The era of Donald Trump has brought with it what one might view as either a golden moment or a dark age for fact-checking. The president’s extremely loose regard for the truth, even for a politician, has produced a surfeit of fresh grist to verify—or more often, debunk. Yet it doesn’t seem to make a great deal of difference. Trump’s approval rating is in the basement, but it’s his inability to get anything done and his legal troubles that seem to be hurting him; his dishonesty was already manifest during the campaign. If the bleaker view is right, then truth is a casualty of the age, and stories like David Leonhardt and Stuart A. Thompson’s exhaustive inventory of Trump’s lies (their word) are little more than exercises in liberal and anti-Trump catharsis.
If you’re in the latter camp, then a new political-science paper has good news and bad news. Here’s the good news: Trump voters do not, in fact, seem impervious to truth. Present them with a falsehood from their man and they’ll acknowledge he was wrong. But that doesn’t have much effect on their support for Trump. As the authors put it, “Individuals may be willing to change their minds about the facts, but we do not observe changes in the candidate whom they support.” They know he’s wrong, and they don’t care (that much). CONT.
David A. Graham, The Atlantic