Reason #5607 That Trump Was Elected

He drives the media crazy to the point that even Snopes is obliged to point out their lies: The Lies of Donald Trump’s Critics, and How They Shape His Many Personas

Broadly speaking, most of the falsehoods levelled against Trump fall into one or more of four categories, each of them drawing from and feeding into four public personas inhabited by the President.

They are:

• Donald Trump: International Embarrassment
• Trump the Tyrant
• Donald Trump: Bully baby
• Trump the Buffoon.

Some of these claims are downright fake, entirely fabricated by unreliable or dubious web sites and presented as satire, or otherwise blatantly false. But the rest — some of which have gained significant traction and credibility from otherwise serious people and organizations — provide a fascinating insight into the tactics and preoccupations of the broad anti-Trump movement known as “the Resistance,” whether they were created by critics of the President or merely shared by them.

Generally speaking, we discovered that they are characterized and driven by four types of errors of thought:

• Alarmism
• A lack of historical context or awareness
• Cherry-picking of evidence (especially visual evidence)
• A failure to adhere to Occam’s Razor — the common-sense understanding that the simplest explanation for an event or behavior is the most likely.

Infused throughout almost all these claims, behind their successful dissemination, is confirmation bias: the fuel that drives the spread of all propaganda and false or misleading claims among otherwise sensible and skeptical people. Confirmation bias is the tendency to look for, find, remember and share information that confirms the beliefs we already have, and the tendency to dismiss, ignore and forget information that contradicts those beliefs. It is one of the keys to why clever people, on all sides of every disagreement, sometimes believe stupid things that aren’t true.

As often happens, the comments at Althouse are as good as the article. Linked at Pirate's Cove in the weekly "Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup" and links.