You have to read this lament by Daniel Dale, who was given the Sisyphean burden of keeping track of Donald Trump's lies by CNN. When he first started out in 2017, the Dumper was telling an average of 2.9 lies per day. By 2018, it was 8.3 and in 2019, they had to add a second reporter to the beat. As Dale recounts:
Trump's 2017 dishonesty tended to be impromptu ad-libbing. His 2018 dishonesty was much more scripted; he used serial lying as a deliberate strategy in the midterm elections. Then he used serial lying as a deliberate strategy in his 2019 Ukraine scandal. Then he used serial lying as a deliberate strategy in his response to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic -- holding daily "briefings" so wildly dishonest that CNN needed me to go on TV right afterward to debunk the nonsense viewers had just heard.
People almost certainly died because of Trump's Covid-19 lying. And people died at the Capitol because of Trump's lying spree about the 2020 election. Though there was some solid absurdist comedy mixed into the President's dishonesty repertoire -- I couldn't help but be entertained by his imaginary "sir" stories about burly blue-collar workers crying in his presence -- there were always dark consequences, too.
These dark consequences included death threats against reporters -- and physical assaults as well, though Dale doesn't mention it. As he says elsewhere, years of dishonest propaganda from Fox News, right wing radio and social media had poisoned Republican voters minds so they were primed to absorb the uninterrupted stream of bullshit from their Dear Leader as if it were sacred revelation.
And sadly, the corporate media generally were simply unable to deal with this appropriately because of the conventions they had absorbed in saner times. We can't have a functioning society, let alone a democracy, if 40% of the population lives in an alternate reality. We must find a way to fix this.
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