I think commentators are missing a huge reason for Trump’s success. In our devotion to free speech, right wing media has completely become a conservative PR force. Disinformation swamped legitimate reporting on jobs, the economy, education, immigration, international relations. And it was more than disinformation— it was outright lying with no effort to offer reality based reporting on conditions of US life.

When Walter Cronkite began to report more of the reality of the Vietnam Nam war, he stood out as a leader of truth in media. The public began to see the wickedness of that war and turned against its continuation. Truth has some influence. Today truth in media has disappeared from billionaire funded Fox and the Sinclair Network, Newsmax and other right wing programming that are virtually the only source of (mis)information for half of our citizens. They hear Trump’s terrible lies and without other exposure they start to believe things are terrible and we are overrun by criminal immigrants, schools are doing trans surgeries on kids, and the election system is rigged. That’s evil talk from a felon who tried a coup, but half the media lets his say he was a victim of a Riggs’s justice system instead of identifying the criminality that is fundamental to everything Trump has ever done. We are in trouble here and to me, right wing fake news and social media (the never ding promotion of Trump lies on X) is significantly responsible.

I don’t know how to deal with media lies in a nation that offers free speech, but that’s killing democracy right now.