The most cursed phrase in politics over the last decade isn’t “make America great again,” which, while sleazy and destructive in its application, is at least noble in its aspiration. It’s “do your own research.”
Research is a skill. To do it conscientiously requires brain power, intellectual rigor, and ideally a bit of training. The process begins with a question and arrives at a considered answer by weighing the available evidence as dispassionately as possible.
The sort of “research” undertaken by the average American yahoo in 2025 is the opposite. It starts with a conclusion that the “researcher” passionately wishes to reach and backfills an argument for it by cherry-picking evidence that supports the conclusion while impugning evidence that doesn’t.
If proper research tends to weigh expert opinion more heavily, yahoo “research” tends to discount it. “Do your own research” in practice is simply populist-speak for “don’t trust the conventional wisdom,” which means not only is some rando on Reddit just as reliable a source of information as the average scientist, he’s better.
A population that increasingly “does its own research” is on its way to becoming a sh-thole country. A population that prefers to be governed by people who “do their own research” is pretty much already there.
The face of this phenomenon inside the Trump administration is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man in charge of, God help us, America’s science bureaucracy. “Part of the responsibility of being a parent is to do your own research,” he said in a televised interview on Monday, hedging his official recommendation that children be inoculated against measles. To Kennedy, doing one’s own research means ignoring the 16 professional studies that have found no link between vaccines and autism and commissioning a notorious vaccine skeptic to conduct another for the Department of Health and Human Services.
We know what the finding of that study will be because, again, yahoo “research” begins with a desired conclusion and reasons backward to justify it. If and when the U.S. government officially “finds” that vaccination causes autism, ours might be the only developed nation on Earth—and possibly the only one, period—to do so. It doesn’t get much more sh-thole than that.
Donald Trump was “doing his own research” long before RFK joined his team, speculating about a link between vaccines and autism during a Republican primary debate as far back as a decade ago. Treating garbage information that flatters his prejudices as at least as trustworthy as expert opinion, if not more so, has always been part of his populist appeal; it’s no exaggeration to say that our country wouldn’t be “making America great again” right now if so many of us weren’t already doing our own research in 2015.
After 10 years of the president insulating himself from reality with ever more restrictive information filters, though, it’s become hard to tell when he’s knowingly lying and when he’s earnestly describing the results of his “research.”
I find the latter scarier than the former.
Lies and ‘research.’
At a rally yesterday in Michigan to mark his first 100 days back in office, Trump told the crowd to ignore the supposedly fake polls that have his job approval slipping into the low 40s. In the “legitimate polls,” he claimed, he’s in the 60s—or even the 70s.
Was that a lie or did he get that number from his “research”?
I’d guess “lie.” No matter how eager his own pollsters are to bring him good news, surely even they aren’t finding support for him as implausibly high as that. Presidents no longer reach the 60s, never mind the 70s, in a country as polarized as America, and they’re especially unlikely to do so during a stock-market slide. Trump is well aware of that slide. He can’t possibly believe his own BS here.
But not every example is so clear cut. Watch this exchange from the interview he gave on Tuesday to ABC News:
Terry Moran, the reporter for ABC, is correct. Ten days ago Trump displayed a photograph in the Oval Office of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s left hand to highlight the tattoos on each of his knuckles—a marijuana leaf, a smiley face, a cross, and a skull, which the White House insists is code for the Venezuelan gang MS-13. The photo Trump held had “M,” “S,” “1,” and “3” photoshopped into the image above each finger to explain the supposed symbolism.
When Jonah Goldberg and others complained that the president was misleading the public by relying on doctored evidence, Trump apologists scolded him for believing that anyone could be so stupid as not to realize that the “M,” “S,” “1”, and “3” were superimposed to explain what Abrego Garcia’s tattoos represent. Except someone was that stupid, it turns out: The president was, per his exchange with Moran.
I don’t think he’s lying this time. I suspect one of his toadies handed him the photoshopped image without explanation, perhaps assuming that he would understand at a glance that the letters and numbers had been added digitally, and Trump took it at face value. He did his own research—or relied on the “research” his aide did for him, at least.
