Before being banned from Twitter and Facebook, Donald Trump utilized these platforms to spotlight content that he claimed was fake news. As previous research documents, Trump’s Twitter feed was used as a means of promoting right-wing sociocultural values (Di Carlo, Reference Di Carlo2020), while perpetuating the notion that Trump is antiestablishment (Hart, Reference Hart2020) and condemning “fake news,” despite his own routine trafficking in disinformation (Ross and Rivers, Reference Tyson2018). This chapter offers the claim that Trump’s politics are simultaneously “insurgent,” reactionary, and contradictory, considering his laments of fake news, coupled with his routine reliance on falsehoods.

I recount the reactionary slide of the Republican Party and the US right through the adoption of the language of anti-intellectualism and conspiracy theory, which was prevalent in American society years before Trump’s rise to political power. One high-profile example was Rush Limbaugh – the father of modern partisan talk radio – and his attacks on the “four corners” of American “deceit,” which he claimed were “government, academia, science, and media.” Prior to Trump’s rise, Limbaugh portrayed science in total as illegitimate. In a 2013 rant, he lamented that liberals were seeking to “codify elements of their ideology as science”:

Limbaugh sought to identify climate change research and climatology as fraudulent, drawing on the story of former Dutch psychology professor Diederik Stapel, who was implicated in fabricating data for dozens of academic publications and forced to retract the works after an extensive investigation. Highlighting this single instance as “one of the worse cases of scientific fraud on record in the Netherlands,” Limbaugh associated it with a manufactured right-wing climate change scandal from a few years earlier – “climategate” – claiming that Stapel’s scandal was “[j]ust like what happened at the University of East Anglia on climate prediction and research” (Limbaugh, Reference Limbaugh2013).

The attempt to depict a single case of academic fraud as demonstrating a larger conspiracy of endemic fraud in academia was outlandish on its face. A single observation, by definition, does not equate to a pattern of observations, nor can it be used to talk about general trends regarding allegations of fraud. Nor did the Stapel case even have anything directly to do with climate science research, despite Limbaugh’s efforts to link this case of fraud to “climategate.” Climategate was itself a manufactured controversy, involving allegations that climatologists at the United Kingdom’s East Anglia University and the United States’ Penn State University manipulated data to present a false claim that climate change was real. The “controversy” involved a set of hacked emails made available to the public, allegedly proving that climate scientists were duping the public by trafficking in fearmongering over climate change. Numerous investigations into “climategate” by Penn State University, East Anglia University, and the British government absolved the climate scientists involved in the manufactured scandal, finding no evidence that they manipulated data. This conclusion was well publicized years prior to Limbaugh’s rant seeking to link Stapel to “climategate” and to the notion that academia and science are, at their core, a fraud (Andrews, Reference Andrews2010; Whiteman, Reference Whiteman2010; Matson, Reference Matson2011).

Limbaugh’s attack was a classic example of the right-wing commitment to post-truth. He demonstrated contempt for the notion that evidence-based reasoning should inform political discourse and policy, via his attempt to undermine the entirety of science and academia as a liberal fraud. As he explained in the rant: “Science is simply another prong, if you will, of the liberal agenda, and it’s been corrupted. Conservatives don’t use science to advance conservatism. It wouldn’t even occur to ’em. What conservatism mostly is today is spent trying to refute everything the left says because they’re omnipresent” (Limbaugh, Reference Limbaugh2013). Limbaugh was explicit that Americans on the Republican right should view the world through a binary language: on one side is “conservatism,” and on the other is “science” – and they are mutually exclusive.

For Limbaugh, the conservative Republican right should seek to combat science by marginalizing it. This was to be accomplished by declaring an assault, not only on science, but on higher education, which he claimed is dominated by the left:

For Limbaugh, science was the opposite of democracy – a fundamentally repressive phenomenon. “Science is not up to a vote. Science is not determined by a majority vote on something” (Limbaugh, Reference Limbaugh2013). This depiction is undermined by the realities of the peer review and evaluation process, as academics (including those in the social and natural sciences) are evaluated by way of acceptance or rejection of publications, academic hiring, firing, promotions, the tenure process, and through voting on these matters – albeit among a specific, select group of scholarly experts recognized as such in their respective fields. This is ultimately beside the point for Limbaugh; his program was one of constructing a political and cultural distinction for his audience between the Republican right on one side, and the elitist scientists, academia, and the left on the other. For Limbaugh, his viewers are the normal, ordinary folks of middle America and Main Street, who are being bamboozled by “these frauds” in academia who

The reference to “lifestyles” is part of a larger right-wing narrative that discounts science and seeks to discredit academics as well-paid, disconnected elitists who are part of a system of “coastal elites” and “limousine liberals” affiliated with the Democratic Party, and who do not have the interests of ordinary Americans at heart.

Although Limbaugh died in 2021, his legacy of fomenting anti-intellectualism on the right continues. It fueled a larger commitment to post-truth among Republicans, which cultivated a worldview in which academics, medical researchers, and modern science in general – with their commitment to observing reality through evidence-based inquiry – are viewed with suspicion. This point was reinforced by the Trump administration’s messaging on Covid-19, medical science, and the 2020 election. Jared Kusher, Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, boasted in the run-up to Election Day that Trump was seizing the country “back from the doctors” and that the president was “back in charge” – rather than the “over-confident idiots” who were providing medical advisement to the administration, but were replaced with “more thoughtful people” who “know their place” (Warren, Gangel, and Stuart, Reference Warren, Gangel and Stuart2020). Among those who had fallen out of favor were Anthony Fauci, whom Trump referred to as an “idiot” and a “disaster” in advising the president on Covid-19 (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 2020). With Trump’s reelection prospects dimming as he ignored basic safety protocols such as masking, in the process contracting Covid-19 himself and being hospitalized, the former president reiterated his attacks on medical experts, warning that if Democratic presidential challenger Joe Biden won, “he’ll listen to the scientists” and impose “a massive depression” on the nation, in contrast to Trump’s “rocket ship” economy (Stieb, Reference Stieb2020). Trump also targeted the Center for Disease Control and reporters for trafficking in “fake news,” via his baseless assertion that they “exaggerated” the number of US Covid-19 deaths, while insisting that reports of a rising death toll were a “Fake News Media Conspiracy” as the total dead grew to 350,000 in late 2020 (Lovelace, Reference Lovelace2020; Kaiser Health News, 2021; King, Reference King2021).

