While he was campaigning, it was wise to refrain from coming to any definite conclusions about Trump's character or intentions. Much of what a presidential candidate says before election day is rhetoric, marketing and bluff, designed to attract as many votes as possible.

As a general rule, the words of a politician, particularly one who is facing an election, rarely translate into actual policy. Actions and results are what count, not discourse or style. Not following this rule is what made America's anti-Bush, anti-war 'dissident left' fall for Obama's deception, and conversely, engage in anti-Trump campaigns before he got into office.

The rule still applies now that Trump has become president, although his words carry more weight because they are now a signature away from becoming executive orders. Someone in his position understands that inconsistency in word and deed risks eroding his authority.

Let's start by putting aside some of the common stereotypical ideas about Trump currently floating around. Let's assume that Trump is neither 'a new Hitler' (see this blog post for a reasonable criticism of that theme), nor a fascist, nor racist. Let's also reject the idea that Trump is just like his predecessors. Until now, every US president followed very similar policies characterized by imperial adventures and covert or overt interference in other nations and the perpetuation of a domestic economic system that feeds corporations and the banking and financial sectors at the expense of the population. Sure, George Bush could barely string a coherent sentence together, and Obama was so polished and 'charming', but if their actions and resulting figures are compared, was there such a big difference?

And this just goes to show that, historically, US presidents have not been in charge - at least not since Kennedy - they have simply been the Public Relations face of the government, carrying forward an agenda dictated by the 'deep state'. That is, the conglomerate of unelected bureaucracy (notably intelligence and security agencies), financial and corporate powers, the Military-Industrial Complex which together form a structure of power that is almost impossible for elected officials to change.

But is Trump just another 'Washington insider'? Some might cite his promises to 'bring back jobs' and stop 'regime changing'countries that don't follow America's lead as evidence of his independence, but promises can be broken. Much more convincing evidence that Trump at least intends to be more than just another establishment politician is the extent of the media attacks he has received, both before and after the election, which led to massive demonstrations, many of them violent and some of dubious legitimacy given that people were paid to protest.

With hysteria rising in the US, Vladimir Putin pointed out that the social climate there is not unlike what happened in the lead up to Ukraine's 'EuroMaidan' and violent coup d'état. Media pundits and celebrities have openly suggested that Trump be assassinated, or the White House bombed in a military takeover. Can you imagine such sentiments being publicly expressed during Obama's administrations? Not without mass condemnation and prompt visits from the Department of Homeland Security or the Secret Service! The Establishment seems to be signalling to the people that Trump is no friend of theirs, and thus should be ostracized and vilified by the public.

Who is 'The Donald'?

But if Trump is not like any of his predecessors, who is he? First and foremost, he's a businessman who fully believes in an entrepreneurial ethos of success in all of his endeavors. One could say that he sees the USA as his new business project and, in his own way, wants to make it a successful one. To Trump, the country itself is like a business that needs to be run efficiently in order to impress a 'board of directors', i.e. voters. From this point of view, the masses of Americans are human capital, and countries like Mexico or China are competing businesses, and they are 'cutting into profits' by taking jobs away from Americans. You intimidate them into doing business your way because that is what powerful corporations do (or try to do) with their competitors. Hence Trump's "wall".

Ironically, placing "America first" in these business-like terms results in a protectionist economic strategy which rejects multilateral free-trade 'super-treaties' like the TTP or NAFTA (the latter he intends to renegotiate), and instead focuses on developing the domestic economy via investment in public infrastructure and the creation of jobs. These are moves we would normally associate with classic socialist models - certainly not with the neoliberal framework that has given us globalization!

But there are pitfalls to the 'benevolent CEO' approach. For starters, anything that gets in the way of "making America great again" is deemed an obstruction. The environment, diplomacy and human rights come to mind. Who has time for such when there's a business to run? Furthermore, Trump has, let's say, an inflated ego; it is him, after all, who is going to put things right by making bold moves that no one dared to make before. This is a problem, because a big ego makes him arrogant and a bad listener, and arrogant bad listeners tend to piss people off. Was he aware of the ramifications when he recently called Chelsea Manning "a traitor" and threatened Iran on Twitter? Or when he told an ABC News interviewer that "torture works"? To put it politely, he may be suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Dilbert cartoonist and pro-Trump blogger Scott Adams recently wrote about an interesting way to understand one of Trump's most controversial actions so far, the temporary immigration 'ban' from seven Muslim countries. He argues:

Half the country thinks President Trump is well on his way to becoming a Hitler-like dictator. But many other Americans think Trump is an effective business person with good intentions. They can't both be right. [...]

