Donald Trump’s continued political survival relies on a wholesale rejection of reality. While most of the country has turned against him and for good reason, much of his fanatical Republican base remains loyal.
Trump keeps his supporters close by constantly feeding them a false narrative alleging they’re the victims of a litany of abuses and by pumping a string of outright lies directly into their homes. He keeps them loyal by keeping them enraged.
This morning, Trump tweeted out an unprovoked attack on the search engine giant Google, claiming that a search for “Trump news” only brings up fake news reports. He claimed Google’s practices are “RIGGED” against conservatives and floated the idea that they could be illegal.
In reality, a quick Google search for “Trump news” brings back a slew of reliable sources and reports, ranging from CNN to The Washington Post and even the pro-Trump Fox News.
Just because many of the stories are negative reports about Trump doesn’t make them fake, it just means that they’re honest and therefore unfavorable stories about the worst, most corrupt administration in history, as any report about a regime such as this must be.
Google search results for “Trump News” shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96% of….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 28, 2018
….results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 28, 2018
Google, unwilling to let the mendacious president slander their company name freely, has issued a statement in response according to The Hill. While the company remained civil in tone, they were firm in correcting Trump’s lies and left no room for doubt as to the nature of their search results, denying all political bias.
“When users type queries into the Google Search bar, our goal is to make sure they receive the most relevant answers in a matter of seconds. Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology,” the statement begins.
“Every year, we issue hundreds of improvements to our algorithms to ensure they surface high-quality content in response to users’ queries. We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment.”
Google should be commended for standing up to the president, even though they risk invoking the ire of his followers by doing so. No one can stop Trump from lying as long as his base has an appetite for untruths, but we can be sure to challenge him at every turn, lest his version of reality become widely accepted. The truth still matters.