In a big picture sense, the attack on scientific expertise is a significant threat to classical liberal enlightenment values. The right-wing assault on science, journalism, and education reveals a radical political philosophy that rejects foundational elements of the enlightenment – specifically the rationalist commitment to evidence-based reasoning and efforts to understand the world. Science, at its core, is based on the systematic collection of data and the development and testing of hypotheses, which may be confirmed or falsified, and are scrutinized by academic peers. When a political party and its leaders proceed from the premise that all of the societal actors engaged in these practices are fraudulent, and that such fraud defines the essence of their professions, there is no place for a commitment to scientific enlightenment principles or practices. When society is untethered from these principles with the rise of post-truth, then political leaders, pundits, and citizens are free to spin whatever “realities” they want through the social construction of their own “truths” and the dissemination of distortions, lies, and propaganda.

Post-Truth Trickles Down

Republican pundits’ and officials’ efforts to stoke distrust of expertise and evidence-based reasoning appear to have succeeded, as witnessed by widespread distrust within the party’s base of major societal institutions. Strong distrust is directed toward the news media and journalists, academia, medical researchers, and science. This suspicion speaks to the power of Republican officials and pundits to socially construct reality in a way that reinforces party positions with constituents.

As is apparent from numerous polls, Republican Americans widely hold contempt for the institutions and people working in them that Limbaugh, Trump, and other Republicans lamented, including the media, higher education, scientists, and medical researchers. With the news media, Republicans embraced Trump’s attacks, which resonated with the right’s long-standing distrust of journalists. Ninety-two percent of Republicans, compared to 79 percent of independents and 53 percent of Democrats, agreed in a 2018 Axios survey that “traditional news outlets” “report false or misleading stories” “a lot” or “sometimes” that “they know to be fake, false or purposely misleading” (Fischer, Reference Fischer2018). When confronted with starker language in polls, 51 percent of Republicans agreed in a 2019 Hill-Harris poll that the news media are “the enemy of the people,” compared to 35 percent of independents and 14 percent of Democrats (Bonn, Reference Bonn2019). Republican hostility was associated with support for suppressing freedom of the press, with a 2017 Economist poll revealing that nearly half of Republicans agreed that government should have the power to “shut down” “biased or inaccurate” media outlets and “revoke broadcast licenses” for news organizations if they “are [supposedly] fabricating news stories about a president and his administration” (Beauchamp, Reference Beck2017). Hostility toward the press grew noticeably over the decades, among members of both parties, but more on the Republican-right. While the General Social Survey reveals that 13 percent of Democrats had “hardly any” confidence in the media in 1973, it was 28 percent in 2018; comparatively, 16 percent of Republicans felt the same in 1973, compared to 65 percent in 2018 (Hetherington and Ladd, Reference Hetherington and Ladd2020).

Contempt for institutions of learning also includes distrust of higher education. This suspicion coincides with the Trump era, despite positive opinions of higher education being commonplace among Republicans just a decade earlier. As the Pew Research Center documents, while only 32 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning Americans held a “negative” perception of higher education in 2010, and the number remained relatively steady through 2015 at 37 percent, it increased to 58–59 percent in 2017 and 2019, during the Trump era. In contrast, the numbers remained relatively flat for Democrats and Democratic leaners, with 22 percent holding a negative view of higher education in 2010, compared to 18–19 percent in 2017 and 2019. By 2019, just a third of Republican and Republican leaners held a positive view of higher education, compared to just over two-thirds of Democrats and Democratic leaners (Parker, Reference Parker2019). These negative attitudes persisted during the Trump years despite a lack of scholarly evidence that those achieving higher levels of formal education are more likely to form liberal or leftist political attitudes (DiMaggio, Reference DiMaggio, Nadler and Bauer2019). The dearth of scholarly evidence to verify Republican suspicions was largely beside the point at a time when “conservatism” and scientific reasoning were explicitly positioned as diametrically opposed.

Along with the suspicion of higher education, one sees Republican skepticism toward medical researchers and scientists. The Pew Research Center’s polling reveals “growing partisan differences over trust in medical scientists and scientists” “since the Covid-19 outbreak.” For medical scientists, distrust on the right remained relatively constant, with only 32 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners expressing “a great deal of confidence” in “medical scientists” in 2019, compared to 31 percent saying the same in 2020. In contrast, while only 37 percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners had “great” confidence in medical scientists in 2019, it had grown to 53 percent by 2020. A similar – albeit weaker – growth in trust was apparent for scientists overall. No change was observed for Republican and Republican leaners between 2019 and 2020, with 27 percent expressing “a great deal of confidence” in scientists in both years, although such confidence increased from 43 to 52 percent among Democrats and Democratic leaners in the same period (Funk, Kennedy, and Johnson, Reference Funk and Kennedy2020). Republicans were also more likely to embrace various Covid-related conspiracy theories and misinformation, as they were 30 percentage points more likely than the overall public to say “the threat of coronavirus was exaggerated for political reasons,” 12 points more likely to say “the U.S. government is using the Covid-19 vaccine to microchip the population,” and 10 points more likely to believe that “vaccines have been shown to cause autism” (Bump, Reference Bump2021).

