become aggressive. ... They control reality, and everyone either has to bend to it or they don't."
* * *
"You and I have seen elections that we were disappointed in. We're like: Well, fuck. ... Sometimes you lose an election and you have to deal with the consequences nad the fallout. But they refuse to. Everything has to be on their terms. So as a result, anything that happens — and it's not just elections. It's everything that happens in their life. If it doesn't happen the exact way that they want it to happen, it is a crime against them. It's a conspiracy against them. And that is the defining [inaudible: characteristic?] of the Right. Which is this brittle self-identity and also self-hatred of course that they project on everybody, and anything that inconveniences them has to be evil and it has to be a conspiracy against them."
— Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman, "Iran Out of Good Options," June 12, 2026 (37:53–38:23, 43:04–44:00)
See also: Republicans Are Already Sowing Doubt About Election Results, Naturally. Parker Molloy's The Present Age. November 2, 2026 (one day before the midterm elections).
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