Trump: The FAKE NEWS media is the enemy of the American people!

[Pat Mustard]

You make the case for people living in a bubble and then expect them to do what they never did. Fact checking. Him denying X will not be filed under suspicious. It will be filed under wrongfully accused and him making a stand even if they didn't hear about X before. He won't fall over his fanbase. The only reason he can fall is a sufficient amount of sanity left in the political aparatus.

But when it is your own who is puncturing the bubble, that's when the blinkers are stripped away from you. I've seen it before with the catholic church here in Ireland, there was huge attendances at mass up until the '80's and the bishop's words were sacrosant (political careers were made and lost on what was read out from the pulpit during sermons). The whole edifice of lies didn't crash down on the church until they had to come out to bat away and deny, first of all with Eamon Casey diverting church and charity funds to support his son in America, then with the Magdalene Laundries, then the sex abuse scandals (the first cases of which erupted in the early eighties, but were ignored for a further ten years), until it's gotten to the stage where little more than 20% of the country can call them catholic in any sense other than the idea of being "cultural catholic".

When the church were able to ignore the scandals, through fear and background intimidation, they were able to keep a grip on the public consciousness, but once they lost control of the narrative the whole house of cards fell apart very quickly.

You see this over and over again, in cases where one group tries to maintain control through denying truth to the people.