This is madness, but I think it's worth unpacking for a couple of reasons. First, Trump's woefully bad sources of info. You should watch the @OANN clip that served as his source material

This is Trump's source: "Reports Thursday found Biden's live stream address got only one thousand views online." Source? A random guy's tweet. Then this "news anchor" called Biden's speech "another baseless attempt to pose as the winner of the recent elections."

I get it. Everyone's mind is made up about Trump. Biden is the story now. But the pollution from this pro-Trump propaganda still needs to be measured. Watch that @OANN video and remember: Staffers conceived it, scripted it, gathered elements, wrote banners, read it, and aired it.

It's all rooted in resentment and rejection of the reality-based media. The "anchor" said "mainstream media portrays Biden as the most popular candidate in history of US politics, giving him 80 million votes." The US prez consumed this stuff for 4 years and urged others to watch.

The exact claim in this OANN "report" is, of course, a lie. Everyone search Biden + Thanksgiving on YouTube and see all the view counts. It's more than a bit ironic, since OANN is not rated by Nielsen (which signals a small audience) and is on a YouTube time-out for posting lies.

The NEED to lie fascinates me. The need to insist that Biden is low-rated. OANN's "anchor" claimed "observers say his miserable viewership online does not reflect his purported popularity." (Trump cleaned up that shoddy writing when he tweeted about the illogical TV segment.)

It's illogical on so many levels, of course. Biden's speech aired live on all the major networks. It streamed live on dozens of sites. There was no "report" like OANN said. Streams don't equate to votes. Etc etc. Almost no one notices or calls out these lies.

So this is the end of my thread. Yet another thread about Trump being misinformed by what he sees on TV. After 4 years, what intrigues me most is that no one ever successfully intervened. No one ever stepped in and stopped the president from embarrassing himself by tweeting lies.

They tried, right? Family, friends, aides. I mean, my wife tells me to turn off the TV sometimes. Colleagues alert me when my tweets have typos. We look out for each other.

But in the twilight of his presidency, Trump is still consuming lies and tweeting 'em out to the world.