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In one respect, the gaffe is insignificant to current events. In another, it's vastly more important, because while small it erodes the underpinnings of the system by which we actually disseminate information.

It's like having to choose between being upset about the person that mugged you for $500 on the street, or the bank that surreptitiously added 0.05% APR or the loan you just got for your house. One feels more important in the moment, but the other has much farther reaching implications, not just to your pocketbook, but as to whether you can trust anything about that institution going forward.

If this is the beginning of a new trend for the Whitehouse where nothing presented can be trusted, and it continues through future presidencies, I can definitely tell you which I think will be more important in 20 years.

The cynical among us have been saying that nothing presented by the White house (and any other government institutions) can be trusted at face value for years. I guess now is the time where everyone becomes a cynic.

But is that such a bad thing?

They say access journalism is dead, but access journalism is just repeating stuff said by people with power. Making them accountable is a good thing.

Trump may have unintentionally restored investigative journalism...

>> Trump may have unintentionally restored investigative journalism...

This can happen if they can find a way to monetize text that costs 100x more to produce and has 100x less engagement than clickbait.

If there's 10000 times less competition in investigative journalism than in clickbaiting those numbers add up to being profitable

Maybe people will actually pay for something that isn't trash.

(Or, maybe not, who knows.)

> But is that such a bad thing?

Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting

Your point may be valid, but I think the current (up until very recently, anyway) situation is just as bad.

> I guess now is the time where everyone becomes a cynic.

For a transition of normative systems it seems that it is required that at some point people "don't believe in anything" anymore.

A new trend?

You think Trump is inventing Whitehouse lies, right before our eyes? Politicians have a looooong history of lying, big lies that get peole killed ("Iraq WMDs are a slam dunk!") . Where have you been?

Those lies were not immediately able to be proven wrong. This is different because not only did they lie about something that could be checked but the continued to lie even after being called out on it. Further the president repeated the lie and continues to repeat the lie. O bet both George W. Bush and Tony Blair would agree that there were no WMDs in Iraq if you asked them today, if you also Trump, today or in 10 years, about the turnout for his inauguration he would repeat the same lies.

Those lies were not immediately able to be proven wrong.

But there was serious doubt even if it did not constitute a clear proof. And doesn't this actually make matters worse? An obvious lie about something without much if any consequences versus a somewhat convincing lie about something that affected the lives of millions? To me the former one seems more like a stupid thing to do, the later one seems ruthless, evil or what ever you want to call it.

> O bet both George W. Bush and Tony Blair would agree that there were no WMDs in Iraq if you asked them today, if you also Trump, today or in 10 years, about the turnout for his inauguration he would repeat the same lies.

You can use the Obama birth certificate turn around as counter point and that was definitely less than 10 years.

No, I don't think you can since it's entirely possible Trump will simply declare he never backtracked and that he still has doubts or evidence Obama wasn't legitimate. He's repeatedly denied saying things _he is on video or twitter_ saying. He can simply make up any facts whenever he wants because no matter the evidence to the contrary, what he says is true simply because he's said it.

> No, I don't think you can since it's entirely possible Trump will simply declare he never backtracked and that he still has doubts or evidence Obama wasn't legitimate. He's repeatedly denied saying things _he is on video or twitter_ saying. He can simply make up any facts whenever he wants because no matter the evidence to the contrary, what he says is true simply because he's said it.

President Obama is on video, audio, Twitter, and just about every other form of media saying things that subsequently were proven false. A brazen example of that is the infamous line, "If you like your plan you can keep your plan." which he knew to be false (and Ezekiel Emanuel, architect of much of the ACA had apparently laughed at as impossible).

I don't mean to single out President Obama as it's really all Presidents, or more generally politicians, that do it. It's not unique to Trump, didn't start with him, nor will it end with him.

All politicians lie, what's seemingly different about Trump is the scope and frequency of those lies, and his refusal to admit he even said them given evidence.

Just the refusal to admit them would be bad enough, but since he's gotten away with it just about every time, it shows a worrying trend of there being no accountability. Combined with the frequency, the problem is just multiplied.

I find a politician that can't seem to be held accountable for his actions and that trades on this for more political power very troubling.

Right. That and the birth certificate thing wasn't a "lie", it was ignorant, dog whistle politicking.

Telling people you are going to strengthen whistle blowing laws to empower workers, then prosecuting a record number of people under the Espionage act is closer to a damaging lie.

Why Trump's Staff Is Lying (https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-23/why-trump...)

> if you also Trump, today or in 10 years, about the turnout for his inauguration he would repeat the same lies.

I bet good money he'll be saying billions of people watched his inauguration by then.

So it's more acceptable for politicians to admit to their lies at a later date, that to stick to them? Hmm...

Is that what I said?

I choose my words carefully. I even emphasized specific words to attempt to make my point more clear. Then you ignored all that.

