This post first appeared at BillMoyers.com

Dont let it be said that Donald Trump is clueless. Mendacious, chaotic, vicious, disgusting and arguably psychopathic, yes. Supply your own examples from the past week. Say, bragging about crowd sizes and attacking Barack Obama at the Boy Scout jamboree; urging police not to be too nice when throwing thugs into paddy wagons, and later claiming he was kidding; tweeting Reince Priebus into oblivion. From the trademark slogan Youre fired to Please dont be too nice is this progress in presidentiality? Only if the Marx Brothers had lived to write a sequel to Duck Soup starring John Belushi as Anthony Scaramucci.

But cluelessness doesnt explain why truth reels in the United States. Trump gets all too many clues from delusional sources. He rubber-stamps a mental agenda drawn up by Rupert Murdoch, Sean Hannity , Breitbart News, Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson , Mike Cernovich, et al., and the Republican politicians who share their wavelength. Trump sops up their horror stories, then barks, tweets, brays and pumps them back out to be amplified in turn on talk radio, Fox News and the other conduits of what I have been calling the VOices of RighT-wing EXtremism, aka the VORTEX . What happens next is a positive feedback loop garbage begets garbage. The Birthers, Whitewater, Travelgate and Vince Foster conspiracy theorists, death panel enthusiasts, Lock Her Up! chanters, scientist-haters and other Flat Earth factions gulp down the Kool-Aid, panicking those Republican members of Congress who havent already swallowed.

Sometimes Trump reacts almost instantaneously, as with the Swedish riot that wasnt, last February. You may recall that, having watched a Fox News documentary about immigrant violence in Sweden, he told an adoring rally the next day: look at whats happening last night in Sweden, vaguely suggesting some dire incident, a riot or, perhaps a terror attack. There was no riot the previous night; there was the Fox News show. As the BBC commented:

The statement about a particular incident on Friday night baffled Swedes, including former [conservative] Prime Minister Carl Bildt, who tweeted: Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking?

Do these spikes of hysteria matter? In a word, yes. As each panic wave subsides, it leaves a residue of delusion. Over time, the residue tends to acquire one stratum after another. Even refutations and denials can fuel the belief that theres a controversy, an issue. Since the rights paranoid system churns incessantly, a huge and well-represented public has crystallized over the decades. Its not necessarily a majority on one issue or another, but it has hardened into a permanent critical mass that forces reason into a corner. The Flat Earthers set an agenda that often enough infects the mainstream media as well as the Vortex. What is ludicrously called the debate remains warped even if the scarred-up Party of Reason does, for a time, prevail as when, last week, thanks to three defections, Mitch McConnell failed to bulldozer Obamacare into oblivion.

So as not to get lost in the particular lunacies of the last week (which by the time this piece appears will likely have been bumped aside in favor of the next round) lets consider in some detail a single case study of a hoax with long legs, a continuing story, one that promises grave consequences for democracy Trumps claim that he would have won the popular vote had it not been for voter fraud.

so he tweeted on Nov. 27.

This was no idle and groundless boast; this was a fantasy with a history, and its nowhere near dead. Trump guaranteed it a future when he set up a Republican-majority Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity , nominally headed by Vice President Mike Pence (no preconceived notions ), vice-chaired by the unflagging pursuer of fraudulent voters Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (recently fined by a federal judge for a pattern of misleading the court in voter-ID matters), and including longtime voter fraud fanatic Hans von Spakovsky . The point, obviously, is to suppress the nonwhite vote. Kobach has been beating this drum for years.

Trumps immediate source for his Roswell-New-Mexico-level claim about 3 million noncitizen votes (let alone God knows how many other cases of voter fraud) seems to have been an interview conducted by CNNs Chris Cuomo on the day of Trumps tweet with a gentleman named Gregg Phillips. Phillips is a longtime hunter for vote fraud in Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi. In 2016, he tweeted that

and that

Phillips works with an organization called True the Vote , which began as a tea party offshoot dispatching white poll watchers to mostly-black precincts in Houston. In 2010, as Mariah Blake wrote in The Atlantic, they deployed hundreds of observers to minority neighborhoods in and around Houston, where they gathered more than 800 complaints of improper voting. A complaint is not evidence, and 800 is not a huge number, not in the fourth-largest city in America, but the tea party offshoot parlayed this early success into a national recruitment drive. By 2012 they claimed to have trained a million poll watchers nationally, and von Spakovsky spoke at their convention. Abby Rapoport , a solid Texas reporter, thought their claims overblown and ineffective. The New York Times debunked many of them. But these folks never went away. Theyre back.

On his CNN show, Cuomo cited a Phillips tweet 16 days earlier, which ran as follows: