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Comment by duderific | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's inability to distinguish. At least for those in the public sphere, it's a willful disregard for facts entirely, because acknowledging facts would put them in opposition to the president, thus potentially setting them up to be banished by the party.

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The last episode of This American Life[1] really nails it to the wall:

> The bully lie is different. It doesn't try to convince you. It doesn't present evidence. It just tells you to pick a side. So when the president said that diversity programs caused the plane crash over the Potomac, when he called the president of Ukraine a dictator without elections, he didn't lay out a set of facts to make his case. He wasn't interested in rebuttal.

> When he does this kind of thing, Masha writes, he's "asserting control over reality itself" and splitting the country into those who agree to live in his reality and those who resist and become his enemies by insisting on facts.

[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/855/transcript

I think in addition to that, he has learned that his behaviour is rewarded with unprecedented social and media exposure and share of the social consciousness, and when all everyone talks about is Trump, it in some way legitimizes whatever he says by nature of choking out everything else. This has basically only escalated based on everything he has done so far in his second term. Even if whatever he said is dumb and doesn't work or he is wrong, it doesn't matter because that story is buried under the stories covering the 10 other outrageous things he has said since. Whenever he says something absurd, he is inviting everyone to join him in his reality, and everyone hops in.

I think institutional trust is too low, the media cycle moves too fast and people are too divided for facts to matter much in this environment.

> The last episode of This American Life[1] really nails it to the wall:

This was also 'on display' in Trump 1.0 with the claim of "the largest crowds ever" for his first inauguration—which they weren't:

* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38707722

* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/06/donald-trump-i...

* https://www.factcheck.org/2017/01/the-facts-on-crowd-size/

A bunch of comments then about it being a 'loyalty test' if you were willing to repeat the line.

I think the GP might have been referring to voters, I frequently hear from them how Republican economics are better because, allegedly, there is less spending ("allegedly" is doing a lot of work there - we all know how the national deficit trends between the two parties). Businesses across the country initially reacted very well to him coming to power, though that honeymoon is abruptly coming to an end.

> because acknowledging facts would put them in opposition to the president

Let’s be honest, both parties are doing these dances of hypocrisy. Stay-the-course Dems defending Biden and continuing to demonise both wealth and populism aren’t much better. It’s not as bad, blatant or personalised. But it’s there.

Honest? If the Democrats even remotely demonized wealth, we’d be in a completely different situation today.

> If the Democrats even remotely demonized wealth

The point is we have strong rhetoric around both. That is internally inconsistent.

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