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Like many successful branding campaigns, Trump’s is grounded in some truth: The term “fake news” emerged, in the context of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, as a reference to the deliberately false stories that Russian government propagandists and assorted troublemakers around the world were spreading on Facebook and other social-media platforms to help or harm a particular candidate, sow chaos, or simply make a quick buck. The weaponization of information and large-scale manufacture of disinformation have become fixtures of contemporary politics.

The rise of social media, amid heightened political polarization, has also created media echo chambers and undermined public trust in the professional press in many parts of the world. In the United States, coverage of Trump has been much more negative than coverage of his recent predecessors, which has only deepened distrust among Trump’s supporters. It’s telling that when the communications marketing firm Edelman polled Americans on the meaning of “fake news,” they disagreed about what phenomenon it describes: Forty-seven percent of respondents said it is “sloppy or biased reporting,” while 39 percent characterized it as an “insult being over-used to discredit news stories people do not like” and roughly 15 percent labeled it either a Russian weapon to disrupt democracies or a “political dirty trick” practiced by Democrats or Republicans.

But in specifically repurposing the term “fake news,” and conflating unfavorable journalism with disinformation, Trump is arguing that journalists maliciously fabricate the sources and substance of their reporting—at least when what they report doesn’t reflect well on him. By persistently hurling the fake-news put-down at nearly all the country’s leading news organizations, he is refashioning a vital democratic institution—the independent press—as an enemy. According to his populist-nationalist narrative, it’s an enemy not just of his but also of the people and the nation. He is thus inverting the core mission of news organizations: to ferret out the truth and hold powerful people of all persuasions accountable.

Trump, who has made numerous false or misleading claims himself, has not indicated that his fake-news crusade is geared toward establishing a more fact-based discourse. Instead, his hallmark has been to relentlessly turn questions of fact into questions of motive. Coverage of the newly passed tax bill was critical not because of debate over the merits of the legislation, but because the “Fake News Media” wanted “to please their Democrat bosses”; TV news scrutinized the Trump administration’s response to the hurricane in Puerto Rico not to determine how the government handled the emergency, but because the “Fake News Networks” were trying to “take the spirit away” from U.S. soldiers and first responders. But when the motive favors Trump, the facts are immaterial. After Trump retweeted videos posted by a far-right British politician that purported to show violence by Muslims, his press secretary argued that the dubious authenticity of the clips didn’t matter. “Whether it’s a real video, the threat is real,” Sanders said. Trump was highlighting “the need for national security, the need for military spending. … There’s nothing fake about that.”