Twitter, Donald Trump, and the death of truth

Fair warning:  This one's a-gonna be a ramble.  I have a lot to say on this, predictably, and as is sometimes the case in any writing endeavor, no particular structure immediately suggests itself to me right now, as I begin writing.  So I shall impose structure by writing, which is a thing I teach to my students.  If this were anything more than a blog, I'd go back and edit and rewrite, but this is a blog.  So, I'm just-a-gonna-ramble.  And I'm going to start with Jeffrey Dahmer.

Do I have your attention?

Perhaps you don't remember Dahmer the Menace.  Or... maybe I'm not supposed to do cutesy, little nicknames for him.  Too soon?  Anyway, I am not a biographer for Jeffrey Dahmer, but here's a little bit about him.  He was born on May 21, 1960 in Milwaukee, WI.  Throughout his life, he had some problems with alcohol.  He attended, but did not complete a degree at Ohio State.  He enlisted in the Army, and was discharged in 1981.  So, those are just a few biographical tidbits that turn up from some simple web searches.  I am reasonably confident in the veracity of that information, but of course, there are more detailed biographies of Mr. Dahmer.

Did... did you notice something?  Something missing?  Like... I talked about Jeffrey Dahmer, and said things about him that may even have been true, but there's this... elephant in the room that I was just not mentioning.

Jeffrey Dahmer was a cannibal serial killer.

I mean, I know nobody wants to be known for one thing, particularly not the worst thing about themselves, but... that's kind of a big thing, no?  I mean, if you kill and eat people, and then we don't talk about that, the things we say about you might be true, but we are doing damage to empirical reality by avoiding the topic of your cannibalistic serial killing.

Not you, dear reader, but the hypothetical person, or Dahmer, or whoever.  You get the point.  Oddities of the English language.

Anyway, the point is that, assuming you recognized the name, Jeffrey Dahmer, the first thing you thought was probably, "cannibal serial killer."  Me?  I thought of a Saturday Night Live sketch with Chevy Chase doing a guest performance as Dahmer, sitting in prison, talking to his lawyer (the late, great, Phil Hartman), and chomping down on his own finger.

The single most important thing about Jeffrey Dahmer is the cannibal serial killer thing.  If you don't deal with that, you aren't dealing with him, and you are being fundamentally dishonest through omission.

Honesty.  Hmmm...  I'm going somewhere with this, obviously.

Donald Trump.  If you ask people in surveys to list the words that they associate most directly with him, one of the biggies is:  "liar."  According to a Quinnipiac poll, "liar" came second, right after, "idiot."  I'm focusing on the "liar" part, obviously.  Tomes could be written on either, but let's focus on the "liar" part.  As I have said on many occasions, he is "the lying-est liar who ever lied a lie."  No human being in history has ever been a more shameless, craven or egregious liar.  He maxed out the scale.  Any other liar you ever find will tie him, at best (worst).

"Liar" is to Donald Trump as "cannibal serial killer" is to Jeffrey Dahmer.  And I'm going with liar over idiot because there actually are dumber people in the world, if not in politics.  Dishonesty is the single most central feature of who and what Trump is, to the point that it defines everything about him.  To the exclusion of everything else.  To the point that you cannot understand anything about him, unless you understand that he is not just a liar, but the most shameless, craven, egregious liar that you will ever encounter.

Donald Trump is an alien creature, to someone like me.  He lies so reflexively, and so pointlessly that those of us who think in terms of truth can't even grasp the mind of such a liar.  Here's something trivial.  And I'm going for complete triviality here, by looking around my desk.  Observe.  Or... read.  Whatever.  (I warned you that this'd be a ramble.)

One of the things that happens in the chit-chat before class is that students will sometimes ask trivial questions.  Here's the kind of question a student might ask, motivated by scanning my desk:  pens or pencils?

Do you prefer pens or pencils?

A student wouldn't have to ask me that because throughout every class, I have a pen in my hand, but I'm just scanning my desk, mid-ramble.  Anyway, though, if someone asked me that, here's what would happen.  First, my thought would be the true answer:  I prefer pens.  I'd say that.