In the larger historical context, Republican skepticism of science has grown significantly in the last half-century. In 1975, 72 percent of Republicans had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in science; that fell 27 points, to 45 percent by 2021. Trust for Americans overall did not change much, with 70 percent holding a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in science in 1975, compared to 64 percent in 2021 – a decline of just 6 percentage points. This modest decline, however, is deceptive, as the dramatic Republican decline is obscured by rising support for science among Democrats, with this group’s confidence growing from 67 to 79 percent (Brewster, Reference Brewster2021). Put another way, the United States became more polarized regarding opinions of science over the last half-century, with Democrats becoming more supportive and Republicans rejecting it. This movement toward embracing anti-intellectualism, rejecting science, and denial of evidence-based thinking helps to explain the rise of conspiracy thinking on the US right. It also explains why so many Americans expressed little to no confidence in the guidance of medical experts, particularly relating to mask and vaccine skepticism in the Covid-19 pandemic.

Looking at the evidence presented thus far, one can see that Americans are increasingly living in separate social and political realities. This development speaks to the incredible power of partisanship in polarizing individuals and in socially constructing reality in contempt of science. While right-wing pundits continue to claim a commitment to evidence-based reasoning, the totalizing rhetoric that the Republican Party and its media defenders use to condemn professionals who produce fact-based discourses in the media, higher education, and the scientific community reveals the hollowness of their rhetoric. The right-wing attacks on expertise reveal a commitment to post-truth thinking, with journalists, academics, scientists, and medical researchers depicted as purveyors of mass deception.

Trump versus the “Fake News” Media

Republican efforts to manage the news included the curtailment of press access by the Trump administration, attempted coercion of dissidents, and rhetorical attacks on reporters that depicted them as purveyors of fake news. The curtailment of journalistic access by the Trump presidency was almost immediate, occurring in early 2017. In late February, several news organizations were barred from attending a press gaggle with the administration’s press secretary, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, CNN, Buzzfeed, the BBC, the Daily Mail, Politico, and The Guardian, which occurred as Trump referred to the media as the “enemy of the people” (Siddiqui, Reference Siddiqui2017). Right-wing sources attended, including The Washington Times, One America News Network, and Breitbart News. White House spokesperson Stephanie Grisham falsely maintained that “claims that outlets were excluded” from the gaggle “were not factual,” while noting “various media mediums were represented” (Siddiqui, Reference Siddiqui2017). Clearly, the ban was motivated by an effort to discipline elements of the press seen as hostile to the president, with White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer noting at the time the need to “aggressively push back” against “false narratives” in the media in response to questions about why some reporters were denied access to the event (BBC, 2017a).

Journalistic responses to being labeled fake news and being barred from White House access were negative. Some outlets that were allowed access, including the Associated Press and Time, refused to attend in protest and in solidarity with the barred news organizations (Siddiqui, Reference Siddiqui2017). Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, framed the ban as unprecedented: “[N]othing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties” (Siddiqui, Reference Siddiqui2017). The executives at CNN released a statement calling the ban “an unacceptable development” and an effort by the administration to “retaliate” against outlets that “report facts they don’t like” (Byers, Murray, and Liptak, Reference Byers, Murray and Liptak2017). The hostile relationship between the presidency and reporters continued throughout Trump’s term, and intensified as Trump sought to mobilize support for attacks on the media.

Trump’s conflict with the media worsened by late 2018, when the New York Times ran an embarrassing “anonymous” op-ed from a member of the administration – later revealed to be Department of Homeland Security official Miles Taylor, who defined himself as part of the Trump “resistance.” Taylor’s op-ed reflected the position of a contingent of Trump officials who “believe our first duty is to this country,” as opposed to a president who “continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic”:

The op-ed called the president “ill-informed” and “reckless” – and depicted Trump as a loose cannon – engaging in “repetitive rants” and “impulsiveness” that produced “half-baked” decision-making. Taylor expressed his concern that Trump’s politics were authoritarian, via “his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the ‘enemy of the people,’” an attack that he deemed “anti-democratic” (Taylor, Reference Taylor2018).

Trump’s response to the “anonymous” op-ed reinforced Taylor’s warning about the administration’s authoritarianism. As reported by the New York Times, Trump pressured his attorney general Jeff Sessions to “investigate the source of the article, which he has condemned as an act of treason” (Landler and Benner, Reference Landler and Benner2018). The president did not treat the criticism as an act of disloyalty from a member of his administration; Trump could have sought to identify Taylor and purge him from the Department of Homeland Security. Rather, Trump reportedly sought to intimidate the press as a punishment for its dissent, as he considered “[legal] action against the Times” although “[federal] prosecutors said it would be inappropriate for the Justice Department to conduct such an investigation, since it was likely that no laws were broken” (Landler and Benner, Reference Landler and Benner2018). Trump’s preference for prosecution would have violated the First Amendment constitutional protection of the media to freely report on government affairs. But freedom of the press was of little concern to a president demonstrating hostility toward media independence, as observed in the administration’s surveillance of House Democrats and journalists related to the “Russiagate” investigation (Raju et al., Reference Raju, Perez, Williams and LeBlanc2021; Tucker, Reference Tucker2021). Critics responded by charging the Trump administration with the “weaponization of law enforcement” in their targeting of journalists and opposition political leaders, as the Washington Post announced:

While the administration did not criminally prosecute reporters, it did create a political environment in which journalists were subject to coercive management techniques and surveillance, raising concerns about media freedom from government censorship.

