Dept. of Misinformation

Whether or not he can bring America’s jobs home, Donald Trump is certainly keeping one group of workers gainfully employed: fact checkers. The cottage industry that has arisen as a result of Trump’s refusal to acknowledge error or prevarication in his campaign shows no sign of shrinking. Which is ostensibly a good thing. As Michael Kinsley wrote in Vanity Fair, it has at least shifted public focus from gaffes—those old standbys of campaigns—to lies. On the other hand, even when exposed, the falsehoods—whether about rates of crime committed by immigrants in the United States or America being the highest-taxed country in the world, or Trump doing more for veterans than anyone else has—have done little to shake Trump’s large and devoted following. A similar dynamic played out in the Brexit vote, where the leaders of the “leave” campaign repeated exaggerations and fabrications long after they had been publicly disproven. They acted as though the...