Then, I'd rant.  Why?  Have you read this blog?  I enjoy ranting.  Some people enjoy watching sportsball.  Some people read romance novels.  I rant.  My rant would begin by explaining that I don't like the sound or the feel of a pencil on paper.  I would go from there to why I like Rhodia paper.  That would probably lead me to how Rhodia paper feels with a fountain pen, and then from there to pros and cons of fountain pens, why everyone should carry a Fisher Space Pen, which I learned about from an Adam Savage video on Youtube, and from there to why I sometimes carry pens with Pilot G2 gel refills and sometimes Schmidt 9000 EasyFlow refills... and... yeah.  I rant.

You know what it would never even occur to me to do?  Lie about whether I prefer pencils to pens.  It would never occur to me to say, "I prefer pencils."

Now, why would anyone lie about that?  So here's the thing.  A true liar would.  There are people in the world who can hear the question, "pencils or pens," and at no point does the truth of their preferences ever even occur to them.  Instead, their heads will go to, "what response benefits me?"  How could a lie benefit anyone here?  Well, let's say I see you with a stash of pencils in a little carrying case.  That means you prefer pencils.  If I say that I prefer pencils, then hey!  We've bonded over that, in some stupid, minor, trivial way!  After all, if I can rant about Rhodia paper, then obviously there are people who do care about this stuff in some small, trivial way.

And what I'm addressing here is not merely the lie itself, but the mentality of the ultimate liar.  The person who never even thinks, in response to a question, "what is true?"  The person who only thinks, "what statement will benefit me?"

Here we get into Harry Frankfurt's distinction between a "liar" and a "bullshitter," from his classic Princeton University Press book, On Bullshit, and obviously, I assign that book.  The liar, by Frankfurt's definition, understands objective reality and attempts to deceive.  The bullshitter, by Frankfurt's definition, is completely indifferent to the existence of objective reality.

The way I am describing the ultimate liar is, in some ways, closer to Frankfurt's definition of the bullshitter, but the authoritarian requirement of speaking falsehoods to undercut the capacity of truth to exist will put my exemplar closer to the liar in practice.  For the purposes of this post, though, I'm not especially concerned with the distinction because either way, the speaker is someone who a) should never, under any circumstances, be believed, b) whose defining characteristic is dishonesty, and c) whose mentality is beyond the comprehension of those few of us who think in terms of truth.

And (c) is really where I am right now.  It is important to understand our inability to understand the mentality of someone whose first reaction to a question like, "pens or pencils," would never even approach considering their own actual preferences.

Yet, Donald Trump is such a person.  If you ask him a question, the objective truth will either never occur to him, or occur to him only inasmuch as it must to construct a self-serving answer.  Any truth that he speaks will only ever be incidental, like Harry Frankfurt's bullshitter, or a stopped clock being right twice per day.  At a purely individual level, I would have zero sympathy for anyone ripped off by such an obvious liar and thief.  Alas, democracy doesn't work that way.

Besides, we all know that Donald Trump prefers sharpies.

I wish I could say I planned that, but I didn't.  Writing serendipity.

Anyway, moving right along.  This presents political dialog with something of a problem.  Donald Trump's defining feature is that he is a liar, just as Jeffrey Dahmer's defining feature was that he was a cannibal serial killer.  We cannot discuss Trump in an honest way without making the fact of his liar-ism a central feature, if not the central feature of our discussion.

For journalism and scholarship, this has presented a problem since Trump became the Republican presidential nominee, and one that I have discussed many times before, although less here than on The Unmutual.  I've done game theory about it, presented at conferences, and I'm not the only one workin' on it.

It isn't just that pointing out dishonesty is considered an attack, but the word, "liar," is considered so harsh that the act of using it is considered verboten in polite, civil dialog.  Fortunately, I am impolite, and I don't give a damn about civility.  As I always say, "civility" isn't the point.  Decency is the point, and "civility" is just an excuse to be indecent while hiding behind what N.K. Jemisin called "weaponized politeness."

Anyway, that has meant that the norms of political dialog, developed around politicians who didn't lie with anywhere near the shamelessness, cravenness or egregiousness of Donald Trump, told us not to call people, "liars."  If you do that, you're a partisan hack.  So, only partisan hacks call politicians "liars," because really, all politicians lie somewhat, but nobody is really worse than anyone else.

And then Donald Trump came along, and it was like introducing Jeffrey Dahmer into a quiet, little town where the worst crime anyone ever saw was vandalism from some neighborhood kids.

