A new peak in Trump’s efforts to foster misinformation

In a speech to veterans, President Donald Trump said, “Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” What President Trump is doing is asking listeners to join him in his carefully-crafted bubble, a space where information that conflicts with what President Trump asserts or with what President Trump believes is untrustworthy, intentionally false or simply doesn’t exist. It’s as clear an articulation of Trump’s approach to his role as chief executive as we’ll find, and one for which evidence abounds of Trump’s deployment of it as a tool. In a way, Trump’s comment to the veterans was just an overt articulation of what was already obvious. It was a direct request to his base to do what had previously been implicit: Set aside anything from anyone else as suspect.