During a press conference with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto, Trump took credit for inventing the term “fake news.””
“I don’t even use fake anymore,” he said. “I call the fake news now corrupt news because fake isn’t tough enough. And I’m the one that came up with the term—I’m very proud of it, but I think I’m gonna switch it to corrupt news.”
Donald Trump said he invented the term “fake news.”
He was lying.
Again.
Buzz Feed editor Craig Silverman popularized the term “fake news” before “Trump got his greasy paws on it,” Andrew Beaujon wrote in the Washingtonian magazine.
Silverman began using it in 2014.
Trump used the term to discredit the press.
He was not the first megalomaniac to impugn the press to weaken their credibility so he could advance his undemocratic agenda.
Trump perhaps learned this from Adolf Hitler, who he admired, according to Trump’s chief of state John Kelly.
Of all the figures in history to admire, Trump picked Hitler.
There are comparatively few people in the last hundred years who were worse than Donald Trump.
Hitler was one of them.
He started a world war and executed six million Jews.
So Trump was definitely a better guy than Hitler.
There, I said it.
But there are comparisons.
Hitler used propaganda and disinformation in his rise to power.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/opinion/hitler-speech-1919.html
So did Trump.
https://newrepublic.com/article/144592/trump-creating-propaganda-state
Hitler told the German people that their country was a cesspool and only he could fix it.
When Trump delivered his inauguration speech on January. 20, 2017, he promised an end to “American carnage,” and, according to an article by the Reuters News Service, “painting a bleak picture of a divided, dysfunctional nation he had insisted that he alone could fix.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-trump-legacy-analysis-int-idUSKBN29P0EX/
Hitler divided the German people into “us” and “them.”
Trump did the same in the United States.
https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-trump-legacy-analysis-int-idUSKBN29P0EX/
Hitler called Jews “the enemy of the people.”
Trump called the press “the enemy of the people.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/437610-trump-calls-press-the-enemy-of-the-people/
Hitler and his propagandists found a term to repeat over and over to discredit journalists so their criticism would be ignored: “Lügenpresse.”
Translated, it means “lying press,” Timothy Snyder, the author of On Tyranny and several other books on the Holocaust and contemporary politics, wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/opinion/hitler-speech-1919.html
Trump and the far right revived the term and called it “fake news.”
Ivana Trump, Donald Trump’s first wife, once told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that her husband kept a book of Hitler’s speeches near his bed.
Ivanka said that her husband used to read the book.
But Trump’s ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, who spent a year and a half with Trump writing his autobiography, The Art of the Deal, has his doubts about whether Trump read the book.
During the eighteen months that Schwartz observed Trump, he never saw a book on Trump’s desk or anywhere else.
“I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life,” Schwartz said.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all
Trump openly expressed his admiration for Hitler, Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly told Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender, author of the book, Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost.
Kelly said that Trump told him during a trip to Europe to commemorate the World War I that Hitler “did a lot of good things.”
Kelly, a former Marine Corps general, responded by telling Trump that “you cannot ever say anything supportive of Adolf Hitler. You just can’t.”
Trump’s knowledge of German history is perhaps no better than his knowledge of American history.
The Wrap published a compilation of some – but certainly not all – of Trump’s mistakes when talking about American history, such as saying this about the long-dead abolitionist Frederick Douglass:
“Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.”
Trump says there’s a plaque on his golf course that sits on the Potomac River that this was the site of a great battle of the Civil War, where, according to Trump, an inscription reads, “The casualties were so great that the water would turn red and thus became known as ‘The River of Blood.’”
Historians say no significant Civil War battle took place at the site.
Trump once brought up in a speech that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican.
“Most people don’t even know he was a Republican,” Trump said. “Does anyone know? Lot of people don’t know that.”
Trump once demonstrated his knowledge of the Civil War in an interview.
People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why?” he asked. “People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?”
Here’s a little-known answer: “slavery.”
Trump claimed in a phone conversation with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that Canadians burned down the White House during that War of 1812.
https://www.thewrap.com/donald-trump-team-confused-history/
George Santayana is credited with the quote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Put another way, those who don’t know their history should do same reading about it or just shut the hell up.