I wasn't trying to imply that the White House could be trusted in all things, but that there was some level of truth you could probably assume, especially about things that were already known or weren't worth lying about. What we have now is an example of disputing obvious facts, and over something inconsequential, as issues the White House responds to about go. This is clearly different than what we could expect before, even if we couldn't always expect for an entirely honest answer before.

This is what people have been noticing during and since the election, you can't pin down Trump on anything because he is a controversy machine. He says something ridiculous and the media gives it attention and even begins to get some momentum on the story, but a week later, sometimes even days later, he does or says something that's even more ridiculous and now most people are concentrating on that new thing. Its hard to say if this is intentional or if his bombastic style is just something we're not used to in politics, but it seems to be effective in that the media is always chasing after the latest controversy.

For me it looked like the media had really nailed him on not releasing his tax forms, even going so far as to uncover damning ones from the 90s, but then the inside edition tapes came out and everyone focused on that instead.

Berlusconi used to do the same. They know the media cycle and play it to their advantage. It's a sort of "fire and motion" strategy where you keep enemies talking about the previous position while you're already gaining a new one. Anyone can play it, but your "suppressing fire" must be strong enough to distract effectively; that sort of bombastic bravado doesn't come naturally to "reality-based" personalities on the left who are constantly walking a tight rope between very different positions in their base.

I think your description is definitely spot on and Trump has also been playing this game — in one form or another — since the 80s.

The similarities between Trump and Berlusconi are terrifying - and Berlusconi was in power for what, 10 years?

Trump has tapped in to something and I fear it's going to work quite well.

More like 20, considering the years in which he passively controlled part of the political narrative.

More like 20 years, but Italy does not have the hard culture of "8 years and GTFO" that is so ingrained in the US. There are no term limits for Prime Ministers, election losers are not required to step down from party-leadership roles, and even the unofficial limits for President (which is mostly a ceremonial role) reelections, have recently been broken.

It is one of the great achievements of US democracy, although one has to question how much meaningful change can realistically be achieved in a massive country with little more than 7 years available (because re-election campaigns and lame-duck status in practice will consume a full year). For all the drama that they generate and the feeling of electoral power, strict term limits are a very conservative measure. On the other hand, you're guaranteed Trump will be gone by January 2025 at worst.

I think that Joel Spolsky popularized "fire and motion" (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/) but the Hebrew original more accurately translates to "fire in motion" or, more awkwardly "firing while moving"

Makes me think of a certain tech personality that is no longer with us...

The Youtube channel Charisma on Command has interesting videos explaining Trump's success.

https://www.youtube.com/user/charismaoncommand/search?query=...

It's completely intentional, and very effective. Mix big lies and small lies with truths and half truths. Lie about friends and enemies, and that's what the media will focus on. So much misinformation that nobody knows was what is truth.

Because "The standards you walk past, are the standards that you implicity accept/allow"...

Most of the worst dictators and tyrants in the world didn't start off at 'maximum mayhem'. They tend to start with lies, misinformation, subterfuge and misrepresentations, then they move up to things like false accusations, inquisitions, persecution and the like.

Every step just makes it easier to move closer to full blown deportations, incarcerations & executions etc.

A bit harder to stop them at the last step, when you have allowed the previous 99 steps to go unquestioned.

A few good governments too. Wilson, usually rated in the top 10 presidents, ran with "America First" and "He Kept Us Out" for his re-election. We joined the war only a month after his re-inauguration. In hindsight, that was likely for the best but it seems a misrepresentation.

How was that for the best? American involvement in WWI led to the Treaty of Versailles which was the direct cause of Hitler and WWII. All of that could have been avoided if America had just stayed uninvolved.

> In hindsight, that was likely for the best but it seems a misrepresentation.

Was it? American involvement created a decisive winner in what would have been a stalemate. Imagine if Versailles hadn't been so one sided?

WW1 was a stalemate, it was only really ended by strike action and mutiny within Germany. Hence dolchstosslegende.

This is why he got that far in the primaries and then eventually got elected. Every gaffe was reported on and some of it also not true which muddied the water to a point where people stopped listening when serious things came up.

All of this just for profit and tv ratings. There is also ego in there because who want's to be the last to break a story.

We see the same thing happening when a disaster occurs. For example the airport shooting. So much false information is reported just because they have to be the first/exclusive.

> Every gaffe was reported on and some of it also not true

What wasn't true? Honestly curious as I don't remember any truly spurious accusations against him.

> All of this just for profit and tv ratings. There is also ego in there because who want's to be the last to break a story.

Certainly, but that doesn't discount the validity of the reported incidents.

> We see the same thing happening when a disaster occurs. For example the airport shooting. So much false information is reported just because they have to be the first/exclusive.

Yes and no. I think a lot of that comes from reporting on a developing real-time situation where information is constantly revised. That's rarely the case with speeches or political coverage of this sort.

  I don't remember any truly spurious accusations against him.