The Hitler filter [i.e., Trump-as-Hitler] clearly isn't making people happy. The people watching that movie are protesting in the streets. Meanwhile, the people who see Trump as a good negotiator looking out for the country are quite happy with the job he has done so far. The Persuasion Filter [i.e., Trump-as-negotiator] says Trump opens with a big first offer and negotiates back to something reasonable. If you don't recognize the method, it looks crazy, random, and racist. [...]

The left sees Trump's executive orders on immigration as pure Hitler behavior. That gives him plenty of room to negotiate to the middle. The initial orders are too broad, and clearly target too many of the wrong people. As he fixes those special cases he will be moving away from the Hitler model toward the middle. And people are more influenced by the DIRECTION of things than the absolute position of things. As long as he is moving away from the Hitler analogy, people will chill out, even if they think he was too close to that position before.Direction matters.

Trump's temporary immigration ban set a mental anchor in your brain that is frankly shocking. It will make his eventual permanent immigration plan ("extreme vetting") look tame by comparison. The Persuasion Filter says that's his strategy. Because that's ALWAYS his strategy. He acts the same way every time. He wrote a book about it. He talks about it publicly. Then he does it right in front of us, over and over. And no matter how many times he does it, half the country still thinks the opening offer is the real one.

Adams' argument explains a lot about Trump's behavior so far, and confirms the view that he is a businessman at heart. For example, seen through the Persuasion Filter, Trump's proposal of the construction of a wall on the border with Mexico, along with his remarks about Mexico paying for it, perhaps through a 20% tax for Mexican goods crossing the border, constitute the big and shocking opening offer intended to soften Mexico into negotiating trade agreements on Trump's terms. Even the richest man in Mexico, telecom tycoon Carlos Slim, went in front of Mexican media to explain that Trump was "not Terminator but a negotiator."

This makes sense and soothes some concerns because it means that there is reason behind the apparent madness. There is a strategy and the man is not just shooting left and right on a whim. However, the problem of negative consequences I pointed out above still applies - even more so because he is president. The global political and social scene is not the same as an executive boardroom. In international politics, other variables are at work: diplomacy, patriotic myths and fears, cultural differences, etc.

In the case of Mexico, most Mexicans are feeling humiliated by Trump. Historical grievances with the US have been resurrected. If Trump is 'just negotiating', that isn't how millions of people south of the border have interpreted it. Does Trump realize that it can be dangerous to take things too far? And would the Mexican government risk provoking Mexicans' anger if they concede to Trump? They could, for example, spin 'hard-right' themselves, reject Trump's terms and go down the route of a trade war (which risks developing into actual war). Does Trump really want that with his neighbor, one of the US' biggest trading partners? Similar problems may develop with China and Iran.

I am sure the reader can think of many other examples in which Trump's 'Art of the Deal' approach can result in unintended chaos.Many social and political demons may awaken. In fact, some already have.

Steve Bannon and a remake of the Clash of Civilizations

Following the business-president model, we might expect to see a Trump who prefers negotiating with other countries, or competing with them on a commercial basis, rather then threatening them or actually going to war with them. Of concern though is that many members of his cabinet and advisers have a decidedly hawkish background. Indeed, in the last few days the rhetoric against Iranhas grown louder, partly for reasons we will explore below.

Steve Bannon, former head of right-wing news website Breitbart, now Trump's adviser and chief strategist at the White House, is in a position to exert a lot of influence on the direction a Trump presidency takes. The ideas of a single presidential adviser would normally not cause much concern, except that much of Bannon's worldview is reflected in the positions Trump has taken so far, especially in regards to foreign policy. It's also disconcerting that Bannon made the impressive leap from being editor of a news website to White House chief strategist, suggesting that he (and his ideas) are very much valued by his new boss.

Bannon, in contrast to Trump, is a political ideologue. His main concern, as he has expressed it, seems to be the "crisis" of Judeo-Christian Western values and capitalism. Capitalism, he says, has ceased to be the 'enlightened' engine of wealth that it used to be. Together with the secularization of society, the loss of Judeo-Christian values has brought the West to a major "crisis". Additionally, the West now faces a global confrontation with 'jihadist Islamic fascism'. Bannon says:

I strongly believe that whatever the causes of the current drive to the caliphate was — and we can debate them, and people can try to deconstruct them — we have to face a very unpleasant fact. And that unpleasant fact is that there is a major war brewing, a war that's already global. It's going global in scale, and today's technology, today's media, today's access to weapons of mass destruction, it's going to lead to a global conflict that I believe has to be confronted today. Every day that we refuse to look at this as what it is, and the scale of it, and really the viciousness of it, will be a day where you will rue that we didn't act [unintelligible]. [...] I believe you should take a very, very, very aggressive stance against radical Islam. And I realize there are other aspects that are not as militant and not as aggressive and that's fine.

