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Heather “Digby” Parton has a quote which I nominate as the most insightful quote of the day, if not of the week:
Trump is no student of sociology, but he has a very finely honed sense of how to bullshit the public and he's a natural at disinformation and propaganda. He's been doing it his whole life. He knows the value in using a Senate trial to push his conspiracy theories into the mainstream and seems to instinctively understand that the more exposure they get, the more "real" they become. All the Democrats can do is try to get the truth out while avoiding giving too much oxygen to the other side's alternate reality. It won't be easy.
This is a brief article which I suggested reading. If your prefer not to do so, here’s an excerpt which explains the likely GOP strategy:
Quinta Jurecic and Jacob Schulz of the Lawfare blog have written a very interesting and slightly unnerving analysis of how that works. They point out that Democrats on the Intelligence Committee mostly opted not to address all the conspiracy-mongering that occurred during their hearings in their report to the Judiciary Committee, and for good reason. Aside from all the confusion these conspiracies and false narratives create, studies show that even rebutting such theories tends to give them credibility. For instance, Jurecic and Schultz write:
Research suggests that the more a claim is repeated, the more likely people are to believe it, even in the context of a debunking — so stating, “The DNC server is not in Ukraine” could lead readers to have more, rather than fewer, doubts over whether the server actually is in Ukraine, much less whether there is a physical server at all. (This has proven difficult to navigate for media outlets struggling to report on the president’s falsehoods.)
We will know soon enough if House Republicans are planning to take advantage of these phenomena. It would be hugely surprising if they don't. The big question now is whether or not the Senate will do the same.