- The piece discusses Trump's history of lying and his disregard for reality.
- It questions the meaning behind Trump's words and highlights his frequent lies and exaggerations.
- The piece explores how Trump's lies have become normalized and examines where he gets his information from, including cable news.
- It emphasizes the importance of a shared sense of reality in policy discussions and criticizes Trump for making policy decisions based on false information.
- The piece raises the questions of how Trump became a pathological liar, why people believe him, and what can be done about it.

- The video discusses how Donald Trump relies on unreliable sources such as Breitbart and InfoWars for information
- Trump's trust in Breitbart goes back several years, as he has used their articles to support his claims
- InfoWars, run by Alex Jones, has spread conspiracy theories about government control of tornadoes and the Sandy Hook shooting
- Trump's belief in voter fraud originated from a tweet and was spread by right-wing sites, despite being debunked
- Trump's disregard for evidence and his administration's defense of his beliefs raises concerns about democracy and policy-making based on false information
- The press is under attack and labeled as fake news by the Trump administration, with Breitbart being given preferential treatment at press conferences
- The endgame is to delegitimize the press and have the public rely solely on the president for news, similar to the philosophy of North Korea.

- The philosophy of North Korea is to get news directly from the leader
- It is alarming that leaders can pass on mistruths without consequences
- Republicans should want objective reality to remain intact
- Protests, calls to legislators, and lawsuits are effective ways to hold the administration accountable
- Individuals should verify stories before sharing them on social media
- The show has created commercials to educate Donald Trump on various topics he may not know about
- The commercials will air on shows that Trump watches
- The goal is to educate Trump one by one on topics he may lack knowledge on.

- The text discusses Trump's history of lying and his disregard for reality.
- It questions the meaning behind Trump's words and highlights his frequent lies and exaggerations.
- Trump's reliance on unreliable sources such as Breitbart and InfoWars is mentioned.
- The piece raises concerns about the impact of Trump's lies on policy-making and democracy.
- The Trump administration's attack on the press and preference for Breitbart is discussed.
- The endgame of delegitimizing the press and having the public rely solely on the president for news is mentioned.
- The importance of holding the administration accountable through protests, calls to legislators, and lawsuits is emphasized.
- The need for individuals to verify stories before sharing them on social media is highlighted.
- Commercials have been created to educate Trump on various topics he may lack knowledge on.

Donald Trump spreads a lot of false information thanks to his daily consumption of morning cable news. If only we could sneak some facts into the president’s media diet.

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-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ Normally, we like to focus this part of the show on complex, depressing policy issues.

Something fun, like, CO2 emissions from hearses.

Or the proliferation of special purpose taxing districts.

A topic so boring, you didn't even realize we literally already did that exact story last year.

And we want to keep doing those kind of things, but unfortunately we can't until we address something even bigger, the concept of reality itself.

Now, since taking office around 412 years ago, Trump has made it clear that reality is not important to him.

He's exaggerated the size of his inauguration crowd.

He said the election was marred by mass voter fraud with no real proof of that.

He also falsely claimed that compared to Muslims, it was almost impossible for Christian refugees from Syria to get into the U.S.

He even lied about the weather during his inauguration.

The rain should have scared him away, but God looked down and he said, we're not gonna let it rain on your speech.

First, it did rain while you were speaking.

That's why your wife was holding up an umbrella and people behind you were wearing ponchos.

And second, if God did look down, his only thought would have been, wait, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir?

Could you not book silence, or was silence somehow boycotting this thing too?

We have a president capable of standing in the rain and saying it was a sunny day.

And before we go any further, Donald Trump lies is clearly not a fresh observation.

Liberals are probably thinking, wow, hot take there, Johnny.

Next, you're gonna tell me that Obama is aloof, Dick Cheney is evil, and Paul Ryan doesn't climax until he checks his Fitbit to see how many calories he's burned from fucking.

If you're on the other side, if you're on the right, you're probably thinking, oh, great, another blizzard of snowflakes from last cuck tonight with Johnny Trigger warning.

And yes, I know all other presidents have lied.

PolitiFact found that just over a quarter of President Obama's statements that they evaluated were some degree or false.

But with Trump, that number is currently over two-thirds.

Perhaps that is why 1 reporter who's been covering Trump found himself saying this.

This is what makes covering Donald Trump so very difficult.

We are talking about the president, like a Tinder match we've been on 4 dates with.

I asked him if we could hang out this Friday, and he said, "...I'm starving." Bicycle emoji, poop emoji.