If Bannon means dealing with the likes of ISIS, then few will disagree with him, but notice how he skips over "the causes of the current drive to the caliphate" and then makes it about a global confrontation against "radical Islam".

The fact is that there would not be any "ISIS" (or al-Qaeda, for the matter) without ongoing support from Gulf State countries likeSaudi Arabia and Qatar; from Israel; from the CIA itself and more generally from the US and its NATO allies. If left to their own devices, those radical jihadists would have never grown in strength and would have faded into obscurity as quickly as they arose. Radical interpretations of Islam would not be a problem and secular governments would be ruling in Muslim countries that are not 'failed states'.

But if Bannon were to recognize this, what then would become of his 'apocalyptic global conflict' between 'the Judeo-Christian and Muslims realms'?

We've seen this all before with the neocons that surrounded Bush and who brought us America's wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. One of their ideological inspirations, you may remember, was Samuel P. Huntington's thesis of the Clash of Civilizations, which argues that cultural and religious identities would be the main source of conflict in the post-Cold War world. It turns out that not only Bannon, but National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and new CIA Director Michael Pompeo have expressed views that are also in line with Huntington's.

Huntington predicted, back in the 90s, that global conflict would arise, and that the main dividing line would be that between Muslims and non-Muslims. Here we are a quarter-century later; we've had 9/11, the War on Terror^TM and, lo and behold! the "prophecy has come true". A hard look at the facts of how it all came about, however, leaves us with the impression that Huntington, Bannon and others basically invented a theory that 'fit' with, or covered for, American imperial ambitions. Huntington, by the way, tacked on a number of clauses, not least to beware "the Sino-Islamic connection." Sure enough, Bannon himself has coupled China and Islam into one gargantuan 'threat':

"We're going to war in the South China Sea in five to 10 years," he said in March 2016. "There's no doubt about that. They're taking their sandbars and making basically stationary aircraft carriers and putting missiles on those. They come here to the United States in front of our face - and you understand how important face is - and say it's an ancient territorial sea." [...]

"You have an expansionist Islam and you have an expansionist China. Right? They are motivated. They're arrogant. They're on the march. And they think the Judeo-Christian west is on the retreat," Bannon said during a February 2016 radio show. [...]

"The one thing the Chinese fear more than America ... they fear Christianity more than anything," he said. [...]

"Some of these situations may get a little unpleasant," Bannon said in November 2015. "But you know what, we're in a war. We're clearly going into, I think, a major shooting war in the Middle East again."

If that sounds like George W Bush's "crusade" all over again, it is. Yes, China is building bases in the South China Sea, but that's in the context of about 400 US military installations already ringing China, and thus is legitimately framed by the Chinese as a defensive maneuver. As for 'the Caliphate', only radical Muslims seek such, radical Muslims that are nothing without covert Western support.

Seen through Bannon's eyes, it's easier to understand why Trump appears friendly towards Russia and Israel but confrontationalwith China and Iran. Putin should beware, however, as the friendship may not last forever. Bannon says:

You know, Putin's been quite an interesting character. He's also very, very, very intelligent. I can see this in the United States where he's playing very strongly to social conservatives about his message about more traditional values, so I think it's something that we have to be very much on guard of. Because at the end of the day, I think that Putin and his cronies are really a kleptocracy, that are really an imperialist power that want to expand.However, I really believe that in this current environment, where you're facing a potential new caliphate that is very aggressive that is really a situation — I'm not saying we can put it on a back burner — but I think we have to deal with first things first.

In other words, let's take care of the Chinese and Muslims first, and we'll worry about Russia later.

Like Huntington's, Bannon's views are made up of broad, unrefined, black-or-white ideas, leaving little-to-no room for the complexities and subtleties of reality. There's a flavor of schizoidal psychopathy to them, as described in Political Ponerology:

Carriers of this anomaly are hypersensitive and distrustful, while, at the same time, pay little attention to the feelings of others. They tend to assume extreme positions, and are eager to retaliate for minor offenses. Sometimes they are eccentric and odd. Their poor sense of psychological situation and reality leads them to superimpose erroneous, pejorative interpretations upon other people's intentions. They easily become involved in activities which are ostensibly moral, but which actually inflict damage upon themselves and others. Their impoverished psychological worldview makes them typically pessimistic regarding human nature. We frequently find expressions of their characteristic attitudes in their statements and writings: "Human nature is so bad that order in human society can only be maintained by a strong power created by highly qualified individuals in the name of some higher idea." Let us call this typical expression the "schizoid declaration". [...]

[T]heir ponerogenic role can have macrosocial implications if their attitude toward human reality and their tendency to invent great doctrines are put to paper and duplicated in large editions. [...]

An analysis of the role played by Karl Marx's works easily reveals all the above-mentioned types of apperception and the social reactions which engendered animosity between large groups of people. When reading any of those disturbingly divisive works, we should examine them carefully for any of these characteristic deficits, or even an openly formulated schizoid declaration.

[Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology, p. 123 - 125.]

Indeed, Marxism, with its 'Grand Theory of History', in which arbitrarily delineated groups (proletariat vs bourgeoisie) are destined for eternity to fight each other, share a similarly schizoidal declaration to the 'Judeo-Christian Westerners vs Muslims (plus the Chinese)' scenario envisioned in the 'Clash of Civilizations'. They both claim to be defining objective reality, but are they really just engendering subjective animosity between large groups of people.

If he wasn't in such a key position of power, Bannon would be harmless. But not only is he there, if we take him at his word, he seems to have Donald Trump in his pocket. Last summer, during the election campaign, Vanity Fair interviewed Bannon:

On the surface, Bannon at least has the benefit of being politically sympathetic with Trump; Breitbart, under his leadership, after all, has become "Trump Pravda," as one former staffer described it to me. But when I talked with Bannon, he expressed a wariness about the political genuineness of the Trump campaign persona.Trump is a "blunt instrument for us," he told me earlier this summer. "I don't know whether he really gets it or not." It is likely that Bannon's political calculus here, if not Trump's, will be less about winning an election that seems a bit out of hand and more about cementing an American nationalist movement.

Bannon the ideologue manipulating Trump, the ego-driven entrepreneur so that he can realize his vision. Given his history as both Republican, Democrat and Independent, Trump likely sees himself as a man of action with little time for ideologies or political theories. So, is he paying Bannon to take care of all that?

Self-fulfilling prophecies

Steve Bannon may not want a confrontation with Islam or China, but his certainty about its inevitability, and the fact that he is in a position to influence global events, may turn his vision into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I don't think Bannon is aware that things don't have to play out that way. It would take someone smarter, like Putin, to see beyond the 'inevitability' of that scenario. Remember how many times the US/NATO sought to corner Putin into escalating tensions between Russia and Europe, yet he has time and again maneuvered his way out of it. Unfortunately, nothing we have seen of Trump thus far suggests that, when put in similar positions, he could avoid falling into the trap. Indeed, as I suggested earlier, his particular 'extreme negotiating style' could make things worse.

Then there is the liberal left (what is 'left' these days anyway?) that is so unhappy about Trump. Do they realize that they too are partaking in a self-fulfilling prophecy? Trump probably has no personal reasons to become a new 'Hitler', but if lefty demonstrations become riots and the riots become persistent insurrection, how is someone like Trump going to react, if not by showing who is the boss and restoring order with an iron fist? Scott Adams makes the same point:

But lately I get the feeling that Trump's critics have evolved from expecting Trump to be Hitler to preferring it. Obviously they don't prefer it in a conscious way. But the alternative to Trump becoming Hitler is that they have to live out the rest of their lives as confirmed morons. No one wants to be a confirmed moron. And certainly not after announcing their Trump opinions in public and demonstrating in the streets. It would be a total embarrassment for the anti-Trumpers to learn that Trump is just trying to do a good job for America. It's a threat to their egos. A big one.

And this gets me to my point. When millions of Americans want the same thing, and they want it badly, the odds of it happening go way up. You can call it the power of positive thinking. It is also the principle behind affirmations. When humans focus on a desired future, events start to conspire to make it happen.

I'm not talking about any new-age magic. I'm talking about ordinary people doing ordinary things to turn Trump into an actual Hitler. For example, if protesters start getting violent, you could expect forceful reactions eventually. And that makes Trump look more like Hitler. I can think of dozens of ways the protesters could cause the thing they are trying to prevent. In other words, they can wish it into reality even though it is the very thing they are protesting.

Trump has not been in power for long and there are many unknowns, so it's hard to say what we can expect from him. However, based on the few issues we've covered here, I think we can be fairly sure that increasing chaos, in one form of another, will be the order of the day.

Since at least Donald Trump's election, our media have been in the grip of an astonishing, self-inflicted crisis. Despite Trump's constant railing against the American press, there is no greater enemy of the American media than the American media. They did this to themselves.

We are in the midst of an epidemic of fake news. There is no better word to describe it than "epidemic," insofar as it fits the epidemiological model from the Centers for Disease Control: this phenomenon occurs when "an agent and susceptible hosts are present in adequate numbers, and the agent can be effectively conveyed from a source to the susceptible hosts."

The "agent" in this case is hysteria over Trump's presidency, and the "susceptible hosts" are a slipshod, reckless, and breathtakingly gullible media class that spread the hysteria around like—well, like a virus.

