President Donald Trump walks on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Sunday, Nov. 29, 2020, after stepping off Marine One (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Unraveling viral disinformation and explaining where it came from, the harm it's causing, and what we should do about it.
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Trump on Sunday evening also promised “big things” were coming in his campaign’s legal actions. But his effort to overturn the election he lost suffered yet another defeat on Friday when the federal appeals court in Philadelphia roundly rejected his team’s latest effort to challenge the state's presidential election result saying the “campaign’s claims have no merit.”On Saturday night, Trump continued to criticize Fox News, suggesting his followers switch to Newsmax or OAN “or almost anything else. You won’t have to suffer through endless interviews with Democrats, and even worse.”
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Seemingly tired of pushing election disinformation, Trump then tried to take credit for saving the world from the coronavirus. “I came up with vaccines,” Trump said, claiming the U.S. was doing better than the rest of the world when it comes to dealing with COVID-19.Such a claim is entirely inaccurate: the U.S. is currently reporting over 100,000 new cases per day, hospitals across the country are overwhelmed by patients, and the country’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, predicts the country may see “surge upon a surge” in the weeks after Thanksgiving.Later on Sunday, Trump lashed out at an interview on 60 Minutes with Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who was fired by Trump last week.During the interview, Krebs was asked about the Trump campaign’s disinformation campaign. “What I saw was an apparent attempt to undermine confidence in the election, to confuse people, to scare people,” Kreb said.
Trump’s unrelenting efforts to undermine the integrity of the election are showing no signs of slowing down, and according to one expert, this is a tactic taken directly from the Kremlin’s playbook.Trump is running a “classic Russian-style disinfo campaign,” known as the “firehose of falsehood,” Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, told CNN on Sunday. “Push out as many different stories and conspiracy theories and lies and half-truths as you possibly can,” Rauch said. “The goal here is to confuse people, and he's doing very well at that. This is a classic propaganda tactic.”