The Trump administration sought to foster a political culture that was conducive to rising suspicion of, and animosity toward, journalists. This involved the language of outrage against the “fake news” media, which played well with Trump’s base. The president claimed that journalists were “doing everything within their power to fight the magnificence of the phrase, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! … They can’t stand the fact that the Administration has done more than virtually any other Administration in its first 2yrs. They are truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!” (Samuels, Reference Samuels2019). This sort of language was heavily propagandistic, drawing on a nationalistic fervor that envisioned the administration as seeking to return the United States to its past glory, and portraying reporters as un-American in opposing Trump because he wanted to “Make America Great Again.” Such rhetoric, obviously, was not geared toward achieving a productive dialogue between reporters, administration critics, and the president, but instead at rallying the base against one of the “four corners of deceit” – the “fake news” media.

Trump’s attacks extended beyond certifying who was a legitimate patriot – they glorified violence against the press. He indulged in extremist messages that would have been deemed beyond the pale by previous presidents. This included his comment at a rally in Minnesota that a journalist shot by rubber bullets was “a beautiful sight,” in reference to an MSNBC reporter in May 2020 who was struck while covering a Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest following the murder of George Floyd (Joyella, Reference Joyella2020). Trump’s attacks were also coordinated through Twitter. In one tweet, he included an image of a “Trump train” hitting a reporter, with the “CNN” logo tagged in front of the generic image of a blue-suited reporter, and including a caption that read “Fake news can’t stop the Trump train” (BBC, 2017c). The president also tweeted an edited video of him wrestling WWE promoter Vince McMahon that included the word “CNN” covering McMahon’s head and with the words “#FraudNews CNN” (BBC, 2017b). The video showed Trump tackling the CNN effigy and repeatedly punching it in the head, in a literal manifestation of Trump’s aggression against the “fake news” media. These videos made abundantly clear the president’s disdain for the news media. They also revealed rising extremism in the White House, via the embrace of the language and imagery of romanticized violence against reporters.

Trump routinely attacked the news media on Twitter and at rallies, to the delight of supporters, attempting to pacify and neutralize criticisms of his administration. Perhaps the most infamous example was when Trump refused to answer a question from CNN reporter Jim Acosta during a press conference in early 2017, reportedly as punishment for the outlet reporting an allegation that Russia “had compromising financial and personal information” against him:

This heated exchange occurred prior to Trump even taking office, setting the tone for the administration and their attempts to manage the press. Such blunt efforts failed to silence journalistic criticisms of Trump, but the attacks were no doubt appreciated by those in the president’s base who distrusted the “fake news” media.

It became clear over time that Trump was not going to intimidate reporters into silence. Eventually the president decided to circumvent the national press corps almost entirely, abandoning daily press briefings and regular press conferences in favor of communicating directly with individual reporters seen as sympathetic to administration goals, and reaching out to his supporters directly through Twitter (Keith, Reference Keith2018). According to Reporters Without Borders (RWB), the number of White House press briefings and gaggles fell dramatically by 2019–2020, compared to in 2017–2018. The decline was not because of Covid-19, as Trump’s press briefings and gaggles had nearly ground to a halt by 2019, while the number of such engagements briefly increased at the onset of the pandemic in early 2020, before again declining. Comparatively speaking, the number of press briefings and gaggle engagements during Trump’s four years in office was dramatically lower than the engagements of the previous two presidents in each of their first four years in office. As RWB reported, while the Trump administration (pre–Covid-19) held 158 press briefings in its first three years in office, the Obama administration held 399, while the George W. Bush administration held 351 (Reporters Without Borders, 2020).

Declining press access provided the administration with the dual advantage of reaching the public directly and unfiltered, while empowering Trump to attack the “fake news” media without worrying about journalists filtering his attacks in ways that challenged his messages. The preference for direct communication was conveyed by Trump himself, who boasted about his growing number of Twitter followers that “I’m not saying I love it, but it does get the word out,” while citing his tweets as a method of “fighting back” against news stories he deemed unfair (Keith, Reference Keith2016). While direct communication with his supporters benefitted Trump, he was also subject to criticism. As political communication scholar Martha Kumar reflected about the loss of the press engagements: “A briefing fills a very important role because it holds an administration to account to explain what they did and why they did it. It informs the public so it’s not just that reporters lose when there is no briefing, but the public loses.” With access to Twitter, Kumar explained, “We know what’s on the president’s mind, but you need to know what’s going on in an administration” (Reporters Without Borders, 2020).

While Trump’s term saw a declining engagement with the press, that trend was reversed in 2020 at the outset of the pandemic, as Trump returned to regular press briefings to address the crisis. The president bragged about his high ratings in these engagements (Wolfe, Reference Wolfe2020), despite the briefings being marked by many critical questions about the administration’s lack of a coordinated response to the crisis, as it failed to put forward a national plan, leaving management to the states (McCaskill and Ollstein, Reference McCaskill and Ollstein2020). Trump found these sessions frustrating, in large part because of the critical questions posed by journalists, which included inquiries about the lack of administrative preparation for the crisis and about whether the president took Covid-19 seriously as it emerged as a global pandemic (Costa, Vozzella, and Dawsey, Reference Costa, Vozzella and Dawsey2020). Questions abounded about the premature reopening of the country in the spring of 2020 prior to a vaccine being available and about Trump promoting, contrary to the recommendation of medical experts (Smith, Reference Smith2020), unproven Covid-19 treatment drugs, about the national PPE shortage early in the crisis, about his false comparison of the virus to the seasonal flu, and about his failure to take basic safety precautions seriously such as mask-wearing (Cathey, Reference Cathey2020a). By being in the direct line of fire from reporters, Trump could no longer avoid critical questions from the safety of Twitter, or retain freedom to control his message while railing against the “fake news” media.

