The Real Coup Plot Is Trump’s Mr. Mueller’s investigation aims to “destroy” the Trump presidency “for partisan political purposes and to disenfranchise millions of American voters,” the Fox News host Jesse Watters claimed on Saturday. Now, as Mr. Trump and his allies seem on the verge of staging a coup against independent institutions and the rule of law — maligning the special counsel Robert Mueller and threatening a purge at the F. B.I. And Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary has portrayed his opponents as pawns in the billionaire philanthropist George Soros’s supposed scheme to use refugees to subjugate his country (a claim that is increasingly being echoed on the farther reaches of the American right Rather, Mr. Trump, Fox News and Republicans in Congress seem to be actively using falsehoods to prepare an assault on the institutions that allow American democracy to function. But a hundred people telling a thousand lies quickly exhaust the ability of news outlets to disprove each claim, and of citizens to keep track of all the real and invented scandals. At first, the most extreme partisans — like Mr. Watters of Fox News — float an outlandish idea. The true purveyors of fake news, he claimed, were television networks like CNN and newspapers like this one. By the same token, Mr. Trump would, at one moment, be scandalously overstepping the bounds of his rightful authority in firing Mr. Mueller or pardoning his closest associates.