What does he mean when he says, -"Words?" -...Words.

Trump's relationship with the truth is going to be of profound importance going forward, because any policy discussion has to begin with a shared sense of reality, and Trump's reality can change within a single sentence.

When you hear 4.9 and 5% unemployment, the number's probably 28, 29, as high as 35.

Because a 4.9% rate might result in a cautiously constructive monetary policy, whereas a 42 percent rate might result in the purge.

So, tonight, we thought it would be useful to try and answer 4 basic questions.

How did we get a pathological liar in the White House?

And to that first question, Trump's lying is obviously nothing new.

He has a well-documented 40-year history of bullshit.

He lied about being invited on this show, and about the ratings for The Celebrity Apprentice.

Even his building, Trump Tower, is not as big as he says

His 58-story building became a 68-story building.

It made a lot of sense in his mind, because if you're renting a room, you'd rather be on the 14th floor than on the 6th floor.

Just spare a thought for confused firefighters turning up to that building.

The smoke alarm's going off in Penthouse B on the 68th floor, which is apparently an Alcove studio on the 58th.

What is less harmless is when he started lying about the president's birth certificate, and then as a presidential candidate, started making troubling statements like these.

The murder rate in the United States, it's the worst, the highest it's been in 45 years.

Our president wants to take in 250,000 from Syria.

Our gross domestic product, a sign of strength, right?

And no one's ever heard of a GDP below 0 because that is fucking impossible!

Now, any 1 of those voters could have disqualified him for office, but we were so accustomed to Trump's nonsense, people could just shrug it off as Donald being Donald.

Even his own advisors, like Peter Thiel, argued that people shouldn't worry about his statements because he didn't really mean them.

I think a lot of the voters who vote for Trump, take Trump seriously, but not literally.

And so when they hear things like the Muslim comment or the wall comment or things like that, It's not, the question is not, you know, are you gonna build a wall like the Great Wall of China, or, you know, how exactly are you gonna enforce these tests?

What they hear is, we're gonna have, we're gonna have a saner, more sensible immigration policy.

Oh, yeah, that is definitely the sense I got from watching those Trump rallies.

Yes, while we are all furiously chanting, build that wall, we all understand in this context, wall is a clever use of metonymy, or a figure of speech in which 1 word, wall in this example, is used as a stand-in for a saner, more sensible immigration policy.

Now, if you will, let's unpack Trump the bitch.

And yet, the travel ban literally happened, and as for the wall...

A lot of people say, oh, 0, Trump was only kidding with the wall.

When he says he's going to build a wall, he means it.

Now, it might be 30 feet high and labeled 156 stories, but assume that it's coming.

Trump was telling the truth about his solutions to the problems he was lying about.

And he is now making real policy based on fake facts.

Which brings us to our second question, where is his information coming from?

Now, Trump himself has admitted he gets a lot of it from TV, which may explain why he speaks so confidently about cable news staples like crime and terrorism.

But when it comes to the nuts and bolts aspects of government, like the nuclear triad, he struggles.

Now, he famously flubbed a question on the triad during an early debate in an exchange that ended like this.

Of the 3 legs of the triad, though, do you have a priority?

Because I want to go to Senator Rubio after that.

to me, nuclear's just the power, the devastation is very important to me.

The components of that triad are important.

It is unacceptable not to be able to name every single 1 of them.

They are nuclear weapons, not your children.

It starts with T, and it's not the other 1.

And you would hope that as president, he'd now be getting information from primary sources and briefings, but Trump still watches a phenomenal amount of cable news.

His tweets frequently echo things that just aired on TV.

Just 2 weeks ago, he tweeted, "'Ungrateful traitor Chelsea Manning, who should never have been released from prison, is now calling President Obama a weak leader.

Terrible.'" Which is interesting, because Chelsea Manning never used the words, weak leader.

But, that phrase was used on Fox News just 15 minutes before he tweeted in a segment which also called Manning an ungrateful traitor.

So, the president seems to tweet about whatever information he just saw on cable news.

If someone changed the channel to The Sprout Network, he'd tweet, "...Caillou's life is boring even for a cancer kid.

a sense of just how much he watches cable news, a few hours later, he was on Air Force 1, and you could actually hear the commercials from Fox News blaring in the background.

That is the Empire Carpet jingle playing at full blast.

Trump just made the interior of Air Force 1 sound like the living room of an old person who died 3 days ago and who nobody's found yet.

