Propagandists and their cousins in the advertising business know that frequent "impressions" linking an idea or feeling attached to something else (a person, a product, a policy) cause the audience to automatically, unconsciously associate the two in members' own minds. That is the reason Coca-Cola has spent many billions of dollars on advertising that shows healthy, slim people alongside the Coca-Cola name or a container of the beverage.

The D.C. establishment and its media handmaidens are dedicated to a narrative that Donald Trump is a racist who hates all the putative victim groups lionized by the left's identity politics fixation. They reinforce that narrative every day, in every way possible.

It is one of the oldest and most disreputable tricks in the propaganda business to apply this technique to politicians. Find something that sounds or looks bad that has been that way for a long time, and suggest to the audience that it is something new that the current incumbent implemented.

Thanks to eagle-eyed Mike Brest, writing in the Daily Caller, we have a classic example of this technique in the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post:

The Washington Post published an article about the U.S. government choosing not to renew the passports of people born near the border, as they are skeptical that those people were actually born in the country. It's not until the ninth paragraph that the article begins to address that the policy began under the Bush administration and continued under Obama.

Everyone in the news business knows that a large portion of readers never make it nine paragraphs into a story. Many glance only at the headline and a subhead or two. Another big group reads the first few paragraphs. These two groups account for a big majority of newspaper readers, unless the topic in question is of highest concern – say, an epidemic breaking out locally.

So, for most readers, the message conveyed is that the current administration of Donald Trump is doing this on its own initiative.

Read the first four paragraphs, and there is an unmistakable impression of the Trump administration's sole responsibility (emphasis added):

On paper, he's a devoted U.S. citizen. His official American birth certificate shows he was delivered by a midwife in Brownsville, at the southern tip of Texas. He spent his life wearing American uniforms: three years as a private in the Army, then as a cadet in the Border Patrol and now as a state prison guard. But when Juan, 40, applied to renew his U.S. passport this year, the government's response floored him. In a letter, the State Department said it didn't believe he was an American citizen. As he would later learn, Juan is one of a growing number of people whose official birth records show they were born in the United States but who are now being denied passports – their citizenship suddenly thrown into question. The Trump administration is accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Hispanics along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown.

Officially, the WaPo is telling the truth. But effectively, considering the reading habits of its audience, most readers will get a false impression.

The editors known they are doing this. That is why it is despicable.