It is difficult to adequately sum up the breadth of this epidemic, chiefly because it keeps growing: day after day, even hour after hour, the media continue to broadcast, spread, promulgate, publicize, and promote fake news on an industrial scale. It has become a regular part of our news cycle, not distinct from or extraneous to it but a part of it, embedded within the news apparatus as a spoke is embedded in a bicycle wheel.

Whenever you turn on a news station, visit a news website, or check in on a journalist or media personality on Twitter or Facebook, there is an excellent chance you will be exposed to fake news. It is rapidly becoming an accepted part of the way the American media are run.

How we will get out of this is anyone's guess. We might not get out of it, not so long as Trump is president of these United States. We may be up for four—maybe eight!—long years of authentic fake news media hysteria. It is worth cataloging at least a small sampling of the hysteria so far. Only when we fully assess the extent of the media's collapse into ignominious ineptitude can we truly begin to reckon with it.

Since Trump's election, here's just a small sampling of fake news that our media and our journalist class have propagated.

Early November: Spike in Transgender Suicide Rates

After Trump's electoral victory on November 8, rumors began circulating that multiple transgender teenagers had killed themselves in response to the election results. There was no basis to these rumors. Nobody was able to confirm them at the time, and nobody has been able to confirm in the three months since Trump was elected.

Nevertheless, the claim spread far and wide: Guardian writer and editor-at-large of Out Zach Stafford tweeted the rumor, which was retweeted more than 13,000 times before he deleted it. He later posted a tweet explaining why he deleted his original viral tweet; his explanatory tweet was shared a total of seven times. Meanwhile, PinkNews writer Dominic Preston wrote a report on the rumors, which garnered more than 12,000 shares on Facebook.

At Mic, Matthew Rodriguez wrote about the unsubstantiated allegations. His article was shared more than 55,000 times on Facebook. Urban legend debunker website Snopes wrote a report on the rumors and listed them as "unconfirmed" (rather than "false"). Snopes's sources were two Facebook posts, since deleted, that offered no helpful information regarding the location, identity, or circumstances of any of the suicides. The Snopes report was shared 19,000 times.

At Reason, writer Elizabeth Nolan Brown searched multiple online databases to try to determine the identities or even the existence of the allegedly suicidal youth. She found nothing. As she put it: "[T]eenagers in 2016 don't just die without anyone who knew them so much as mentioning their death online for days afterward."

She is right. Just the same, the stories hyping this idea garnered at least nearly 100,000 shares on Facebook alone, contributing to the fear and hysteria surrounding Trump's win.

November 22: The Tri-State Election Hacking Conspiracy Theory

On November 22, Gabriel Sherman posted a bombshell report at New York Magazine claiming that "a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers" were demanding a recount in three separate states because of "persuasive evidence that [the election] results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked." The evidence? Apparently, "in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots."

The story went stratospherically viral. It was shared more than 145,000 times on Facebook alone. Sherman shared it on his Twitter feed several times, and people retweeted his links to the story nearly 9,000 times. Politico's Eric Geller shared the story on Twitter as well. His tweet was retweeted just under 8,000 times. Dustin Volz from Reuters shared the link; he was retweeted nearly 2,000 times. MSNBC's Joy Reid shared the story and was retweeted more than 4,000 times. New York Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman also shared the story and was retweeted about 1,600 times.

It wasn't until the next day, November 23, that someone threw a little water on the fire. At FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver explained that it was "demographics, not hacking" that explained the curious voting numbers. "Anyone making allegations of a possible massive electoral hack should provide proof," he wrote, "and we can't find any." Additionally, Silver pointed out that the New York Magazinearticle had misrepresented the argument of one of the computer scientists in question.

At that point, however, the damage had already been done: Sherman, along with his credulous tweeters and retweeters, had done a great deal to delegitimize the election results. Nobody was even listening to Silver, anyway: his post was shared a mere 380 times on Facebook, or about one-quarter of 1 percent as much as Sherman's. This is how fake news works: the fake story always goes viral, while nobody reads or even hears about the correction.

December 1: The 27-Cent Foreclosure

At Politico on December 1, Lorraine Woellert published a shocking essay claiming that Trump's pick for secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, had overseen a company that "foreclosed on a 90-year-old woman after a 27-cent payment error." According to Woellert: "After confusion over insurance coverage, a OneWest subsidiary sent [Ossie] Lofton a bill for $423.30. She sent a check for $423. The bank sent another bill, for 30 cents. Lofton, 90, sent a check for three cents. In November 2014, the bank foreclosed."

The story received widespread coverage, being shared nearly 17,000 times on Facebook. The New York Times's Steven Rattner shared it on Twitter (1,300 retweets), as did NBC News's Brad Jaffy (1,200 retweets), the AP's David Beard (1,900 retweets) and many others.

The problem? The central scandalous claims of Woellert's article were simply untrue. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Ted Frank pointed out, the woman in question was never foreclosed on, and never lost her home. Moreover, "It wasn't Mnuchin's bank that brought the suit."