-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ He watches so much cable TV, he presumably also gets daily briefings from this guy.

I'm a professional cowboy, and I use catheters.

I've broken 14 bones, had 2 concussions and a punctured lung.

I know pain, and I don't want any more of it.

If you've only been cowboying for 25 years, what did you do before you were cowboying?

And why are you in a library and 1 that doesn't want to overdo it with the books?

He also takes information in from frighteningly unreliable sources such as Breitbart, the organization which gave us Steve Bannon, see Bannon, now Trump's chief strategist.

Breitbart has published such Pulitzer-eligible stories as, Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy, racist pro-Nazi roots of Planned Parenthood revealed, and hoist it high and proud, the Confederate flag proclaims a glorious heritage.

You know, the kind of headlines you see your old high school friends share on Facebook and think, oh, that's a shame.

-♪ ♪ -♪ But Trump's trust in Breitbart actually goes way back.

A few years ago, Trump was challenged by Bill O'Reilly, who correctly pointed out that his claim that thousands of Muslims were seen celebrating in New Jersey on 9-11 was based on no evidence whatsoever.

You know, this just came out from Breitbart.

Believe me, if there were thousands, that would have been reported.

Well, this article says they were swarming...

Bill, this article says they were swarming all over the place.

So I don't know what that means, but it means a lot of people.

Holding up a Breitbart article does not make you seem more credible.

You might as well have gone, oh, hold on a second, Bill.

And Trump's sources get even worse, because he also cited an article to support his Muslims on 9-11 claim from InfoWars, a website run by this guy.

Hillary and Obama want to make you poor and pathetic.

That man is Alex Jones, and that is actually him at his most presentable.

That's Alex Jones meeting his girlfriend's parents for the first time.

Now, in his more outspoken moments, Jones has argued that the government has the ability to control tornadoes, that the Boston Marathon bombing was a false flag attack, and that tap water is a gay bomb, and that they are putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin' frogs gay.

And then, there is the Sandy Hook school shooting.

Yeah, so, Sandy Hook is a synthetic, completely fake, with actors, in my view, manufactured.

I knew they had actors there, clearly, but I thought they killed some real kids.

And it just shows how bold they are that they clearly used actors.

Now, that is not just offensive, It's stupid.

If the government had actually hired child actors, there is no way their stage parents would have stopped talking about it.

Well, he didn't get the Tide commercial, but he did book a leading role in a government-sponsored false flag attack.

It's the same director who did the moon landing.

Trump is apparently such a fan that Alex Jones himself has said, it is surreal to talk about issues here on air and then word for word hear Trump say it 2 days later.

And I would be skeptical of that if Trump hadn't gone on Jones' show and said this.

I just want to finish by saying your reputation's amazing.

You will be very, very impressed, I hope.

I guess it makes sense that Donald Trump wants to impress Alex Jones.

Why would you want to drain the swamp if not to eradicate all those gay frogs?

Trump sees something that jibes with his worldview, doesn't check it, half remembers it, and then passes it on, at which point, it takes on a life of its own and appears to validate itself.

Let me try and show you that machine in action.

Trump's constant claim that millions of people voted illegally originated, as far as anyone can tell, from some dude on Twitter who claimed in November, while providing no evidence, we have verified more than 3000000 votes cast by non-citizens.

The next day, InfoWars picked that up and it spread like jet fuel among the right-wing sites.

Now, it was quickly debunked by multiple outlets, but despite that, days later, President-elect Trump started tweeting about millions of illegal votes and serious voter fraud in states like California.

And by early December, people were on TV expressing similar concerns.

Voting is a privilege in this country, and you need to be legal, not like California, where 3000000 illegals voted.

And that right there actually answers our third question of why so many people believe Trump.

Because if you get your news from similar sources to him, as many, many, many people do, he doesn't look like a crank.

He looks like the first president ever to tell you the real truth.

But rumors can be really tenacious, and I'll prove it.

What rumor do you think of when you hear the name Richard Gere?

But, if the president went on TV and told you it was true, you'd go, I knew it!

But that loop gets much more dangerous when you're not talking about something as silly as gerbils.

-...validated his supporters' beliefs about voter fraud, and in turn, they validated his.

Because even when he was directly confronted with the lack of evidence, this is how he responded.

Millions of people agree with me when I say that.

If you would have looked on 1 of the other networks and all of the people that were calling in, they're saying, we agree with Mr.

Right, but just because they believe you and you believe them, doesn't make it true.

