monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Taking this number at face value, that would still mean that there were more than 120 million people in the country who did have an issue with their health insurance or health care prior to the ACA.

That's hardly what a functioning health care system looks like.

The Lies of Donald Trump’s Critics

An in-depth analysis of the false allegations and misleading claims made against the 45th President since his inauguration

This article is intended as a neutral, reliable analysis of the lies, false allegations and misleading claims made about and against Donald Trump since his inauguration in January 2017. We’ve attempted to strip away the hyperbole, name-calling and generalizations, and examine the patterns and trends at work: what characterizes these lies and exaggerations, the effect they have, what might explain them.

We pay particular attention to selected examples revealing much about the methods, priorities, and tone of that opposition, and illustrating how this movement both cultivates and plays off a number of caricatures of the 45th President and at times falls prey to a handful of identifiable and repeated errors of thought.

Broadly speaking, most of the falsehoods levelled against Trump fall into one or more of four categories, each of them drawing from and feeding into four public personas inhabited by the President.

They are:

Donald Trump: International Embarrassment
Trump the Tyrant
Donald Trump: Bully baby
Trump the Buffoon.

...these claims...provide a fascinating insight into the tactics and preoccupations of the broad anti-Trump movement known as “the Resistance"...

Generally speaking, we discovered that they are characterized and driven by four types of errors of thought:

(1) Alarmism

(2) A lack of historical context or awareness

(3) Cherry-picking of evidence (especially visual evidence)

(4) A failure to adhere to Occam’s Razor — the common-sense understanding that the simplest explanation for an event or behavior is the most likely.

...The entire episode is a remarkable example of something bordering on collective hallucination, most likely brought on by confirmation bias. Here hundreds of thousands of people — including professional journalists working for influential news organizations, and a chat show host with more than three million nightly viewers — literally heard Trump say something he never said, in most cases probably because it confirmed a pre-existing image of the President as a poorly read, culturally ignorant buffoon.

Other fake stories have simply been designed to make him look ridiculous, like the widely-shared photographs doctored to show Trump with fake diarrhea stains on his golf pants, wearing a diaper or balloon breasts, or posing with a stripper.

Conclusion:

....In some ways, these sorts of massive exaggerations and gross distortions are even more corrosive and destructive than fake news about diarrhea on the golf course, because they bear some distant relationship with the truth.

All of whom came for the purpose of trying to extract concessions from Junior regarding the lifting russian sanctions, which Junior flatly refused to give, eh?

Hillary.

Infused throughout almost all these claims, behind their successful dissemination, is confirmation bias: the fuel that drives the spread of all propaganda and false or misleading claims among otherwise sensible and skeptical people.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to look for, find, remember and share information that confirms the beliefs we already have, and the tendency to dismiss, ignore and forget information that contradicts those beliefs. It is one of the keys to why clever people, on all sides of every disagreement, sometimes believe stupid things that aren’t true.

A final example of how rushed and alarmist conclusions, a lack of context, and a pre-existing caricature of Trump as an incipient dictator have played a role in false claims made against him came early on in his presidency.

...The story horrified readers. “Not a joke,” read one widely-shared tweet, “not a drill.” But also, not true.

The administration had changed WhiteHouse.gov’s summary of the Constitution, but not the Constitution itself. What’s more, the change from “people” to “citizens” in this summary had already been made during the tenure of President Barack Obama.

[...]
On Monday, for example, Spiering questioned Spicer about the Trump administration’s decision to grant 15,000 additional visas to low-wage seasonal workers from foreign countries.

“How does that not conflict with the president’s ‘hire American’ message?” Spiering asked.
[...]
Yet on certain policy matters, Breitbart News is monitoring Trump’s follow-through and occasionally calling him out for not delivering what his base expected. Though mocking the rest of the media is embedded in Breitbart’s DNA, Spiering seemed to defend CNN (yes, really) when Trump intensified his criticism of the network last month.

Trump blasted CNN on Twitter on June 27, even after the network retracted a flawed report and accepted the resignations of three journalists.

“Why isn’t their response good enough for the president?” Spiering asked Sanders during a briefing that day, noting that the subject of CNN’s report, former Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci, had accepted the network’s apology and even praised CNN for a “classy move.”

When Sanders responded by decrying what she called “the constant barrage of fake news” about ties between Trump’s team and Russia, Spiering followed up.

“Does the president actually expect us not to report on stories of a foreign country trying to influence the presidential election?” he asked.

Spiering did not respond to a request for comment.
[...]
As Trump clings to his core supporters amid a historically bad stretch of approval ratings, it is worth watching the reporter who best represents the voice of those supporters in the White House briefing room. That reporter is Spiering, and he is not giving Trump a pass.

Walter Hinteler wrote:

[Breitbart's] reporter is Spiering, and he is not giving Trump a pass.

That is obviously false, and any fool would know it. Breitbart takes huge monthly bribes from Trump to do his bidding, as everyone knows. They aint gunna throw money away.

US President Donald Trump met his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, at a second, previously undisclosed meeting at the G20 in Germany earlier this month, the White House says.
The talks were reportedly held during a dinner for heads of state, hours after both presidents had a formal meeting.
The White House has not revealed what was discussed.
At the formal, two-hour meeting, they discussed Russia's alleged meddling in the US election among other issues.
Halfway through the meal at the summit, President Trump left his seat and sat at an empty chair next to Mr Putin, the Washington Post reports. The US president was alone, and Mr Putin was attended only by his official interpreter, reports say.

US President Donald Trump met his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, at a second, previously undisclosed meeting at the G20 in Germany earlier this month, the White House says.

The White House has not revealed what was discussed.