Trump really is that much worse.  That's the scale.  When people thought of lying politicians before, they may have thought of Richard Nixon, or Bill Clinton depending on partisanship, historical awareness and other factors, but the difference between their lying and Trump's lying really is on the order of comparing vandalism to cannibalistic serial murder.  Trump is so far past anyone else in terms of lying that no comparison can be made.  He maxed out the scale, but we didn't know the scale went that far until we found Trump and his magic sharpie-o-lyin'.

Lying about the weather is supposed to be a joke.

And that means the standards that developed around past politicians have strained our ability to discuss him.  It cannot be the case that calling him a "liar" implies that one is a partisan hack.

Instead, if you don't call him a liar, it's the equivalent of ignoring that Jeffrey Dahmer was a cannibal serial killer.  Because Donald Trump lies about everything.

He'd lie about whether he prefers pens or pencils.  While holding a sharpie, and using it to lie about the weather and threatening to fire anyone at the NOAA who contradicts him and tells the truth about the weather.

Did you even remember the sharpie thing?  Probably not.  It seems like a lifetime ago, buried amid other lies and scandals, and what does it say that such a stupid lie can go forgotten, simply because he lies so frequently?  I think that makes my point for me, as though it needed to be made yet again.

But that's not the lie of the week.  And that's not why we're here.  That's not why you just read a long wind-up about Jeffrey Dahmer, Rhodia paper, Harry Frankfurt, and whatever the hell else I just wrote amid this rant that isn't anywhere near done.  (I did warn you.  If you aren't a student, this is sometimes what my classes are like.)

Donald Trump's recent Twitter lies have taken two directions that interest me.  He has accused Joe Scarborough of murder, and he has claimed that absentee balloting is an invitation to fraud.  He also threatened to shoot looters, but that's a whole, other thing, and I'm in over my head as it is.

The accusations against Scarborough are straight-up, indisputable lies.  Not bullshit, but lies.  They are false, known to be false, and intended to deceive.  This area of the law is not my specialty, but I'm not clear on why Scarborough couldn't, in principle, file a defamation suit against Trump.  As I understand it, Twitter itself is protected against any lawsuits-- and I'm getting to Trump's executive order, in my very roundabout way-- but I am not clear on why Trump, himself, is immune from civil suits here.  The Supreme Court ruled that sitting presidents can be sued in civil court while in office, and as I understand the current law, it is Twitter, not the person using the platform, that is protected from suits on the basis of things like defamation.  This isn't my specific area of expertise, but that's how I understand it.

As a matter of law, though, it is clear defamation.  Scarborough didn't kill anyone.  Trump is absolutely spreading lies, he is doing it knowingly, and doing it to hurt someone he doesn't like.  Straight-up defamation.  The widow of the dead woman asked Twitter to intervene, and those tweets are among the strongest cases for intervention by Twitter given that they are false, defamatory personal attacks for which anyone other than Donald Trump-- and indeed, any president other than Donald Trump would be sued for defamation immediately and lose the case, but the Republican cult of personality around Trump has set him up as being above the law.

And yes, Donald Trump is above the law.  Laws do not apply to him.  They do not bind him.  They do not stop him.  Yes, he really could literally should someone on 5th Avenue and get away with it, and I detest people who misuse the word, "literally."

Anyway, then there's the mail-in voting matter.  This is more complicated.  Sorry, but it is.

So here's the short version of the lecture I have been giving on voter fraud since long before the current Trump v. Twitter dust-up.

In-person voter fraud does not happen.  When Trump and other Republicans claim that it happens, that is an outright lie.  Justin Leavitt at Loyola Law School has actually tracked every specific allegation of in-person voter fraud ever made, and they don't pan out.  They're bullshit.  This is a line of research that started back in the George W. Bush administration, when he told his attorneys to go out and prosecute voter fraud, and they couldn't because there wasn't any, leading to a president-versus-DOJ meltdown, and firings.  Sound familiar?

So, Justin Leavitt started a project to look at every allegation of in-person voter fraud.  It's bullshit.  Mistaken identity, people moved and records hadn't been updated, but no fraud.  Paperwork glitches.  That's about it.

And, when it comes to the topic of prominent myths, I've been assigning Leavitt's debunkery as a model of how debunkery should work.

But... and as they say, everything before the "but" is irrelevant...

The next part of that lecture has always been that if one wanted to commit voter fraud, well... a) it'd be a stupid way to mess with the electoral system, given the risks, rewards and alternatives, but b) the easier place to mess with the system would be the absentee system.

