Donald Trump ran a campaign built almost exclusively on lies and demagoguery, so it stands to reason that his presidency will usher in a new era of deceitful propaganda as well. It could very well dwarf the George W. Bush administration’s infamous propaganda push around the Iraq War.
As detailed in a recent report from Media Matters, is that Trump can rely on a pre-existing infrastructure of well-funded conspiracy theorists, like Alex Jones, James O’Keefe, and David Daleiden, who pose as “citizen journalists” and pump out a steady stream of lies and misinformation to support the Trump agenda.
This kind of propaganda is strikingly different from the propaganda efforts of previous right-wing administrations in the past, which tended to be more top-down in nature. Take, for instance, the Bush administration’s efforts to sell the American public on the Iraq War. Those efforts were largely coordinated by the Bush administration, which constructed an elaborate but false narrative — that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction — and then spread White House officials and surrogates across the media to keep pushing that story until the public bought into it.
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