And the answer is perfectly clear, or ought to be by now. It isn’t that Trump is “wrong” or even that he is “lying.” Trump is out to destroy fact-based understanding of public affairs. Trump gets, at least intuitively, that he wins that battle simply by having the charge repeated, no matter how often it is debunked. There is brain research that shows how this works. People who don’t follow news closely just remember hearing stuff that’s out there. And they sort of average it out in their heads that there’s probably some truth to it somewhere. See also the Hillary Clinton email “scandal.”

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This is bad enough, but in this instance we have about a third of the electorate happy to accept anything Trump says as gospel. And even that isn’t the end of it. There is a large and growing presence of right-wing “information” outlets that are happy to repeat, amplify or even add to administration-friendly disinformation.

We are all aware of the lethal heroin and other opiates problem spreading in the United States. This is the information equivalent. We are injecting poison directly into the forearms of our democracy. Once a critical mass of people are conditioned to accept an alternative, administration-sanctioned version of reality, and we are terrifyingly close to that already, dialogue becomes impossible, and normal politics becomes impossible.

This is the game Trump is playing. It doesn’t particularly matter whether the GOP health-care bill passes or doesn’t pass. The way he keeps score is this: Is my ability to set the narrative growing stronger, or not? It is cynicism of the most toxic kind, and we desperately need to label it and isolate it. If Trump wins that battle, we can just put our hands up.

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I don’t expect to see the following headlines, but for my money these would be a lot closer to accurately reflecting what is happening:

“Trump demonstrates again that he is detached from reality.”

“Trump again undermining democratic government.”

“Trump still behaving like a sociopath.”