So here's what happens if you show up at a polling place, and try to commit in-person voter fraud.  They check off a name from the voter roll.  What if... that's not you because you're committing voter fraud?  What if the real person shows up?  Well... two people showed up claiming to be that person.  You're given a provisional ballot, and to have it counted, you need to jump through some hoops.  And... well, that kicks off a whole, big thing, and if you are committing fraud, it's a whole big thing you don't want, even if there hadn't been an ID law.  That's part of why in-person voter fraud doesn't happen.  It's epically stupid.

On the other hand, let's say you're filling out an absentee ballot improperly.  That process... doesn't happen.  That check doesn't exist.  So let's say, just for the sake of argument, that you work in a retirement home, and help a bunch of people with vision problems fill out absentee ballots.  If you committed fraud in the process... who'd know?  That's just one example, and it actually goes after Trump's base-- old people-- but my basic point is that it is easier to commit fraud in the absentee ballot system.

Do we know that there is fraud there?  Do we have so much as the tiniest scrap of evidence?  No.

In scientific terms, this is where we get into what we call "non-falsifiable hypotheses."  Claims that, if wrong, could never be demonstrated to be wrong.  Non-falsifiable hypotheses are really problematic, from a scientific perspective.  They might be true, but we basically disregard them as useless.

Is there any reason to believe that there is widespread fraud in the absentee ballot system?  No.  None at all.  However, do we know that it is as clean as we know the in-person voting system to be, based on research such as Justin Leavitt's?  No.  We can't.  Non-falsifiability.

So, if someone comes along and says that the absentee voting system is rife with fraud, I'm gonna call bullshit because such claims are made a) with no evidence, and b) for self-serving reasons.  They are, by Harry Frankfurt's definition, pure bullshit, made by Heisenberg in Gus Fring's secret underground lab, distilled to the purest essence.  The most potent, dangerous bullshit you will ever encounter.

And I do mean both potent and dangerous.  Potent because it appeals to a pre-existing, paranoid streak, and dangerous because right now, absentee voting is the necessary answer to democracy amid a pandemic.  The goal in spreading this bullshit is nothing less than the destruction of any tattered remains of democracy this country has left.  The goal is to shut down the only viable means of voting in a pandemic so that either Trump wins by convincing the sane, intelligent people to stay home to observe social distancing, as per CDC guidelines, or... it just gives Trump his bullshit, pseudo-legal justification to claim that the election was "rigged" if he loses.

Remember, the probability that he steps down voluntarily, regardless of what happens in November, is absolute, mathematical zero.

Prior to Trump, I could never imagine typing that about a US president.  I could never imagine a president refusing to accept an election.  Now, I can't imagine the president abiding one.  This is reality now.

This is why Trump's claims of voter fraud are so dangerous.  And they are dishonest.  They have no basis in empirical reality.

Yet, there is a fundamental difference between his claims about voter fraud and his straight-up lies about Joe Scarborough.  Those lies about Scarborough are indisputably false and defamatory.  His claims about voter fraud in the absentee balloting system exist in a nether-region between non-falsifiability and self-serving, baseless bullshit.  We don't know that the claims are false, to the same evidentiary standard.  Sane, intelligent people should treat them as false because a) there is no evidence for them, b) they are made in bad faith, and c) their purpose is to destroy democracy.  Not an exaggeration.  But... I've been saying for years that if one wanted to commit voter fraud, it'd be easier in the absentee system.  It's still bullshit, though, by Harry Frankfurt's definition.

And this brings us to Twitter.  Twitter has spent years trying to figure out how to manage the Jeffrey Dahmer of Dishonesty.

Incidentally, Jeffrey Dahmer's known body count was 17.  Just throwin' that number out there.  Do with it as you please.

Trump and Twitter.  Trump, of course, depends on Twitter because he can't form a coherent thought, and Twitter doesn't give you enough characters for a coherent thought, so it's a match made in something better described by an Italian poet than by a particularly long-winded blogger.  (Wow, this has gone on for a while, and I ain't even close to done.)

Twitter has some "policies," which deserves to be put in sarcasm-quotes, but those policies have been tested mightily by the fact that Trump is the lying-est liar who ever lied a lie.  Combine that with his propensity for hate speech and violent threats, and sure, they can hide behind their "world leaders" thing, but wow, nobody violates their terms of service like Trump.  I'm mostly concerned with the lying.  See:  Dahmer, Jeffrey, and strained analogies about cannibalism.

