Trump (still) can’t be bothered with the truth, and that has real effects

Every now and then articles bob to the surface of the Internet about how to avoid passing on bad information. “If you see something on the Internet that disturbs you, don’t take it on face value — do a little research first.” It’s good, sound advice.

Too bad Donald Trump cannot be bothered with it.

It’s pretty much an open secret that Donald Trump has zero filter, zero impulse control. If something catches his eye and causes a spurt of adrenaline to shoot through his brain, he immediately reacts.

This effect is known and used by various parties, from Fox News to those even less savory, to promulgate opinions, points of view, and bizarro world quasi-factoids. Multiple times a week, some Fox pundit will say something particularly outrageous in the morning, and, hey presto, Trump will pick up on it and pass it on as though it were his own particular brilliant insight.

This has consequences, as there apparently are plenty of people who are willing to believe anything Trump says, and plenty of others who are willing to use Trump’s blurts as a justification for passing on their particular zaniness.

In this particular example, Donald has gotten it into his head that Google is out to get him. It’s unclear why, except that, um, they don’t truckle to his commands and whims, and don’t give us a weekly Google Doodle dedicated to him or something. Or it may be that people have put a bug in his ear about it, knowing that Donald is always ready to believe a conspiracy against him.

The initial bits of this were Donald taking the word of some pundit or another who claimed that a search of “Trump news” gave lots and lots of negative articles as a result. Even without fully understanding how Google’s search algorithms work, the immediate answer would seem to be that there are a lot of negative articles written about Donald that are clicked through to or linked to, quite possibly because Donald does a lot of asinine things and is deeply unpopular [1].

Such an answer is unthinkable to Trump, of course, therefore there must be a conspiracy on Google’s part, and thus there’s actual talk coming from the White House about regulating an Internet search engine. Which isn’t at all scary, except in all the ways it is.

And then someone dropped into Trump’s mailbox or Twitter feed or something a video indicating that Google used to promote the President’s State of the Union speech back in the Obama days, but as soon as Trump took over they stopped doing so, thus demonstrating Google’s horrible, horrible bias.

Now a mature adult President of the United States (or even George W. Bush) would turn to an aide and say, “Bob, that sounds pretty awful. Confirm that for me and, if it’s true, let’s get Google on the phone to see what they have to say, and, if we don’t get good answers, we’ll issue a statement.”

Trump, of course, just re-tweets it as proof of Google’s perfidy, without any research.

And, of course, as the article here notes, it’s a completely false accusation, that some basic research could have avoided.

One can question here whether Trump actually cares — whether he sees any need for a filter or a search for the actual truth (vs. what suits his rhetorical needs). After all, even with a clear fact check showing he’s incorrect, he’ll never, ever, issue a retraction. Even if the White House officially admits he misspoke (as they have more than once), it won’t at all slow him down from the next whimsical comment that pumps up his own ego and slings mud at his perceived enemies.

At best, that makes him a loose cannon (a shipboard event in the age of sale that could actually lead to ship damage and death to sailors); at worse, it makes him a willful and unrepentant liar.

This would be amusing if it was the Grandpa next door shaking his fist at the clouds. But this is the President of the United States. The things he says have impact whether they are true or false. In having a White House unable or unwilling to restrain him, and a subsection of the population who have a tribal attachment to him and, honestly, care more about his “style” than his “facts,” we end up with a situation that continues to escalate out of control, that threatens our economy, our international relations, our freedoms and civil liberties.

This just seems like a tiny example. It is not. It’s important in its own right, and it’s part of an even more important, and dire, trend.

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[1] Even his beloved conservative-leaning Rasmussen polling shows that disapproval and strong disapproval of Trump are higher than approval and strong approval numbers. http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/trump_administration/trump_approval_index_history

AP FACT CHECK: Trump wrongly claims Google shunned speech
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is wrongly claiming that Google shunned his State of the Union speech but promoted Barack Obama’s addresses.
In a tweet Wedn

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