Here’s why the word ‘hoax’ lost all meaning as Trump abused it

Donald Trump was the focus of a new analysis published online by The Washington Post on Tuesday.

"Some men use words like a scalpel, leveraging their power incisively and conservatively. Others use words the way Wile E. Coyote uses a boulder perched at the edge of a cliff. Former president Donald Trump is more of a push-the-boulder kind of guy, and one of the boulders he likes to push is the word 'hoax.' Trump used it nearly 800 times as he was first running for and then serving as president, generally as a way of undergirding his incessant claims that everyone but him was being dishonest about things. Every time someone criticized him, it was a 'hoax,' to the point that the word lost any real meaning," Philip Bump wrote.

Bump noted Trump's rants about one alleged "hoax" goes back 8 years.

"There was one particular use of the word, though, that came up a lot. In 2013, he attracted some attention by describing global warming as a hoax, an assertion that was predicated on a major ice storm and cold temperatures ... in December. If global warming were real, why is there still winter, Trump asked. Checkmate," he wrote.

Bump noted Trump's recent statement describing climate change as a "hoax." Bump went on to list "the 13 biggest hoaxes in America," starting with the "no collusion" findings of the Mueller report.

Read more at The Washington Post.