Twitter decided to do nothing about Trump's tweets lying about Joe Scarborough, despite pleas from the widow of the deceased.  Instead, they decided to engage in some very mild fact-checking of his voter fraud tweets.  They did not take down or in any way censor his tweets.  They just added some mild fact-checking.

Let's start (start?  here?) with the basic observation that Twitter picked the wrong fight, when it comes to the concept of fact-checking.  Democracy depends more on voting than on Joe Scarborough's personal reputation.  Would I rather Trump lie about Scarborough, or voting?  I'd rather he lie about nothing, but this is Trump.  He's-a-gonna lie.  And when he's done lying... he's not done lying.  He doesn't even know how to not lie.  During the Russia investigation, his lawyers had to stop him from talking to Mueller because they knew he'd be too stupid to avoid perjuring himself in stupidly obvious ways, because he's too stupid to know how to not lie.  Donald Trump doesn't know how to not lie.  He's a non-sentient beast of burden on us, and must be thought of as such.  The question is how we deal with the burden on us.

But which is more damaging:  lying about Scarborough, or lying about voter fraud?  The latter is more damaging to America.  His goal is to burn the remains of democracy so that he either wins by keeping Biden's voters home, or creates a pretext for refusing to concede upon losing.

But from a "fact-checking" perspective, Twitter would be on more solid grounding to stamp a big, ole' LIE sign on those Scarborough tweets.

Do you remember Andrew Wakefield?  That'd be the lying scumbag who started the whole vaccines-n'-autism thing by faking the data for a paper that he published in Lancet.  Once he was exposed, Lancet retracted the article.  Now, if you go and download the article, it will say, in big, red letters "RETRACTED," diagonally across the pages.  Why?  They don't want you getting the impression that it is a real research paper.  That's... about what a responsible outlet should do with something like Trump's Scarborough tweets, and basically everything he says, except that instead of the word, "RETRACTED," it should just say, "lie."

Like Jeffrey Dahmer, we can't deal with Trump without dealing with the central thing about him.  In Trump's case, that's the lying.  And we can't deal with his Scarborough claims without dealing with the fact that they are lies.  The voter fraud claims are in slightly sketchier territory.  I'm fine calling them false.  They're false.  From a journalistic, fact-checking perspective, though, we are on a different evidentiary basis when we do so.  And that's hard for Twitter.

Ask me as a political scientist who has studied and published about vote counting, and I'll tell you that Trump is "lying."  I'll give you the quote, I'll give you the reasoning, and all that.  We do need to understand, though, that the epistemology is different.

That puts Twitter in a weird position, and a weaker position on principle.  If you are going to start going after Trump for his lies, you really should start with the things that are just unassailably false.

Twitter didn't do that.  This makes me unhappy.  This is my unhappy face.  Not that you can see it, but trust me.  Well, by the length of this post, you know my coffee is long gone, so you can guess that I'm unhappy, but anyway.  Unhappy face.

Now we need to tackle speech, free speech and all that jazz.  So let's get into the legal and philosophical principles here.

Yes, I am about as much of a free speech absolutist as you will ever encounter.

And here's where people really piss me off when it comes to speech.  "Well, the Constitution only protects you from Congress.  That means so-and-so can do whatever they want [in a singsong-y voice]."

So here's what the Constitution says:  "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech..."  There's a whole, big historical thing about why it restricts states too, but I'm not getting into that.  Now, does "no law" mean "no law?"  If you aren't familiar with the exchange with Solicitor General Griswold in New York Times v. US, that may sound like a stupid question, but it actually has legal history.  Yes, "no law" means no law.  Congress cannot pass any law that infringes on freedom of speech.

Period.  Don't start with me on this crap.  You'll lose.  Some Justices have historically been idiots, but on logic, no law must mean no law.  Period.  Otherwise, words have no meaning.  Don't.  Start.  With.  Me.

But let's go beyond that.  Let's deal with the song-singers.  I hate these people.  And they aren't consistent.  I also hate hypocrites.

Do any of these cowardly hypocrites mean to tell me that if their employers found a political statement on a FaceBook page that they didn't like, that these people would be totally fine with getting fired, cuz', like, the First Amendment doesn't say that employers can't punish you for your speech?

I'm not asking what the law says.  I'm asking about what the abstract principle of free speech says, I'm asking about what moral principle says, and I'm asking if these logically-challenged hypocrites actually mean to tell me that they'd be fine with this cuz' dem'z da' breaks?

