Trump has a lot that seems might be wrong with him, but schizophrenia never really seemed to be on the list. Narcissism, dementia, psycho-/socio-pathy, compulsive lying, and possibly more, but I’ve never gotten the feeling he displayed the hyperpatternicity I associate with schizophrenia.
The thing about compelling lies is not that they are new, just that they are easier to expand. The most common effect of compelling lies is their ability to get well-intentioned people to support malign causes and give their money to fraudsters. So, expect that to expand, kind of like it already has been.
The big question for me is what the response will be. Will we make lying illegal? Will we become a world of ever more paranoid isolationists, returning to clans, families, households, as the largest social group you can trust? Will most people even have the intelligence to see what is happenning and respond? Or will most people be turned into info-puppets, controlled into behaviours by manipulation of their information diet to an unprecedented degree? I don’t know.
The trick is, snake oil salesmen exist because there are customers. You might be smart enough to spot them coming, but many, many, many people are not. Being dismissive of scamming as an issue because you can spot them is like being dismissive of drownings because you know how to swim. It ignores the harm to your world done by having others around you destroyed, sometimes because they are cocky and hubristic, sometimes just because they were caught in a weak moment, just a bit too tired to notice the difference between rn and m in an email address.
So many people on lemmy seem to not be the types to hate based on nationality, except for this. The only nationalities I have seen attacked on here are Trumpicans and the French. Trumpicans at least are an ideology, but what is happening with the French that makes them the exception?