Politico eventually corrected these serious and glaring errors. But the damage was done: the story had been repeated by numerous media outlets including Huffington Post (shared 25,000 times on Facebook), the New York Post, Vanity Fair, and many others.

January 20: Nancy Sinatra's Complaints about the Inaugural Ball

On the day of Trump's inauguration, CNN claimed Nancy Sinatra was "not happy" with the fact that the president and first lady's inaugural dance would be to the tune of Frank Sinatra's "My Way." The problem? Nancy Sinatra had never said any such thing. CNN later updated the article without explaining the mistake they had made.

January 20: The Nonexistent Climate Change Website 'Purge'

Also on the day of the inauguration, New York Times writer Coral Davenport published an article on the Times's website whose headline claimed that the Trump administration had "purged" any "climate change references" from the White House website. Within the article, Davenport acknowledged that the "purge" (or what she also called "online deletions") was "not unexpected" but rather part of a routine turnover of digital authority between administrations.

To call this action a "purge" was thus at the height of intellectual dishonesty: Davenport was styling the whole thing as a kind of digital book-burn rather than a routine part of American government. But of course that was almost surely the point. The inflammatory headline was probably the only thing that most people read of the article, doubtlessly leading many readers (the article was shared nearly 50,000 times on Facebook) to believe something that simply wasn't true.

January 20: The Great MLK Jr. Bust Controversy

On January 20, Time reporter Zeke Miller wrote that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the White House. This caused a flurry of controversy on social media until Miller issued a correction. As Time put it, Miller had apparently not even asked anyone in the White House if the bust had been removed. He simply assumed it had been because "he had looked for it and had not seen it."

January 20: Betsy DeVos, Grizzly Fighter

During her confirmation hearing, education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos was asked whether schools should be able to have guns on their campuses. As NBC News reported, DeVos felt it was "best left to locales and states to decide." She pointed out that one school in Wyoming had a fence around it to protect the students from wildlife. "I would imagine," she said, "that there's probably a gun in the school to protect from potential grizzlies."

This was an utterly noncontroversial stance to take. DeVos was simply pointing out that different states and localities have different needs, and attempting to mandate a nationwide one-size-fits-all policy for every American school is imprudent.

How did the media run with it? By lying through their teeth. "Betsy DeVos Says Guns Should Be Allowed in Schools. They Might Be Needed to Shoot Grizzlies" (Slate). "Betsy DeVos: Schools May Need Guns to Fight Off Bears" (The Daily Beast). "Citing grizzlies, education nominee says states should determine school gun policies" (CNN). "Betsy DeVos says guns in schools may be necessary to protect students from grizzly bears" (ThinkProgress.) "Betsy DeVos says guns shouldn't be banned in schools ... because grizzly bears" (Vox). "Betsy DeVos tells Senate hearing she supports guns in schools because of grizzly bears" (The Week). "Trump's Education Pick Cites 'Potential Grizzlies' As A Reason To Have Guns In Schools" (BuzzFeed).

The intellectual dishonesty at play here is hard to overstate. DeVos never said or even intimated that every American school or even very many of them might need to shoot bears. She merely used one school as an example of the necessity of federalism and as-local-as-possible control of the education system.

Rather than report accurately on her stance, these media outlets created a fake news event to smear a reasonable woman's perfectly reasonable opinion.

January 26: The 'Resignations' At the State Department

On January 26, the Washington Post's Josh Rogin published what seemed to be a bombshell report declaring that "the State Department's entire senior management team just resigned." This resignation, according to Rogin, was "part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don't want to stick around for the Trump era." These resignations happened "suddenly" and "unexpectedly." He styled it as a shocking shake-up of administrative protocol in the State Department, a kind of ad-hoc protest of the Trump administration.

The story immediately went sky-high viral. It was shared nearly 60,000 times on Facebook. Rogin himself tweeted the story out and was retweeted a staggering 11,000 times. Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum had it retweeted nearly 2,000 times;journalists and writers from Wired, The Guardian, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, ABC, Foreign Policy, and other publications tweeted the story out in shock.

There was just one problem: the story was more a load of bunk. As Vox pointed out, the headline of the piece was highly misleading: "the word 'management' strongly implied that all of America's top diplomats were resigning, which was not the case." (The Post later changed the word "management" to "administrative" without noting the change, although it left the "management" language intact in the article itself).

More importantly, Mark Toner, the acting spokesman for the State Department, put out a press release noting that "As is standard with every transition, the outgoing administration, in coordination with the incoming one, requested all politically appointed officers submit letters of resignation." According to CNN, the officials were actually asked to leave by the Trump administration rather than stay on for the customary transitional few months. The entire premise of Rogin's article was essentially nonexistent.

