Two more WaPo pieces I found interesting today.

The Trump presidency was marked by battles over truth itself. Those aren’t over.

“What’s unique about Donald Trump is that he took advantage of this widespread distrust of government and media to say everyone is lying to you except for me. We have never had a president so devoted to spreading disinformation and trying to overturn an election,” said Kathryn Olmsted, a historian at the University of California at Davis. “The people who stormed the Capitol are absolutely convinced that the election was stolen. They’re not being opportunistic; they really believe this. And all of the social science shows that if someone really believes a conspiracy theory, it is just about impossible to change their minds.”

As Trump’s presidency recedes into history, scholars seek to understand his reign — and what it says about American democracy

In many ways, Trump’s presidency was so aberrant — a real estate promoter and reality television star with no political or military experience winning the highest elected office with a minority share of the popular vote — that it is difficult to place him within the continuum of his peers, historians said.
Yet they also emphasized that Trump did not come out of nowhere — that his rise to political prominence behind a false birther conspiracy seeking to delegitimize his predecessor, President Barack Obama, is rooted in the Republican Party’s history of racial grievance politics and its leaders’ increasing willingness to embrace the far-right wing.
Likewise, they said, Trump’s use of new social media tools to spread disinformation was made possible by rapidly changing technologies, but the rhetoric he employed to radicalize his base is steeped in language of American demagogues — from Joseph McCarthy to Father Charles E. Coughlin to George Wallace.