The term "fake news" has become ubiquitous in our political landscape. Of course, it came to prominence as a very specific phenomenon during the last election that benefited then-candidate, now-president Trump. A host of websites purporting to be news sites released an insane number of false stories that painted Hillary Clinton in a negative light. These stories were designed to go viral—and that's exactly what they did. As a response to the discussion of this phenomenon, Donald Trump adopted the term and weaponized it against the actual news media. Any story that he didn't like? Fake news. And all the while, Trump has continually and hypocritically made a habit of talking about and citing things that just aren't true.

Now, if you're like me, you maybe have wondered where Trump gets some of these "alternative facts." After all, this is a guy whose media diet is pretty well-established. He reads The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post. He watches cable news, and though Fox News can definitely revel in the outlandish from time to time (especially Trump's beloved Fox & Friends), it doesn't entirely explain the sheer ludicrousness of some of the shit Trump consistently seems to make up. Well, thanks to a report in Politico, we now have a pretty clear idea where this shit comes from.

White House chief of staff Reince Priebus issued a stern warning at a recent senior staff meeting: Quit trying to secretly slip stuff to President Trump. Just days earlier, K.T. McFarland, the deputy national security adviser, had given Trump a printout of two Time magazine covers. One, supposedly from the 1970s, warned of a coming ice age; the other, from 2008, about surviving global warming, according to four White House officials familiar with the matter. Trump quickly got lathered up about the media’s hypocrisy. But there was a problem. The 1970s cover was fake, part of an Internet hoax that’s circulated for years. Staff chased down the truth and intervened before Trump tweeted or talked publicly about it.

Oh, no big deal, just the deputy national security adviser planting a fake story in the president's ear. Nothing at all terrifying about that, especially coming from a person working in foreign policy... But as damning and bizarre as that is, maybe even stranger is the story of how Trump's tax plan came to be.

More recently, when four economists who advised Trump during the campaign — Steve Forbes, Larry Kudlow, Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore — wrote in a New York Times op-ed that “now is the time to move it forward with urgency,” someone in the White House flagged the piece for the president. Trump summoned staff to talk about it. His message: Make this the tax plan, according to one White House official present. The op-ed came out on a Wednesday. By Friday, Trump was telling the Associated Press, “I shouldn’t tell you this, but we’re going to be announcing, probably on Wednesday, tax reform,” startling his own aides who had not yet prepared such a plan. Sure enough, the next Wednesday Trump’s economic team was rolling out a tax plan that echoed the op-ed.

This is a president who looks at the news and just says "that." Call me crazy, but that doesn't seem like a well-thought-out way to run the country.

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