Perhaps most embarrassing for the president was an April 23 press conference, which became a public relations disaster for Trump and a sign of his struggles in responding to the pandemic. During this conference, he suggested that disinfectants and ultraviolet rays could be used as treatments against Covid-19. Although Trump later downplayed his comments as sarcastic, the details at the time made it clear that the statements were being seriously offered to the public, reporters, and public health professionals. Standing in front of a presentation board titled “Best Practices for Every American” for reducing risk of exposure to Covid-19, the board included a reference to “commonly available disinfectants” including “Bleach and Isopropyl Alcohol” which “work to kill the virus” (BBC, 2020b).

The references to bleach as a cleaner of household, office, store, and other surfaces would be difficult for reporters to question by itself, until the president mentioned alleged alternative treatments for human consumption to treat Covid-19 infection. The interaction with Trump’s Covid response coordinator Deborah Birx is reproduced in the following quotation with Trump talking to reporters and the public, and speculating with Birx in favor of unproven potential remedies:

Birx sat through Trump’s comments silently, failing to contradict the president, although disinfectant producers such as Dettol and Lysol produced statements after Trump’s briefing announcing that “under no circumstances should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion, or any other route)” (Broad and Levin, Reference Broad and Levin2020). Trump’s comments were also widely rejected by medical experts and reporters.

Within a day of the disastrous April 23 briefing, reports appeared that Trump was considering ending daily press engagements (Swan, Reference Swan2020). Trump’s response was to pursue damage control, blaming the media for disinfectant-UV rays fiasco, and returning to his trusted venue of one-sided communication with his supporters on Twitter. He attacked reporters for behaving in “hostile” ways toward him, lamenting in one tweet:

He depicted the news media as a villain, deflecting critical attention from the negative public reaction to his comments about disinfectants and UV rays: “There has never been, in the history of our Country, a more vicious or hostile Lamestream Media than there is right now, even in the midst of a National Emergency, the Invisible Enemy! FAKE NEWS, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!” (Baker, Reference Baker2020).

From this review, it should be clear that Trump utilized the language of fake news routinely, in his efforts to pressure reporters to cover the president more favorably and as a projection tool to deflect attention from the administration’s routine falsehoods. Within the first month of taking office, The Washington Post reported that Trump “averaged four falsehoods or misleading statements a day … There hasn’t been a single day of Trump’s presidency in which he has said nothing false or misleading” (Cillizza, Reference Cillizza2017a). The ritualistic deception continued throughout his four years in office, with the paper reporting that Trump ended his tenure having “accumulated 30,573 untruths … averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day” (Kessler, Rizzo, and Kelly, Reference Kessler, Rizzo and Kelly2021). But such falsehoods were beside the point for his base. In an era of post-truth, in which much of the Republican-right base is socialized to assume a priori that reporters and experts lie as a matter of routine, and that truth only comes from Republican officials, Trump, and right-wing media, it did not matter if the president accumulated 10,000 or 30,000 or 100,000, or a million lies. With post-truth, the language of “fake news” is a weapon that is used against reporters who expose presidential spin. No amount of fact-checking or reporting on administrative deceptions, disinformation, or falsehoods was going to turn most Trump supporters against the president – with 62 percent admitting in late 2019 that there is not “anything that Trump could do” “in his term as president that would make you disapprove of the job he is doing” (Monmouth University, 2019).

Trump, Twitter, and the Meaning of Fake News

What did President Trump mean when he criticized the news media for reporting “fake news”? Keeping with my theme about the social construction of reality, the language of fake news was utilized by Trump in such a way that the meaning of the term took on a specific set of meanings, which were very different from what the term meant to reporters and the public, as I demonstrate in Chapters 3 and 4. Here I examine how Trump weaponized the term, via a comprehensive analysis of all his tweets mentioning “fake news” in the more-than-three-year period from November 2016 to December 2019. The analysis includes 633 tweets, which I categorize based on 1,383 total keyword descriptions used in those tweets in relation to “fake news.”

My analysis yields three main findings. First, I explore via Figure 2.1 the most common words used to describe the media in relation to fake news allegations, examining these words as a percent of all descriptions appearing in Trump’s tweets. Second, for ease of interpretation, I group words together into thematic categories. Finally, I supplement my findings with a closer textual analysis of Trump’s tweets, examining the ways that he talks about fake news, and provide a deeper understanding of the nuances of his language and word choices.

Figure 2.1 Trump’s tweets and fake news (November 2016–December 2019).

Source: Twitter

My initial review of the highlights of Trump’s linguistic choices in discussing fake news reveals numerous findings. Initially there appears to be little rhyme or reason to the president’s use of the term, as captured in Figure 2.1. Trump invoked the term “fake news” in relation to many different portrayals of the media. These included references to “Russiagate” and claims that journalists are “phony,” that they are “bad,” “sad,” “corrupt,” and “failing,” – that they are “hateful” “liars” who lack credibility and who stoke public anger as a result, in addition to many other descriptors captured in the figure.