As always, the correction received far less attention than the fake news itself: Vox's article, for instance, was shared around 9,500 times on Facebook, less than one-sixth the rate of Rogin's piece. To this day, Rogin's piece remains uncorrected regarding its faulty presumptions.

January 27: The Photoshopped Hands Affair

On January 27, Observer writer Dana Schwartz tweeted out a screenshot of Trump that, in her eyes, proved President Trump had "photoshopped his hands bigger" for a White House photograph. Her tweet immediately went viral, being shared upwards of 25,000 times. A similar tweet by Disney animator Joaquin Baldwin was shared nearly 9,000 times as well.

The conspiracy theory was eventually debunked, but not before it had been shared thousands upon thousands of times. Meanwhile, Schwartz tweeted that she did "not know for sure whether or not the hands were shopped." Her correction tweet was shared a grand total of...11 times.

January 29: The Reuters Account Hoax

Following the Quebec City mosque massacre, the Daily Beast published a story that purported to identify the two shooters who had perpetrated the crime. The problem? The story's source was a Reuters parody account on Twitter. Incredibly, nobody at the Daily Beast thought to check the source to any appreciable degree.

January 31: The White House-SCOTUS Twitter Mistake

Leading up to Trump announcing his first Supreme Court nomination, CNN Senior White House Correspondent Jeff Zelenyannounced that the White House was "setting up [the] Supreme Court announcement as a prime-time contest." He pointed to a pair of recently created "identical Twitter pages" for a theoretical justices Neil Gorsuch and Thomas Hardiman, the two likeliest nominees for the court vacancy.

Zeleny's sneering tweet—clearly meant to cast the Trump administration in an unflattering, circus-like light—was shared more than 1,100 times on Twitter. About 30 minutes later, however, he tweeted: "The Twitter accounts...were not set up by the White House, I've been told." As always, the admission of mistake was shared far less than the original fake news: Zeleny's correction was retweeted a paltry 159 times.

January 31: The Big Travel Ban Lie

On January 31, a Fox affiliate station out of Detroit reported that "A local business owner who flew to Iraq to bring his mother back home to the US for medical treatment said she was blocked from returning home under President Trump's ban on immigration and travel from seven predominately Muslim nations. He said that while she was waiting for approval to fly home, she died from an illness."

Like most other sensational news incidents, this one took off, big-time: it was shared countless times on Facebook, not just from the original article itself (123,000 shares) but via secondary reporting outlets such as the Huffington Post (nearly 9,000 shares).Credulous reporters and media personalities shared the story on Twitter to the tune of thousands and thousands of retweets, including: Christopher Hooks, Gideon Resnick, Daniel Dale, Sarah Silverman, Blake Hounshell, Brian Beutler, Garance Franke-Ruta, Keith Olbermann (he got 3,600 retweets on that one!), Matthew Yglesias, and Farhad Manjoo.

The story spread so far because it gratified all the biases of the liberal media elite: it proved that Trump's "Muslim ban" was an evil, racist Hitler-esque mother-killer of an executive order.

There was just one problem: it was a lie. The man had lied about when his mother died. The Fox affiliate hadn't bothered to do the necessary research to confirm or disprove the man's account. The news station quietly corrected the story after giving rise to such wild, industrial-scale hysteria.

February 1: POTUS Threatens to Invade Mexico

On February 1, Yahoo News published an Associated Press report about a phone call President Trump shared with Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto. The report strongly implied that President Trump was considering "send[ing] U.S. troops" to curb Mexico's "bad hombre" problem, although it acknowledged that the Mexican government disagreed with that interpretation. The White House later re-affirmed that Trump did not have any plan to "invade Mexico."

Nevertheless, Jon Passantino, the deputy news director of BuzzFeed, shared this story on Twitter with the exclamation "WOW." He was retweeted 2,700 times. Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, also shared the story, declaring: "I'm sorry, did our president just threaten to invade Mexico today??" Favreau was retweeted more than 8,000 times.

Meanwhile, the Yahoo News AP post was shared more than 17,000 times on Facebook; Time's post of the misleading report was shared more than 66,000 times; ABC News posted the story and it was shared more than 20,000 times. On Twitter, the report—with the false implication that Trump's comment was serious—was shared by media types such as ThinkProgress's Judd Legum, the BBC's Anthony Zurcher, Vox's Matt Yglesias, Politico's Shane Goldmacher, comedian Michael Ian Black, and many others.

February 2: Easing the Russian Sanctions

Last week, NBC News national correspondent Peter Alexander tweeted out the following: "BREAKING: US Treasury Dept easing Obama admin sanctions to allow companies to do transactions with Russia's FSB, successor org to KGB." His tweet immediately went viral, as it implied that the Trump administration was cozying up to Russia.