Remember the George Costanza rule: It’s not a lie if you believe it.
Very online.
In the same interview, Moran rattled off a series of ominous economic indicators during Trump’s first 100 days, one of which is that “travel is down.” The president, visibly incredulous, countered that “Tourism is doing very well. We’re doing very well. We’re doing very well.”
We’re not doing very well, certainly not with respect to international tourism. In March, even before “Liberation Day” alienated more or less the entire world, foreign travel to the United States had fallen off a cliff. One recent survey of the tourism industry found a “significant dip” in business, with more than half of respondents reporting a decline. The downturn will cost America billions.
When Trump says tourism is doing well, is that a lie or is it “research”? Is he trying to suppress the truth, or have his aides shielded him from the truth so completely that Moran’s claim of a tourism recession came as a genuine shock? Again, watch his face in the clip.
One more example. Earlier this month the president complained that some nations are using arbitrary technical standards as a pretext to exclude American exports. He accused Japan specifically of conniving to keep U.S. vehicles out: “They drop a bowling ball on the top of your car from 20 feet up in the air,” he alleged, “and if there’s a little dent, they say, ‘No, I’m sorry, your car doesn’t qualify.’”
It’s not true. Japan doesn’t have a bowling-ball test. Yet Trump has been chattering about it since 2018 at least, causing the then-White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, to anxiously insist at the time that he was “joking.” The closest anyone has gotten to explaining how he got the idea is noting that an old commercial for Nissan involved dropping bowling balls on a car to show its durability.
He’s not joking and he’s not lying. We’re at an impasse on trade with the world’s fifth-biggest economy because at some point the president’s “own research” sincerely convinced him that the Japanese are flinging Brunswicks at F-150s to keep them off the domestic market. And seemingly no amount of correction can make him think better of it.
One Dispatch colleague compared the president’s mistaken beliefs about matters like Abrego Garcia’s tattoos to an older relative seeing something on Facebook, instantly treating it as gospel, and remaining unmoveable no matter how much evidence is adduced to persuade them otherwise. (“Research”!) He’s just another red-pilled grandpa on a conspiratorial email chain with the subject line, “FWD: FWD: FWD: MS-13.” When he starts spouting Kremlin propaganda about Ukraine, it’s not because he’s a “Russian agent,” it’s because he’s a Very Online American septuagenarian with zero standards for the information he consumes.
If Joe Biden were routinely being suckered this way, Republicans would treat it as the ultimate proof of severe dementia-driven brain damage.
Poisoning the well.
It’s not just politically motivated gullibility that makes Trump’s White House the most toxic information environment in the history of the American presidency, though. There are four factors poisoning the well of data that supplies him and his team.
One is poor gatekeeping. When John Kelly replaced Reince Priebus as Trump’s chief of staff in 2017, his top priority was to control—i.e., improve—the quality of information that the president received. He lasted 18 months in the job before giving up, unable to keep the president from doing his own research. Under current chief Susie Wiles, Trump’s access to cranks is so unrestricted that he fired the head of the National Security Agency earlier this month after being lobbied in person to do so … by Laura Loomer. If Kennedy’s anti-vax campaign doesn’t convince you that we’re living under a de facto third-world government, that ought to do it.
Next is the probability that some of Trump’s aides are withholding information from him deliberately to further their own strategic agendas, a practice that also marred his first term. Remember when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the administration should “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia from El Salvador? Someone convinced the president that they had ruled unanimously in his favor instead. “That’s not what my people told me,” he replied when a reporter asked him whether the order didn’t require him to bring the detainee back to America. Did anti-immigration aides lie to him about the ruling in order to stiffen his resistance to repatriating Abrego Garcia?