These are just Trump’s greatest hits, looking at more than two dozen top media characterizations – as there are dozens of terms that he used, which I include in this chapter’s Appendix. To make sense of this unwieldy list, I group them together thematically into nine categories, as presented in Figure 2.2. These include, from least common to most common:

1. 1. complaints about the media not covering Trump’s alleged popularity in opinion polls,

2. 2. laments about journalists not paying enough attention to how great the economy was under Trump,

3. 3. claims that the media were biased against Trump, Republicans, and the right,

4. 4. the claim that reporters were rude and uncivil to his administration,

5. 5. nationalistic appeals to American greatness, militarism, and unity – and against alleged journalistic treachery,

6. 6. references to Russia and “Russiagate,” and to journalists fabricating a scandal,

7. 7. appeals to the need for more facts and accuracy in reporting, and against inaccuracy in the news,

8. 8. simple name calling and mudslinging against journalists, and

9. 9. claims about deceptions perpetrated by the press.

Figure 2.2 Nine major themes in Trump’s tweets on fake news (November 2016–December 2019).

Source: Twitter

The targets of Trump’s tweets include a list of media outfits that are commonly targeted by Republicans and right-wing pundits. Almost a third of Trump’s 633 tweets referred to national agenda setting newspapers – specifically The New York Times and The Washington Post. Over a quarter of Trump’s references were to national broadcast outlets, including ABC, NBC, and CBS, and generic references to the broadcast networks. And about 4 in 10 references were to cable news outfits – to CNN and MSNBC. Relatively speaking, CNN was his most targeted news organization – accounting for about a third of references to news organizations in Trump’s tweets. For more on the specific estimates, readers should consult the data provided in this chapter’s Appendix.

Undertaking a closer textual analysis of Trump’s tweets, I find that Trump utilized various linguistic choices when he attacked the “fake news” media. Most commonly, he targeted reporters for alleged deception, depicting them as “dishonest,” “lying,” engaged in “fraud,” “deceiving” the public, disinterested in “truth,” “corrupt,” and perpetuating a “hoax” on the public through reporting of “made up” stories, among other attacks. To provide one example, Trump baselessly perpetuated the conspiratorial claim that he won the popular vote in the 2016 election, tweeting, “It is all a GIANT AND ILLEGAL HOAX, developed long before the election itself, but used as an excuse by the Democrats as to why Crooked Hillary Clinton lost the Election! Someday the Fake News Media will turn honest & report that Donald J. Trump was actually a GREAT Candidate!”

With Trump’s name-calling, the targets included Democratic officials and journalists, who were often treated as inseparable. Most commonly, Trump referred to reporters with words like “failing,” “crazy,” “disgusting,” “sad,” “sick,” “funny,” “horrible,” “ridiculous,” and most common of all – “bad” – in their reporting. At other times he referred to them as “pathetic,” “ridiculous,” “garbage,” “disgraceful,” “unhinged,” “fools,” “degenerate,” and an “embarrassment.” In one example, Trump fused multiple themes together between name-calling and nationalistic-populistic rhetoric: “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @CNN, @NBCNews and many more) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people. SICK!” On the nationalism front, Trump referred to journalists as “dangerous” and appealed to efforts to protect national “borders” and build a “wall” and to “Make America Great Again,” to the need for national “unity,” and appealing to the “military” and the “troops.”

Rhetorical appeals to facts were also a part of Trump’s attacks on “fake news” media, including his claims about the economy and approval ratings. These claims were undermined by nonpartisan fact-checkers, such as Trump’s 2018 tweet about the media ignoring his allegedly high popularity rating:

The Associated Press fact-checkers reported the claim was erroneous and that “no known poll” existed at the time “showing such high ratings” (Yen, Reference Yen2018). In another set of tweets, Trump used conspiratorial rhetoric about the national security state, complaining that “[t]he Fake News Media is desperate to distract from the economy and record setting economic numbers and so that they keep talking about the phony Russian Witch hunt” (June 2018) and that “[t]he Deep State and the Left, and their vehicle, the Fake News Media, are going Crazy - & they don’t know what to do. The Economy is booming like never before” (September 2018). Outside of this conspiratorial rhetoric, there was little evidence in 2018 by way of conventional economic metrics such as GDP growth that the United States had reached an economic boom never seen before in modern history, as was recognized by nonpartisan fact-checkers (Yen and Rugaber, Reference Yen and Rugaber2018).

Trump’s rhetorical appeals to facts and accuracy drew on condemnations of reporters for slanted reporting, poor quality journalism, and fabrications. Concerning allegations of bias, Trump’s tweets frequently depicted the “fake news” as “biased,” “left,” “radical,” and “liberal.” He routinely took issue with how stories were “source[d],” with their “credibility,” and depicting them as “inaccurate,” “false,” “wrong,” and not based in “fact.” He operated from the premise that it was universally recognized that news outlets critical of him were fraudulent and that they fabricated their sources to discredit him, as seen in the following tweets from 2017 and 2019:

Allegations of fabrication were central to Trump’s lament about a lack of accuracy in the news – for example, when he lambasted reporters for emphasizing “negative” news against him and for ignoring “record setting economic news,” instead reporting on “the Russian Collusion Hoax,” which he claimed was perpetrated by the “deep state.”

Finally, one irony of Trump’s “fake news” tweets was his routine name-calling alongside appeals for reporters to remain civil in their coverage of his administration. Trump frequently attacked reporters for seeking to “demean” his administration, for their “hatred” and “disparaging” coverage, their lack of “respect,” for stoking public “anger” and polarizing the public, and for needing to apologize to him for their reporting. Some of his appeals to civility are captured in the following tweets:

1. 1. “The Fake News Is going all out in order to demean and denigrate! Such hatred!” (October 2017)

2. 2. “The Media has a big responsibility to life and safety in our Country. Fake News has contributed greatly to the anger and rage that has built up over many years. News coverage has got to start being fair, balanced and unbiased, or these terrible problems will only get worse!” (August 2019)

3. 3. “Fake News Media works hard at disparaging & demeaning my use of social media because they don’t want America to hear the real story!” (May 2017)

Moving from the many words Trump used in his efforts to undermine the media to the nine specific themes I discussed earlier, one might still be wondering what exactly fake news means to the former president. Nine themes still seem unwieldy, even as I synthesize more than a thousand descriptions that Trump tied to fake news. Perhaps the best way to simplify our understanding of what Trump means by the term is to dive even deeper into these nine themes, looking at a few specific tweets, which I argue cut to the core of Trump’s definition and that relate to his reference to a “study” by a right-wing media monitoring group purporting to demonstrate left-wing media bias against the president. This tweet is informative, alongside a second tweet suggesting this alleged bias translates into unfair coverage of Trump and “the economy.”

