The Lies of Donald J. Trump's Critics and How They Shape His Many Personas

I was on snopes.com looking for accuracy of a FB post when I came across this story on their home page. It's pretty long but a good read, IMO.

The Lies of Donald Trump's Critics, and How They Shape His Many Personas

The Lies of Donald Trump’s Critics, and How They Shape His Many Personas

An in-depth analysis of the false allegations and misleading claims made against the 45th President since his inauguration.

Over the past two years, many thousands of broadcast hours and probably millions of words have been devoted to Donald Trump’s relationship with the truth. Equally, the President has made accusations of dishonesty and bias against the media and his political opponents a central part of his persona and presidency.

What lies are told about the President? Is he lying when he makes these allegations? In a feverish atmosphere of claim and counterclaim, when everyone seems to reflexively accuse everyone else of “fake news”, it can be difficult to know what’s what.

There are many articles that exist detailing lies and misleading claims made by the Trump administration. This article is intended as a neutral, reliable analysis of the lies, false allegations and misleading claims made about and against Donald Trump since his inauguration in January 2017. We’ve attempted to strip away the hyperbole, name-calling and generalizations, and examine the patterns and trends at work: what characterizes these lies and exaggerations, the effect they have, what might explain them.

We pay particular attention to selected examples — claims that have gained prominence among the mainstream opposition to Trump, revealing much about the methods, priorities, and tone of that opposition, and illustrating how this movement both cultivates and plays off a number of caricatures of the 45th President and at times falls prey to a handful of identifiable and repeated errors of thought.

This is nothing new. Supporters and opponents of every high-profile politician in American history have done exactly the same, but in the current cultural atmosphere, where “the truth” is universally, even manically, exalted as an abstract concept but then widely degraded in practice, it’s essential to confront, correct, and analyze patterns of falsehoods like these.

This is not an exhaustive list. For that, and a litany of fact checks of claims made by the President, you can browse the Snope archive on him.

The focus here is on attacks against Trump. So for the purpose of this article, we’re not interested in false claims that are intended to reflect favorably on him. Nor does this analysis address claims made against his family members, of which there have been many. It’s also limited to the period following the inauguration on 20 January. This analysis was primarily based on an in-depth search of our own archives.

The Many Donald Trumps

Broadly speaking, most of the falsehoods levelled against Trump fall into one or more of four categories, each of them drawing from and feeding into four public personas inhabited by the President.

They are:

Donald Trump: International Embarrassment

Trump the Tyrant

Donald Trump: Bully baby

Trump the Buffoon

Some of these claims are downright fake, entirely fabricated by unreliable or dubious web sites and presented as satire, or otherwise blatantly false. But the rest — some of which have gained significant traction and credibility from otherwise serious people and organizations — provide a fascinating insight into the tactics and preoccupations of the broad anti-Trump movement known as “the Resistance,” whether they were created by critics of the President or merely shared by them.

Generally speaking, we discovered that they are characterized and driven by four types of errors of thought:

Alarmism

A lack of historical context or awareness

Cherry-picking of evidence (especially visual evidence)

A failure to adhere to Occam’s Razor — the common-sense understanding that the simplest explanation for an event or behavior is the most likely.

Infused throughout almost all these claims, behind their successful dissemination, is confirmation bias: the fuel that drives the spread of all propaganda and false or misleading claims among otherwise sensible and skeptical people. Confirmation bias is the tendency to look for, find, remember and share information that confirms the beliefs we already have, and the tendency to dismiss, ignore and forget information that contradicts those beliefs. It is one of the keys to why clever people, on all sides of every disagreement, sometimes believe stupid things that aren’t true.

We’re going to take a look at the four major types of falsehood we found, which correspond with Donald Trump’s four public personas, and point out along the way how various errors in thought have played a role in their origins and their spread.

(See link for the rest of the article as pictures are involved)

Thank you, lawildcat. The truth is a breath of fresh air.

Does this mean snopes.com is a reliable source to use to determine the truth of stories?

Can I just watch his press conferences and read his tweets and make my own determination? I don't need a media filter to come to my own conclusions about the man. I get all I need to know directly from his mouth.

So we dismiss all negative traits associated with the POTUS based upon anecdotes?

Does this mean snopes.com is a reliable source to use to determine the truth of stories?

No...they still haven't won my trust back. They are a resource like many others, but I'll always try to verify their claims with a second source.

Can I just watch his press conferences and read his tweets and make my own determination? I don't need a media filter to come to my own conclusions about the man. I get all I need to know directly from his mouth.

Can I give an AMEN! Hallelujah! Speak!

Can I just watch his press conferences and read his tweets and make my own determination? I don't need a media filter to come to my own conclusions about the man. I get all I need to know directly from his mouth.

Yes.

Does this mean snopes.com is a reliable source to use to determine the truth of stories?

Snopes is just a click-bait advertising site in actually. Its owners are just internet advertising people and they are having their own little war with each other.

Fact-Checker Snopes' Owners Accused of Corporate Subterfuge

SAN DIEGO (CN) – A lawsuit filed in California last week claims the fact-check news site Snopes.com has been caught up in its own concealment scheme, in an ownership spat that has left the site’s personnel matters in limbo.

Internet media management company Proper Media sued Bardav Inc. and its owner David Mikkelson over the “unlawful jockeying for ownership and control of the fact-checking website Snopes.com,” which gained a national profile during the presidential election last year and “recently entered into a high-profile agreement with Facebook to integrate fact-checking services into its social media platform,” according to the 16-page lawsuit filed in San Diego Superior Court on May 4.

Seems they have on job open - and its not for a reporter....

Proper Media Careers & Open Jobs ~ Apply Online | ZipRecruiter

This role will contribute to the growing of Proper Media's Advertising business by providing exceptional support to our advertising and technical teams.

The ideal candidate will have background in online media, sell-side programmatic technical ad operations and trafficking direct sold campaigns, familiarity with DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) and experience mining data in Microsoft Excel to identify actionable insights.

Everyone can form their own opinion, I'm not sure many here would say otherwise, but that doesn't mean lies shouldnt be exposed.

Everyone can form their own opinion, I'm not sure many here would say otherwise, but that doesn't mean lies shouldnt be exposed.

That's some clear thinking for a 7 am post.