Donald Trump seems fixated on the notion of the hoax. He has repeatedly sought to dismiss the unfolding Epstein scandal as a “Democrat hoax that never ends,” designed to distract from his triumphs. Since returning to the White House, he has dismissed green energy as a “scam,” climate change as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” and the concept of a carbon footprint as “a hoax made up by people with evil intentions”—all in one speech to the United Nations. At the same time, however, the president frequently posts fake content as if it were real, such as AI-generated images and false claims about his political opponents.

But in his conviction that anything that favors the other side is a fake, and anything that supports his worldview is real, Trump may not be that far from the average American. Hoaxes have been part of U.S. political life since the Founding Fathers, from the forgeries concocted by Benjamin Franklin to smear the British during the Revolutionary War to a series of bogus academic articles intended to undermine so-called grievance studies in 2017 and 2018. But they also have a life of their own, and tend to outrun their creators, as one particularly enduring example shows: a hoax concocted in the late 1960s by satirists intent on forcing Americans to confront the insanity of the Vietnam War.

Donald Trump seems fixated on the notion of the hoax. He has repeatedly sought to dismiss the unfolding Epstein scandal as a “Democrat hoax that never ends,” designed to distract from his triumphs. Since returning to the White House, he has dismissed green energy as a “scam,” climate change as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” and the concept of a carbon footprint as “a hoax made up by people with evil intentions”—all in one speech to the United Nations. At the same time, however, the president frequently posts fake content as if it were real, such as AI-generated images and false claims about his political opponents.

But in his conviction that anything that favors the other side is a fake, and anything that supports his worldview is real, Trump may not be that far from the average American. Hoaxes have been part of U.S. political life since the Founding Fathers, from the forgeries concocted by Benjamin Franklin to smear the British during the Revolutionary War to a series of bogus academic articles intended to undermine so-called grievance studies in 2017 and 2018. But they also have a life of their own, and tend to outrun their creators, as one particularly enduring example shows: a hoax........

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