ABSTRACT
The meaning of “fake news” has undergone a profound evolution in the decades since Norm McDonald opened Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update segments with “Here’s the fake news.” From harmless satire in fake newspaper The Onion to misleading clickbait about the Pope’s supposed endorsement of Donald Trump (Ritchie 2016), “fake news” has morphed from evoking mere laughter to evoking an existential threat to democracy. While other scholars have examined “fake news” stories as media artifacts (Bakir and McStay 2017; Horne and Adali 2017; Potthast et al. 2017), Donald Trump’s appropriation of “fake news” as a rhetorical device for discrediting unfavorable coverage of his presidency, and the widespread adoption of the same tactic among Republicans and even foreign interests, calls out for more scholarship. This chapter takes up that challenge with an examination of “fake news” as a discursive weapon in Trump’s tweets as president. Text mining, more than a thousand tweets from Trump’s first six months in office, demonstrates the president’s rebranding of the phrase for his own reputational management and examines civic and cultural effects of that rhetoric.