The only one I can think of is the MLK story. In 2009, Obama removed a bust of Winston Churchill (lent by the UK to George W Bush after the 9/11 attack) from the Oval Office, returning it to the British Embassy in Washington [1].

Obama had a bust of Martin Luther King on display in the Oval Office.

After Trump's inauguration, a WH press-pool reporter noticed and reported on Twitter that the Churchill bust was back in the office (it was), then added that the MLK bust had been removed (it hadn't, it was simply obscured by a door).

It was never really a story - just a handful of tweets - and the reporter tweeted the correction within an hour [2]. Trump has used this as an example of "media dishonesty:".

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/462314...

[2] http://www.snopes.com/mlk-bust-oval-office/

His obsessive marijuana habit as a youth; his decades-long black nationalist religious associations; his gangster affiliations; his lengthy professional work with convicted terrorists; his family's foreign intelligence connections, etc, etc.

I suspect all of these things were widely reported, yet largely spurious accusations.

This sounds like you just took the largest aspersions of the last 5 presidents and threw them together. That's intentional, right?

Here's a more in-depth record of some things that have been inaccurately and widely reported[0], and interestingly enough, from a right-wing magazine that refused to support Trump's nomination.

[0] http://thefederalist.com/2017/01/23/mainstream-media-still-b...

That's a great reference. And very accurately describes the state of the media (broadly speaking).

There's a meme that Trump is anti-gay or even dangerous for LGBTQ people when he's pretty liberal-to-ambivalent about LGBTQ issues. At least given his statements and positions so far.

Only if you don't count virtually everyone he has picked in his administration, starting with his VP.

While his personal opinions don't seem to be broadcast regularly I don't think this serves as a great example given his choice of VP.

Peter Thiel got the same treatment despite being gay and clarifying his position, which wasn't at all unreasonable.

> Every gaffe was reported on and some of it also not true

Just about everything was true.

For instance, the "alternative facts" comment/incident is being talked about everywhere

That's exactly why they said it. Notice how it distracted everyone from talking about the marches? Trump knows how to change the media narrative.

The part I hate is that the media and everyone is eating up all these new sound bytes for things like "alternative facts" instead of just calling them what they are, lies, and moving on to more important things like focusing on the actual issues. To give it a fun name like that plays into the spectacle and is exactly what he wants.

There are two forces at work, Trump and the Republican party. The gaffes are all Trump, the sweeping executive orders mostly the party.

He never had much of a platform beyond "build the wall!", and is happy to roll with Republican dogma. The Republicans proved during the last administration that they're willing to bend the rules to breaking point to damage their opponents; they've decided they're willing to humor Trump so they can get him to do what they want.

If the president were a more established Republican like Ted Cruz, we'd still be seeing huge and destructive changes to health care, climate change policy, etc.

It's hard to know which is the bigger threat. Trump is a new style of threat in the way he arrogantly ignores the old polite conventions and even the law itself, lining his pockets in plain sight. Letting that pass unchallenged could result in a permanent autocracy, one "strong man" after another.

The Republican party is "just" pushing an extreme agenda, similar to what they did under Bush, which is more of a known threat (or not a threat at all if you agree with their platform). But they're also neglecting their duty to push back against Trump's abuse of the system. They should be fighting tooth and nail to force him to sell his businesses.

> It almost makes me wonder if it would be a good idea if there was a website that covered the latest gaffe and the corresponding actual news worthy story that was lost out on optimal coverage because of it.

There are publications that tend towards policy focus, and there are even more publications that are half policy-wonk half-commentariat but at least not trapped in the gossip column soundbite minutia.

If you look at circulation numbers, though... The Economist is about 1.5 million in the US. Time seems less news-digest these days and more commentary, but it's got double the circulation.

But both of those are, of course, below Sports Illustrated, People Magazine, Better Homes And Gardens, and Costco Connection in terms of regular readers.

One could surmise that the real issue is that there isn't a large audience that actually wants what you (and I) think we should be paying attention to. Most of us are used to having a set-it-and-forget-it approach to how government works, and don't really believe we should have to pay attention.

And on top of that, some large portion of the country resents the very idea that expertise, education, and focused thinking should represent any authority worth respecting more than their opinions. Why would anyone in that demographic care to read news and policy details at all? The only important thing is knowing that people who are in their ostensible tribe are in charge.

This isn't just to bag on people -- everybody has limited attention and if possible it's nice to not to have to give it to things unless you have to. It's to underscore the problem: in a market economy, publications that stay afloat are going to try to provide what people pay attention to and/or pay for. And that may not be the same thing as what "deserves" attention.

That actually sounds like a great idea! Or even better, two columns on the same site - on first one latest gaffe, on the second one proper news. You can't avoid having "popular" stories on the page, but if they compete with themselves and not with the important news, they can't push them to oblivion.

Yes, and that is exactly the way Trumpet wants it, bait and switch.

the horrifying stuff were his campaign promises, yeah? though, in fairness his campaign was also all about alternative facts.