Consider this tweet by Donald Trump, issued just this morning.
What’s going on at @CNN is happening, to different degrees, at other networks – with @NBCNews being the worst. The good news is that Andy Lack(y) is about to be fired(?) for incompetence, and much worse. When Lester Holt got caught fudging my tape on Russia, they were hurt badly!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 30, 2018
“When Lester Holt got caught fudging my tape on Russia, they were hurt badly!”
Notice the voice: “When Lester Holt got caught”, “they were hurt badly.” Trump writes as though these are settled, well known, universally acknowledged facts — and it’s outright fiction. Lester Holt did not “fudge” a tape, there was nothing to be “caught” doing, and this event which did not happen did not harm NBC.
Even so, the perfidy of that “fudged” tape is now going to become part of the Trump mythology, that time a corrupt newsman in thrall to the “deep state” produced a videotape in which Trump seems to say something that, of course, he would never have said. A mythology is being created right in front of our eyes, and his cult is eating it up.