Scottie Hughes is most famous as a Trump surrogate who got frequently trashed on live TV by anti-Trump Republican Ana Navarro. Hughes is still making the rounds defending Trump now that he has become our president-elect. The latest insane Trumpism she’s spewing word vomit on is his assertion that “millions voted illegally” in the election.
On Wednesday, Hughes appeared on The Diane Rehm Show, where she argued about the nature of facts: facts are now only what you feel after glancing at several hundred Facebook memes featuring a racist frog. She said:
“Well, I think it’s also an idea of an opinion. And that’s—on one hand, I hear half the media saying that these are lies. But on the other half, there are many people that go, ‘No, it’s true.’ And so one thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch, is that people that say facts are facts—they’re not really facts. Everybody has a way—it’s kind of like looking at ratings, or looking at a glass of half-full water. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth, or not truth. There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts.”
Obviously, this has been Trump’s strategy throughout the campaign, if you can call it a strategy and not an infuriating tic—just keep saying the same lie over and over and eventually people will begin to connect with it, raising it to the level of perceived veracity. Both Hughes and Trump are conflating facts with opinions, as she made even clearer when she added:
“And so Mr. Trump’s tweet, amongst a certain crowd—a large part of the population—are truth. When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some—amongst him and his supporters, and people believe they have facts to back that up. Those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies and that there are no facts to back it up.”
The Atlantic’s James Fallows wrote that at around 21:45 in the interview, Hughes stated she is a “classically studied journalist,” which left the rest of the panel “staring at one another in puzzlement, this not being a normal claim in our field.” Of course, if Hughes says she’s a classically studied journalist, that’s just her opinion which is also now a fact.