A short while later, Alexander posted another tweet: "Source familiar [with] sanctions says it's a technical fix, planned under Obama, to avoid unintended consequences of cybersanctions." As of this writing, Alexander's fake news tweet has approximately 6,500 retweets; his clarifying tweet has fewer than 250.

At CNBC, Jacob Pramuk styled the change this way: "Trump administration modifies sanctions against Russian intelligence service." The article makes it clear that, per Alexander's source, "the change was a technical fix that was planned under Obama." Nonetheless, the impetus was placed on the Trump adminsitration. CBS News wrote the story up in the same way. So did the New York Daily News.

In the end, unable to pin this (rather unremarkable) policy tweak on the Trump administration, the media have mostly moved on. As the Chicago Tribune put it, the whole affair was yet again an example of how "in the hyperactive Age of Trump, something that initially appeared to be a major change in policy turned into a nothing-burger."

February 2: Renaming Black History Month

At the start of February, which is Black History Month in the United States, Trump proclaimed the month "National African American History Month." Many outlets tried to spin the story in a bizarre way: TMZ claimed that a "senior administration official" said that Trump believed the term "black" to be outdated. "Every U.S. president since 1976 has designated February as Black History Month," wrote TMZ. BET wrote the same thing.

The problem? It's just not true. President Obama, for example, declared February "National African American History Month"as well. TMZ quickly updated their piece to fix their embarrassing error.

February 2: The House of Representatives' Gun Control Measures

On February 2, the Associated Press touched off a political and media firestorm by tweeting: "BREAKING: House votes to roll back Obama rule on background checks for gun ownership." The AP was retweeted a staggering 12,000 times.

The headlines that followed were legion: "House votes to rescind Obama gun background check rule" (Kyle Cheney, Politico); "House GOP aims to scrap Obama rule on gun background checks" (CNBC); "House scraps background check regulation" (Yahoo News); "House rolls back Obama gun background check rule" (CNN); "House votes to roll back Obama rule on background checks for gun ownership" (Washington Post).

Some headlines were more specific about the actual House vote but no less misleading; "House votes to end rule that prevents people with mental illness from buying guns" (the Independent); "Congress ends background checks for some gun buyers with mental illness" (the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette); "House Votes to Overturn Obama Rule Restricting Gun Sales to the Severely Mentally Ill" (NPR).

The hysteria was far-reaching and frenetic. As you might have guessed, all of it was baseless. The House was actually voting to repeal a narrowly tailored rule from the Obama era. This rule mandated that the names of certain individuals who receive Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income and who use a representative to help manage these benefits due to a mental impairment be forwarded to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

If that sounds confusing, it essentially means that if someone who receives SSDI or SSI needs a third party to manage these benefits due to some sort of mental handicap, then—under the Obama rule—they may have been barred from purchasing a firearm. (It is thus incredibly misleading to suggest that the rule applied in some specific way to the "severely mentally ill.")

As National Review's Charlie Cooke pointed out, the Obama rule was opposed by the American Association of People With Disabilities; the ACLU; the Arc of the United States; the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network; the Consortium of Citizens With Disabilities; the National Coalition of Mental Health Recovery; and many, many other disability advocacy organizations and networks.

The media hysteria surrounding the repeal of this rule—the wildly misleading and deceitful headlines, the confused outrage over a vote that nobody understood—was a public disservice.

As Cooke wrote: "It is a rare day indeed on which the NRA, the GOP, the ACLU, and America's mental health groups find themselves in agreement on a question of public policy, but when it happens it should at the very least prompt Americans to ask, 'Why?' That so many mainstream outlets tried to cheat them of the opportunity does not bode well for the future."

Maybe It's Time to Stop Reading Fake News

Surely more incidents have happened since Trump was elected; doubtlessly there are many more to come. To be sure, some of these incidents are larger and more shameful than others, and some are smaller and more mundane.

But all of them, taken as a group, raise a pressing and important question: why is this happening? Why are our media so regularly and so profoundly debasing and beclowning themselves, lying to the public and sullying our national discourse—sometimes on a daily basis? How has it come to this point?

Perhaps the answer is: "We've let it." The media will not stop behaving in so reckless a manner unless and until we demand they stop.

That being said, there are two possible outcomes to this fake news crisis: our media can get better, or they can get worse. If they get better, we might actually see our press begin to hold the Trump administration (and government in general) genuinely accountable for its many admitted faults. If they refuse to fix these serial problems of gullibility, credulity, outrage, and outright lying, then we will be in for a rough four years, if not more.

No one single person can fix this problem. It has to be a cultural change, a kind of shifting of priorities industry-wide. Journalists, media types, reporters, you have two choices: you can fix these problems, or you can watch your profession go down in flames.