1. 1. Wow, more than 90% of Fake News Media coverage of me is negative, with numerous forced retractions of untrue stories. Hence my use of Social Media, the only way to get the truth out. Much of Mainstream Media has become a joke! (December 2017)

2. 2. The Fake News is working overtime. Just reported that, despite the tremendous success we are having with the economy & all things else, 91% of the Network News about me is negative (Fake). Why do we work so hard in working with the media when it is corrupt? Take away credentials? (May 2018)

These tweets reveal that whatever the grievance and language choice of Trump’s individual tweets – or the individual category in which I placed his choice of words in (see Figure 2.2) – they all have one thing in common: anger that the content is perceived to be negative toward the president and his agenda. This suggests that fake news to Trump can be simply defined as most anything in the media that he does not like, regardless of the specific report or allegation in question. Such an expansive definition threatens to strip fake news of much substantive meaning – and yet the term remains a fixture of US politics because the president of the United States made it such a regular part of his rhetoric and the American political lexicon. As we will see moving forward, however, the concept of fake news appears to retain significantly different meanings for other segments of the public, speaking to how meanings are constructed in competing ways in different political environments.

The “Big Lie” as Fake News, and Trump’s Social Media Expulsion

Trump’s reliance on social media to disseminate disinformation reached a fever pitch in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. He promoted what became commonly referred to as “Big Lie” propaganda on Twitter and Facebook and in right-wing media, claiming there was mass voter fraud and that the election was stolen from him. The president relentlessly pushed this narrative, despite being rebuked in dozens of lawsuits by the courts as he sought to overturn results in battleground states. Trump failed due to a lack of evidence, a point recognized by his own Department of Justice, which conceded that there was no documentation of mass voter fraud (McEvoy, Reference McEvoy2021). As in the past, Trump promoted disinformation claims under the banner of truth, while attacking the media as “fake news.” Responding to news organizations regularly reporting that Trump’s claims were without merit, he angrily tweeted that journalists were in on the conspiracy to steal the election:

1. 1. “The Radical Left Democrats, working with their partner, the Fake News Media, are trying to STEAL this Election. We won’t let them.”

2. 2. “He [Biden] only won in the eyes of the FAKE NEWS MEDIA. I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go. This was a RIGGED ELECTION!”

Contrary to Trump’s rhetoric, his propaganda campaign was itself a manufactured scandal. The president spent months on Twitter, Facebook, and other digital venues, stoking mass paranoia with his “Stop the Steal” disinformation campaign, which was tolerated to varying degrees by social media companies. Trump used rhetorical attacks on the media up through the day of the January 6 insurrection, encouraging those attending his rally near the White House just hours before the Capitol riot. He pushed conspiratorial claims about election fraud, calling on his supporters to “fight like hell” to overturn the election, and blaming the “bold and radical left” and “the fake news media” for his election defeat (Ross, Reference Ross and Rivers2021).

By the summer of 2020, Twitter started actively pushing back against Trump, referring to some of his content as “manufactured” (BBC, 2020c). The platform even hid a presidential tweet during the George Floyd protests that it condemned for “glorifying violence.” The tweet was highly incendiary, responding to BLM protests with the declaration that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” in reference to the potential use of police or military force to suppress protests. Such advocacy of violence stood in contrast to evidence that 96 percent of BLM protests produced no damage to property and that 98 percent resulted in no personal injuries (Udoma, Reference Udoma2021). Trump responded to Twitter’s action by using belligerent language to target the platform, alleging its coziness with the Democratic Party, and tweeting:

The response reinforced a long-standing pattern of Trump invoking language that positions him as an opponent of propaganda and lies, while himself disseminating disinformation, in this case by framing BLM protests as fundamentally violent in nature.

Trump’s reference to social media regulation was to a provision of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which stated, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another content provider.” This provision legally protects social media companies from liability for content posted by their users that might be deemed false or harmful. The attempt to roll back Section 230 was widely seen as a means for Trump to retaliate against social media companies for their efforts to rein in his disinformation, with these venues depicted by Trump and his allies as biased against the US right. It seemed clear that Trump’s comment was intended to pressure Twitter executives into not flagging future content or challenging his disinformation. Twitter continued to monitor Trump, flagging hundreds of the president’s posts in the fall, informing users that the content was false, disputed, or misleading regarding many claims he had made about election fraud (Spangler, Reference Spangler2020). Facebook did not act against the president until early 2021, following the insurrection at the US Capitol building on January 6, when thousands of Trump’s supporters attacked members of Congress to shut down the certification of Democratic president-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

The violence at the Capitol was a public relations disaster for Twitter and Facebook, and disturbed much of the public. Critics of the president implicated him not only in stoking Big Lie election propaganda but also in encouraging insurrectionists to march on the Capitol and engage in violence. Social media executives decided to deplatform Trump from their venues after he provoked his supporters to engage in violence, assaulting Capitol police, destroying property, illegally breaking and entering into the building, searching for members of Congress, and seeking to prevent certification of Biden’s win (Naylor, 2021). After Facebook’s top executives consulted on the matter, they announced first a 24-hour suspension of Trump’s account, which was then followed by a two-year ban, in response to what they framed as “Trump’s brazen incitement of violence to overturn the election,” which they concluded “crossed a line” and “constituted a severe violation” of Facebook’s content moderation rules (Byers, Reference Byers2021; Clegg, Reference Clegg2021). Facebook kept open the possibility of extending the ban “if we determine that there is still a serious risk to public safety” at the end of the two-year period. Twitter issued a “permanent” ban against Trump immediately after the January 6 events, claiming his posts represented a threat to public safety (Byers, Reference Byers2021). That ban was later overturned when Elon Musk purchased Twitter.

