[mandelbulb]

Off-topic: Why is everyone adopting the term fake news, thus leaving a linguistic legacy of that illiterate mafiosi? He obviously used that neologism due to his limited vocabulary, and popularized it further as a buzzword of his campaign.

[dragonwriter]

> Why is everyone adopting the term fake news, thus leaving a linguistic legacy of that illiterate mafiosi?

He adopted it as a way of neutralizing it because other people were using it about propaganda supporting him that appeared, at the time, to follow what RAND Corp had earlier described as the “firehose of falsehoods” propaganda model employed in recent years by the Russian government (and with the benefit of hindsight appears to have been, in no small part, actual Russian government propaganda, which would explain it following that model.)

So, I guess there is a sense in which it connects to his legacy, but not the way you seem to think.

> He obviously used that neologism due to his limited vocabulary

Trump may be an idiot, but the people crafting his campaign messaging were not, and his use of “fake news” was much more careful than you suggest (and effective, as your own mistaken idea of how it came to be prominent in the 2016 campaign illustrates.)

[mandelbulb]

>but the people crafting his campaign messaging were not

Yeah, many people would dispute that. In particular, you can't forget that he rarely followed scripts. His team definitely observed and measured what people and the press responded to, and brainstormed how it might benefit them in the future. But it certainly all started as what he could think of or remember best.

The success of campaign slogans and buzzword relies heavily on creativity, luck, and your own success. The work the campaign teams invest is usually more about damage control than profound strategies on how to rule society.

>So, I guess there is a sense in which it connects to his legacy, but not the way you seem to think.

What are You talking about?

Fake news had been a trivial phrase, used in different contexts throughout the years but without any grand emphasis on its own existence—hence the lack of an entry in dictionaries. Even throughout 2016, it had no explicit connection to Trump. Hillary also used it shortly before Trump famously called CNN out as fake news. [1] Even then the term was an unnecessarily misleading trivialization. But Trump redefined and weaponized that afterwards as his own catchphrase.

[1]: https://edition.cnn.com/2016/12/08/politics/hillary-clinton-...

[jpttsn]

Aren't you answering your own question? He popularized it. Therefore, everyone is adopting it.

[mandelbulb]

>He popularized it. Therefore, everyone is adopting it.

So you jump when everyone else jumps?

But more importantly, he popularized it among his own base. There was and is no need for anyone else to pick up that term, especially outside the US.

[mike_hearn]

My recollection is quite different. I remember his political opponents started to use it quite extensively during the Clinton campaign, but that was a mistake, because trust in journalism is lowest amongst Republicans. So Trump started using it in the sense of "what, that isn't fake news, YOUR news is fake news" and from there it took off. But it's a term used mostly by the left, as far as I can tell. At least they're much more obsessed with the idea.