It seems Donald is having night sweats again. Early this morning, Our Dumb President tweeted that NBC News host Lester Holt "got caught fudging" his "tape on Russia." Fudging Russia sounds like something Donald might choose from a brothel menu, but, in this case, it appears he's now claiming that NBC News doctored the 2017 interview in which he admitted, on tape, that he fired James Comey over, in his words, "this Russia thing."

What’s going on at @CNN is happening, to different degrees, at other networks - with @NBCNews being the worst. The good news is that Andy Lack(y) is about to be fired(?) for incompetence, and much worse. When Lester Holt got caught fudging my tape on Russia, they were hurt badly!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 30, 2018

Speaking, as usual, like someone who learned English late in life through Woody Allen films, here's what Donald actually said to Lester Holt during that interview: "Regardless of recommendation I was going to fire Comey knowing, there was no good time to do it. And in fact when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story, it's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won. And the reason they should have won it is the electoral college is almost impossible for a Republican to win. Very hard."

Indeed. They've only done it three times in the past 20 years, and in two of those cases they still managed to lose the popular vote. It's an impressive record, albeit one that might make you wonder what the point of "democracy" is. Anyway! What Donald is doing—sowing doubt about the media—is an old totalitarian tactic. Hitler did it. The term, at the time, was Lügenpresse or "lying press" rather than "fake news," but the concept was the same. The Nazi Party used the term to encourage distrust of the media and spread propaganda against Jews and communists, as well as the foreign press. It worked then, and among Donald's base, it's working now: According to a poll from last month, three-quarters of Republicans trust Donald over the press.

This should terrify those of us who don't want to see Donald sneak his way to a second term in office. Unfortunately, emerging technology will aid Donald in his mission to destroy trust in the media. Check out this video, which BuzzFeed released in April.

The video looks and sounds like Barack Obama—or at least a very good impersonator—is calling his successor a "total and complete dipshit." While it seems 100 percent likely that Obama does, in fact, think Donald is a total and complete dipshit, it's actually Jordan Peele speaking. This tech—which, by the way, is being developed right here in Seattle—allows the user to edit both video and audio in a way that will, as it improves, look and sound just like the real thing. So not only could someone convincingly create video of, for example, Donald declaring war on North Korea, Donald himself will be able to claim, as he did on Twitter this morning, that whatever idiotic thing that falls from his mouth and is captured on video wasn't him; it was a deep fake. That will become his new cry. "Deep fake," he'll belch when some damning video emerges, whether he's talking about grabbing pussies or golden showers. And his base? They'll believe him.