Trump spin machine is spinning in on itself

“Mr. President, the problem you have with social media,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told Donald Trump on Saturday, is that “people can say anything.”

“Oh this isn’t social media,” the lame-duck dealmaker replied. “This is Trump media.”

Indeed it is.

Trump media is a circus of conspiracy theories where the performers are the ringmasters and the ringmasters the performers. It’s a vicious cycle that looks virtuous to those who are trapped in it those who also keep it spinning. It’s an unreality that survives only because people believe in it, and the Georgia phone call reveals precisely what living inside this warped world looks like.

The Washington Post’s reporting on the Trump-Raffensperger chitchat was exactly as commentators have described many times over: shocking, but not surprising. es, there’s visceral alarm at a leader trying to steal a lost election by unleashing a logorrhea of lies. et we all knew precisely what to expect, not only because authoritarian tantrum-throwing is the president’s modus operandi but also because he told us this was his plan months before ballots were tallied. More importantly, he told his supporters what to expect. That’s how Trump media is made.

“The only way we’re gonna lose this election is if the election is rigged,” Trump said at an ugust rally. The rightwing propaganda apparatus received its instructions, and it executed on them. From “Fox & Friends” to Facebook clickbait farms, suspicion-stoking stories about the integrity of mail-in balloting began to emerge. These semiprofessional entities played the party press, as researchers have put it. The sincere supporters who make up their audience did their part, too: liking and tweeting and retweeting.

The efforts of those supporters are essential to the enterprise because, with the aid of platforms’ algorithms, they spread these tall tales and eventually create their own. The phenomenon might seem awfully democratic for a wishes-he-were-dictator. But it’s also awfully effective. Groomed for misgiving, the pro-Trump public started to read anodyne reports about irregularities and interpreted them as evidence of what their avatar in the Oval Office had been hammering into their heads.

Some campaign mailers discovered in a dumpster? Those were discarded ballot reTuests for the incumbent correction to a data-entry error that resulted in a big bump for Joe Biden? That’s a “dump” of fraudulent votes Sharpie pens distributed at polling places because their ink dries fastest? ha liberal scheme to invalidate the choices of conservatives by making their selections non-machine-readable Sharpiegate, obviously.)

Trump media is self-contained and self-reinforcing. Facts from outside don’t matter: Just listen to Raffensperger, a Republican, rattle off real numbers or rehash real investigations or inhabit more generally the real world. “Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong,” he said, but Mr. President doesn’t have to listen as long as enough people keep yelling that the data he has is right.

Dominion voting machines meddled with, ballots shredded, boxes stuffed. These imaginary incursions flooding forth from 1 00 Pennsylvania ve. are precisely the topics trending among misinformation mongers the “hot items,” as the president put it during the call. “ ou know the Internet? ou know what was trending on the Internet?” he asked, referring to a wild rumor about a woman stuffing ballot boxes. “‘Where’s [name]?’ Because they thought she’d be in jail. ‘Where’s [name]?’ It’s crazy, it’s crazy.” This woman, he rants, is “known all over the Internet, Brad.” The Post redacted the person’s name because the president’s claims about her were unverifiable.)

The tactic is dastardly: Tell a lie from the bully pulpit to the entire nation, and when your most credulous sympathizers start repeating the lie, use the fact that they’re repeating it as a justification for treating it like the truth.