The massively successful campaign to lie about the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act

Politicians always lie, and when those politicians are Democrats, they typically have the media on their side. But rarely have the Democrats had so much success in roping in the news media to misrepresent the facts so blatantly as they did in President Donald Trump’s first term regarding the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Future students of media and politics ought to study the coverage of TCJA as an extreme case in how partisans, acting together with a friendly media, can cause huge swaths of the public to believe verifiably false things.

TCJA cut taxes for almost all Americans, certainly for all middle-class workers who pay taxes. Yet many people, and a vast majority of liberal Americans, those who mistakenly put their trust in the liberal media, believed that the law increased their taxes.