Oh, and just for the record...

Academic freedom!  Yes, it's different for professors.  Just in case you, or... Case Western Reserve University were wondering.  (Hi, there!  Got a copy of my contract and the university rules around here somewhere...)

My point is that the song-singers would not be fine with this.  This is not an idea that anyone would accept behind the Rawlsian veil of ignorance once you point out that it could happen to them.

Why?  Because this is not a morally defensible proposition.  Go back to Rawls.  Always go back to Rawls.

Free speech is a defensible principle.

Of course, if you want to see where free speech enthusiasts like me get pushed hardest, it's with...

Liars.

Are you offended by something I have said?  I don't care.  Ever.  The concept of "offense" is not something that can ever be a defensible standard.  Here's why.  You say you are offended by something I have said.  I am offended by your attempt to silence me out of umbrage, and our offense-taking enters infinite regress.  And I'm not being flippant.  I actually do find it morally offensive when you try to impose your ideas on someone else to silence that person.  Offense-taking cannot be a moral standard.  Your offense cannot be a standard imposed on anyone else, lest we enter infinite regress, so get over your feelings of offense.

Free speech never creates a problem of infinite regress.  It encounters a problem when we have to deal with liars.

I am not a postmodernist.  Objective reality is real, and to quote Philip K. Dick, reality is that which, when you cease to believe in it, doesn't go away.

More importantly, I find little in the world more corrosive than lying, for reasons that I state repeatedly.

So what do you do about lies?  Therein lies the problem, and the challenge for the free speech enthusiast.  If lies are corrosive, but speech must never be silenced, then quite the dilemma, no?

And never has history presented us with a dilemma like Trump.  Straight-up fascist systems, communist systems, and otherwise totalitarian systems without freedom of speech have had dictators who lie and propagandize with something like the shamelessness of Donald Trump, but they did so in systems without free speech or free press.  We have a President who is at least as dishonest as North Korean state media in a system with strong speech protections.

So how do we deal with him?

Of course, Twitter didn't censor him.  They engaged in mild fact-checking, if somewhat misplaced.  The generalized problem, though, is that the lies proliferate in a system in which that comes up against the principle of free speech.

Right now, you are probably expecting me to pose some sort of philosophical resolution to the problem of lies colliding with free speech in a system of rampant lying.

That's not where this is going.  I'm going someplace else.  Where I'm going is that this is a lost battle.  Consider Rush Limbaugh.  When discussing the matter of Trump's Scarborough lies and his general propensity to spread such bullshit conspiracy theories, Limbaugh described Trump's lying not only as "clever," but as morally acceptable merely because it follows the own-the-libs strategy, to the degree that it can be called, "strategy."

In other words, yeah, Trump is lying, but that's OK because he's only lying to hurt people we don't like.

Stop and think about that.

So, here's one of those famous sayings that has migrated into a bunch of famous mouths, as my grad school advisor would have said.  Before speaking, ask yourself, first, is it true?  Is it kind?  Is it necessary?  No, this is not ancient Buddhist wisdom, or anything like that.  And in fact, I'm more of a believer in brutal honesty than anything else, but lots of people pose this kind of thing as a guideline for yadda-yadda, but consider the contrast between this and Limbaugh's decision to be momentarily honest about how he, and to be blunt, many other conservatives view Trump.

They justify dishonesty by its cruelty.  Its sinfulness justifies its sinfulness, by the Limbaugh ethos.  It is a total inversion of the pseudo-Buddhist aphorism that you have seen on a thousand posters before.

And it is those people who have empowered Trump.  Who have placed Trump above the law.

Who have placed Trump before all other gods, and made graven images of him, prayed to him, and turned the Republican Party into the Church of Trump.

Among the flock, many either believe the lies, or just don't care.  They stopped accepting real information sources long ago, and it is this breakdown which has created the post-truth political world we now inhabit.

So Twitter is now occasionally marking Trump's tweets.

To what end?  The damage has already been done, and to truth, that damage was fatal long ago.

In a healthy political party, someone who lies as shamelessly, egregiously and cravenly as Donald Trump would never have been allowed anywhere near power, sociopathic fool that he is.  Instead, the Republican Party has turned itself into a personality cult around him, variously believing even his craziest lies, or justifying them precisely for their cruelty.

And now Twitter wants to put notices on some of those Tweets?

Too little, too late.