Donald Trump: Architect of Fake News

An aspect of Donald Trump’s conviction in New York court today for election fraud through falsified business records to conceal hush money payments to pornography actresses as illegal campaign expenditures to deceive voters by covering up his adulterous behavior is a fake news scheme. The editor of the National Enquirer testified that he would pay people for their negative stories the publication had learned about against Trump, whose 2016 presidential candidacy the journalist supported, and then not publish the stories in a practice called “catch and kill,” in coordination with Trump. By withholding the negative information about Trump from the public, the editor of the publication was thus deceiving the electorate by omission, a common misleading professional journalistic practice that deceptively presents a false picture to readers. The term “fake news” was applied originally to completely fabricated stories by non-journalist youths in North Macedonia who published stories favorable to Trump and unfavorable to his opponents during the 2016 presidential campaign. The Macedonian youths, whose motivation was only pecuniary, had learned, like the Russians also did, that many conservatives were gullible because they distrusted the professional media, but were credulous of any alternate source of information that seemed to validate their thoughts. Thus, instead of simply being reasonably skeptical of the professional media, who are usually biased to the left, often at least somewhat inaccurate and who slant their stories through omission, many conservatives cynically disbelieve all professional media sources and stories while believing everything favorable to their beliefs from whatever questionable source and thereby accepted stories that were worse than being somewhat inaccurate, but were completely false. Trump and his supporters, to minimize how the foreign interference by the Macedonians and Russians through their production of fake news had benefitted him, applied the term “fake news” not to phony journalists and media outlets with baseless stories, but to all professional journalists, particularly those who report facts unfavorable to him. They conveniently ignored the professional media’s complicity in Trump’s 2016 election by providing him disproportionate coverage and by being the uncritical mouthpiece of his Russian backers, as journalists have been for every tyrant and terrorist around the world by reporting their side of every story as if it were credible. But just as Trump was the beneficiary of fake news generated by foreigners, his New York hush money conviction proves he was the architect of fake news himself, deceiving voters by hiding from them his violation of his marriage vows which made him manifestly unfit to be trusted to keep his oath of office. Trump’s only concern is not the truth, proper journalistic practices, or even any political policies, but his own self-promotion.