Making Policy Based on Falsehoods: The Federal Government vs UCLA

This morning I was shocked to read....this about the $ value to California's contribution to our Fed gov.
J. Fishkin tells it like it is, in a clear eye look at disinformation and extortion by Trump & the GOP.
From Yale Law prof blog
https://balkin.blogspot.com/2025/08/making-policy-based-on-falsehoods.html
Making Policy Based on Falsehoods: The Federal Government vs UCLA

Joseph Fishkin

What happens when the government makes policy based on falsehoods? As our present administration’s unrelenting destruction of American ideals and institutions grinds onward, I find myself returning often to this question. I realize now that I completely failed to grasp the significance of the moment, on President Trump’s first day in office in January 2017, when he sent Sean Spicer out to the podium to defend an obviously false claim about the size of the crowd at his inauguration. This had no policy implications, and at the time, it struck me as more embarrassing than dangerous. That was a failure of imagination on my part. It was an early effort to bully the national media into accepting what team Trump then briefly called “alternative facts.”