Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic

by David Frum

The 2016 presidential campaign introduced Americans to fake news as a tool of power. A term that had originated to describe intentional lying was redefined by Trump to dismiss honest reporting. Trump deployed the term as a weapon against everything from errors made in good faith and promptly corrected (like a mistaken report that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office)46 to the most meticulously documented truths. Trump’s aide Sebastian Gorka called it “fake news” to describe the Muslim travel ban as a travel ban even after President Trump himself had resumed using the term.47 Sean Hannity blamed CNN for staging a “fake news” incident even as he acknowledged that the incident was a hoax and CNN was blameless.48 Increasingly, Trump’s supporters use “fake news” as an epithet to mean any reporting not wholly subservient to pro-Trump messaging.