Last Friday a car bomb exploded in Moscow, killing a top Russian general who oversaw battlefield deployments in Ukraine. That’s the sort of hair-raising escalation that might plausibly tank the peace talks that the White House has spent months working on. Yet when reporters asked Trump later on Air Force One about the attack, the president had heard nothing about it and didn’t pretend otherwise. Incredibly, he hadn’t been briefed yet. We can only speculate as to why, but might it be that the Ukraine hawks on his team hid the news for fear that he’d post an angry tweet that would instantly upend U.S. diplomacy?
If so, it wouldn’t be the first term since he first became president that information was kept from him to stop him from doing something rash.
The third factor is Trump’s psychology. I repeat what I’ve said before: To him, the salient question about information isn’t, “What’s true and what’s false?” but rather, “What benefits me and what harms me?” His “rigged election” propaganda in 2020 began months before the election as an obvious ploy to pre-spin an unfavorable outcome but he gives every appearance in 2025 of sincerely believing that he was cheated. At some point, he began swallowing his own BS in the grandest and most destructive way.
If “doing your own research” is the garden-variety yahoo version of motivated reasoning, Trump’s ability to persuade himself that reality is as he wishes it to be is the perfection of the art. You could surround him with dozens of John Kellys, meticulously vetting the news he receives to weed out all but the most indisputable facts, and I suspect he’d still concoct conspiracy theories to explain information that reflected badly on him—and would eventually, if not at first, earnestly believe them.
Which brings us to the last factor. Unlike in his first term, Trump is completely buffered from reality by a phalanx of yes-men this time around.
That’s by design. His second term was and is supposed to be MAGA unleashed, a reboot of his presidency in which he finally gets to do things his way, and “his way” involves surrounding himself with sycophants who’ll never correct him. (Well, almost never. The risk of an imminent global economic meltdown caused Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to finally do a little throat-clearing about tariffs.) Trump famously has one aide whose entire job is to keep good news flowing to him, with a heavy emphasis on material from the conspiratorial blog Gateway Pundit. When the president cries “fake news” over grim data about the economy or his foreign policy, he’s not necessarily lying; he’s simply regurgitating the components of the putrid information diet he placed himself on when he hired Natalie Harp.
A grandiose narcissist constructs an information bubble around himself to feed his fantasies of invincibility and ends up losing his ability to distinguish it from reality: That’s Authoritarianism 101, no?
The ‘market’ decides.
It’s also the story of Vladimir Putin’s misadventure in Ukraine.
I don’t know what Kremlin officials were telling the Russian president about the war before he launched his invasion but the information he was receiving about the two sides’ respective capabilities was plainly very, very bad. When you select aides for loyalty rather than competence, when you make it so that deputies are afraid to tell you the truth, when you resent expert opinion that contradicts your delusions of grandeur, you’re impairing your own ability to respond effectively to events.
Someday the full history of “Liberation Day” will be written and I’m sure we’ll learn that many Trump advisers, Bessent very much included, saw disaster ahead. Some may have seen data projecting an economic catastrophe if the president followed through or had reason to know that China wouldn’t cave as quickly as Trump assumed they would. But they bit their tongues for the same reason that Putin’s aides bit theirs: When you work for a caudillo who insists on doing his own research, his “findings”—particularly in a policy matter about which he feels strongly—are necessarily more compelling than yours.
See now why I find the thought of Trump being misinformed more frightening than him being a liar? A liar is in touch with reality even if he pretends otherwise, a good quality for the most powerful person in the world to have. But a person who’s badly misinformed, and is surrounded by cretins eager to keep him that way, is capable of anything.
Our country is essentially now governed by a right-wing blog’s comment section. No wonder the “sell America” trend in markets is in full swing.
In theory, all of this is self-correcting. For the moment we live in a democracy, a “market” of sorts for policy information. If the government’s policies are bad and harmful, the market will reflect that and the government will be voted out in due course. But in a democracy in which so many stakeholders increasingly “do their own research,” it’s anyone’s guess anymore how efficiently truthful information is being priced into a political party’s “stock.” Despite the fact that Donald Trump has created the most toxic information environment in presidential history, it turns out that Americans now trust him just as much as they do the national political press.
Whether our politics is still “structured by reality” is the question of the age. We’re all about to find out the hard way.
