Trump has a tactical role model: Karl Rove

In the furor over Trump's brazen lying, we forget that there's recent precedent: Karl Rove, once affectionately known as "Bush's Brain".

Trump may come by it naturally, but it sure looks like he's adopted Rove's Three Rules of Politics (I got them from Jeffrey Davis, whose blog is here but I can't find the relevant comment). The rules are: 

1. Attack your opponent's strength from your weakness. When Trump talks about "crooked Hillary," this is of course an extreme case of the pot calling the kettle black. Trump obviously knows he is vulnerable to this charge, but by throwing the same accusation at his enemies he muddies the waters and plants the idea that he is no worse than everybody else. The media and its "professional centrists" actively assist in this deception with their obsession with false equivalence—the "they're all equally guilty" trope. 
2. Accuse your opponent of doing what you're doing. One of Rove's most gag-inducing claims was his assertion that Democrats are the party of special interests. Today we have Trump claiming that it's not the Russians who meddled in our elections, it's actually the FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller! Again, this is an attack on the very concept of truth and deflects the focus away from his own culpability. 
3. Be worse than anyone can imagine. This is a particularly diabolical stratagem, since it essentially hijacks human psychology to the benefit of the perpetrator. We know from studies of human cognition that the brain first attempts to understand a statement by making it true. We are wired to expect most people, most of the time, to tell the truth. So when we hear a particularly outrageous whopper, even if on reflection it's obviously false, our inclination is to think "I can't imagine anybody saying something that awful if there wasn't at least some truth to it." This resonates with the famous discussion of the Big Lie in Mein Kampf, wherein Hitler observes that most people tell small lies and literally can't imagine a really big one.

Anthropologist Joe Henrich describes in his great book The Secret of Our Success how language can be a fantastic communication tool—but only if most people are truthful. If you can't trust anything anybody says, then the whole system breaks down and language itself becomes useless. Think about that in the context of Trump's war on the media: the main tool that journalists have to ply their trade is language, and if Trump can rob them of that tool, he wins. As Hannah Arendt noted, the goal of propaganda isn't to sell an alternate version of reality, it's to create a distrust of all descriptions of reality.

In this, Trump has succeeded brilliantly among his base of supporters, making him a worthy heir to the legacy of Karl Rove.