It’s only fake-believe: Fake news that leaves everyone lost for words

Fischer v Spassky. Newton v Leibniz. Freud v Jung. To the great intellectual clashes of history can be added Trump v Biden (The Trump vs Biden show a welcome distraction from our own crisis). Admittedly, on this occasion, the standards were considerably lower with the walls inexorably closing in on Trump methodically sawing through the branch he’s sitting on.

The Donald. Yes, him. When the final analysis of Trump lies is published it’ll run into volumes. First, Trump said he had a “hunch” the World Health Organisation’s 3.4% Covid mortality rate was a “false number” and suggested people with coronavirus could go to work and get better. “A lot of people will have this and it’s very mild,” he said in an interview on Fox News. “They’ll get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor. They don’t even call a doctor.”

Later Trump called the coronavirus a “horrible infection”, radically altering his public stance on the pandemic. A day earlier he declared: “It will go away, just stay calm, it will go away.” Just as Trump would undoubtedly say: “Don’t believe Monday follows Sunday (or the sun rises in the east). That’s just fake news from the lying media.”

Trump was prominent, too, in spreading the false idea that vaccines cause autism, but then changed his tune, urging people “to get the shots”. Would an embittered Trump, eager to spite his successor and win attention for his future media or political career, become a prominent ‘anti-vaxxer’ campaigner again? To ask the question is to answer it.

Additionally, there are all his unfounded conspiracy theories about voting fraud, claiming Mr Biden’s win in Arizona was “impossible”, the results in Nevada “fake” and “We won Michigan bigly!”

Have we heard the last of Trump? No. Is the world a safer (and saner) place now he’s (almost)

gone? Absolutely. Am I glad? Yes? Am I still talking to myself? Stop looking at me like that – it’s been a long year! So, let’s leave it at this: Happy New Year!

Nora Johnson’s psychological crime thrillers ‘No Safe Place’, ‘Betrayal’, ‘The Girl in the Woods’, ‘The Girl in the Red Dress’, ‘No Way Back’, ‘Landscape of Lies’, ‘Retribution’, ‘Soul Stealer’, ‘The De Clerambault Code’ (www.nora-johnson.net) available online as ebook (€0.99;£0.99), ibook, paperback & audiobook.All profits to Costa del Sol Cudeca cancer charity