This isn't like Peter Pan, where believing in fairies will keep Tinkerbell alive.

And maybe instead of clapping, you should've done the ice bucket challenge, then she'd still be alive.

The point is, even if you take the kindest approach here and assume Trump made an honest, innocent mistake and passed along a news story without checking it, when he was presented with a lack of evidence, he disregarded that fact, at which point, he is lying.

And it seems no 1 in the White House has a problem with that.

Because when asked to justify the president's views, this is what Sean Spicer did.

I think the president has believed that for a while.

A long-standing belief that he's maintained.

It's a belief that he's maintained for a while.

As I've noted several times now, he's believed this for a long time.

It was a comment that he made on a long-standing belief.

I've asked to answer this question twice.

He believes what he believes based on the information he's provided.

If he does believe that, what does that mean for democracy?

The incidents of voter fraud is a verifiable fact.

And faith And facts aren't like Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton.

When you confuse them, it actually matters.

Real people get hurt when you make policy based on false information.

Billions will get spent on a wall that won't work to prevent a crime wave that isn't happening, while refugees sit in dangerous situations to prevent Bowling Green-style massacres that never took place.

Well, the press is going to be a key element in helping us sort out fact from fiction, and they are under attack.

This administration has seized on small corrections in news coverage to paint critical outlets as fake news attempting to delegitimize all of them.

Steve Bannon has already labeled the media the opposition party, although there does seem to be 1 exception.

News reports said the only seat that was reserved for the media at Trump's news conference Wednesday was in the front row, and it was for Breitbart News.

You are Snow White introducing the dwarf, saying, meet grumpy, sleepy, sneezy, fucking awesome big dick cool dwarf, and the 3 others.

And if you are thinking that Breitbart went out of their way to ask a challenging question, Think again.

The decision to publish fake news and all the problems that we've seen throughout the media over the course of the election, what reforms do you recommend for this industry here?

And I actually have 2 follow-up questions.

Does this feel good, and will you let me know when you're going to come?" Just tap my head.

With a completely delegitimized press, you're only going to have 1 source to get your news from, as 1 congressman happily pointed out.

Better to get your news directly from the president.

In fact, it might be the only way to get the unvarnished truth.

Getting your news directly from the leader is basically the philosophy of North Korea.

And the notion that our leaders should be able to pass on mistruths with impunity should be alarming to absolutely everybody, regardless of politics.

Republicans should badly want our sense of objective reality to remain intact, just in case the Democrats ever find their own appealing reality star to win back the White House, RuPaul, for instance.

Make America Fierce Again, hashtag, Make America Fierce Again.

So, so we all need to commit to defending the reality of facts, but it's going to take work.

As we've already seen, protests, calls to legislators, and lawsuits are effective ways to try and drag the administration back to reality, but this needs to go down to a personal level as well.

We should make extra efforts on social media to try and verify stories before passing them on, especially if they confirm our pre-existing biases.

Ask questions of yourself, like, is this a source I know and recognize?

And do those sources match what the story says.

And if you see an outlet repeatedly getting things wrong and never correcting it, maybe stop trusting it.

Whether that outlet is some idiot's blog or the White House.

And because I know our president will not follow any of those suggestions, partly because rightfully, he does not watch this show.

There is 1 small way we wanted to try and sneak some useful facts into his media diet.

As we now know, he watches Morning Cable News for information.

So we've actually created a series of commercials in an attempt to bring him up to speed on some information he may lack.

We're going to run them on shows that we know he watches every day.

I'm a professional cowboy and I use catheters.

Been cowboying for 25 years and there's 2 things I know.

And the nuclear triad consists of land-based missiles, submarine launch missiles, and aerial bombers.

This increases our ability to strike back

event 1 of those is destroyed and deters an attack on us or our allies.

So that's the nuclear triad, in case you're the kind of person who might really need to know that.

-♪ ♪ -♪ That ad will air tomorrow morning between 8.30 and 9 on all these channels in the D.C.

And until we're shut down, we are prepared to educate Donald Trump 1 by 1 on topics we're pretty sure he doesn't know about.

It might seem like a show of strength to kill the families of terrorists, but according to the Geneva Conventions, it's actually a war crime.

Not all black people live in the inner cities, and not all people in the inner cities are black.

Now, I know it can sometimes feel as if you are the only person in the world, but as you can see here, there are actually many non-you people.

Just because sometimes it's cold, that don't mean there's no global warming.

You're confusing climate with weather, partner.

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Trump vs. Truth: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)