Available evidence suggests that Trump’s election disinformation had a significant impact on the Republican base, and that consumers of various media venues were sympathetic to his message. More than one quarter of Republican and “Republican leaners” reported in late 2020 that they relied on the Trump campaign as “a major source of election news,” and within this group, individuals were 25 percentage points more likely than the rest of the public to believe “voter fraud” was a major problem in US elections (Jurkowitz, Reference Jurkowitz2021). Republicans (and leaners) who reported relying only on Fox News and talk radio were 36 percentage points more likely to believe voter fraud was a “major problem” than Americans in general, while Republicans (and leaners) relying on these and other right-wing venues were 19 percentage points more likely than other Americans to feel the same (Mitchell et al., Reference Mitchell, Jurkowitz, Oliphant and Shearer2020c).

Among Trump’s Twitter followers, there was a strong susceptibility to disinformation, with election propaganda posts being among his most popular tweets (Rattner, Reference Rattner2021). But the problem of social media–induced misinformation was more severe than this. My regression analyses of the Pew Research Center’s August–September and November 2020 national election surveys find that Americans who reported relying primarily on social media for their news differed from the rest of the population in their opinions of election fraud. For the August–September preelection survey, only 15 percent of those “get[ting]” their “political and election news” primarily from “print or magazines” believed “voter fraud” was a “major problem” “when it comes to voting by mail in US presidential elections,” compared to 30 percent of those relying on social media. The relationship between media consumption (for social media versus traditional media consumers) and opinions of voter fraud is significant, after controlling for respondents’ gender, race, political party, ideology, age, education, and income (more information on this analysis is available in this chapter’s Appendix).

My analysis reveals that election information consumption was characterized by significant variability in terms of what people thought about election fraud. Those relying on Trump’s campaign for their news were significantly more likely than other respondents to believe that fraud in mail-in voting was a “major problem.” The consumers of CNN, broadcast television (ABC, CBS, NBC News), National Public Radio, Washington Post, and New York Times were significantly less likely to accept claims about voter fraud, while Fox News viewers and talk radio listeners to Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh were significantly more likely to accept fraud claims, controlling for respondents’ other demographic factors. The differences between each group of media consumers and other respondents in the Pew survey are reported in Table 2.1.

For the November survey, social media users were not any less likely to lack confidence that their “vote was accurately counted.” But they were 10 percentage points less likely to say that “votes cast in person at polling places across the United States were counted as voters intended in the elections this November” and 15 percentage points less likely to say that “votes cast by absentee or mail-in ballot across the United States were counted as voters intended” – in line with Trump’s election disinformation. Social media users were significantly more likely to fall into Trump’s propaganda claims, after controlling for respondents’ other demographic factors (again, see Appendix at this chapter’s end). These findings suggest the Trumpian voter fraud narrative found a sympathetic home on social media venues, and not only in right-wing echo chambers but also with such disinformation appearing on a systemic level. This point was apparent when considering that social media consumption was associated with greater acceptance of voter fraud propaganda, even after statistically accounting for survey respondents’ partisanship and ideology. Beyond social media, acceptance of election misinformation was widespread on the right and among Republicans in general. One-third of Americans (Cillizza, Reference Cillizza2021b) and more than three-quarters of Republicans thought there was evidence of “widespread fraud in the 2020 election” in February 2021 (Cillizza, Reference Cillizza2021a). Months later in July, two-thirds of Republicans agreed that “the election was rigged and stolen from Trump” (Dickson, Reference Dickson2021). In sum, the evidence presented here suggests that it is not only people’s partisan affiliation and prior ideology but also their sources of information that have a dramatic impact on susceptibility to Trumpian propaganda and fake news on voter fraud.

Conclusion

This chapter examined Trump’s politics in relation to the fake news phenomenon. I draw on some overarching lessons here. First, Trump’s suspicion of and attacks on the media were accompanied by rising authoritarian attitudes among his supporters, via their support for censoring and shutting down major media outlets, and their preference to get information directly from Trump and his Twitter feed rather than from the news. Trump’s deplatforming left his supporters with even fewer options for seeking political information. Second, the rising reliance on unconventional information sources such as Trump’s Twitter feed (prior to his ban) represented an intensifying threat to an informed public. The danger here was of increased exposure to political propaganda, considering that Twitter (and Trump’s routine falsehoods disseminated on it) is not an authoritative, reliable, or credible news source. While Trump was deplatformed from social media, the risks to democracy from excessive reliance on disinformation on social media remain, as I discuss in Chapter 7 . And Trump’s reinstatement at Twitter raised prospects of a renewed role for the venue in promoting right-wing propaganda from the former president. Finally, rising public distrust of the news media is not necessarily based on a substantive foundation, considering the incoherence of Trump’s attacks on the media, with “fake news” constituting any information that Trump did not like. Considering the many ways Trump discusses “fake news,” any simple understanding of its meaning remains elusive and subject to partisan manipulation.