Washington: Physically, it was in well-heeled Chevy Chase, where Connecticut and Nebraska avenues cross, that the cops captured a gunman after he opened fire in the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria on Sunday.
But in Donald Trump's America, this truly bizarre incident inadvertently shines a light on another, more sinister intersection – the toxic transmission of fake news and information by social media, and how a liar president-elect and his supporters weaponise them, to discredit and distract the mainstream media by communicating over their heads to his millions of followers without challenge, correction or qualification.
In the weeks since the election, while American reporters and editors have wrestled with how to cover Trump's wild and often fictional twitter storms, the pizza man James Alefantis and his 40 staff have lived their own Trumpist nightmare – since being falsely and absurdly accused of being a front for a child abuse ring led by Hillary Clinton and her campaign chief John Podesta, they have been deluged with unhinged threats of arson and death.
Unfolding in the suburbs of greater Washington, their trauma began with the hacking, thought to have been Russian sponsored, of Democratic Party computers and the publication by WikiLeaks of an innocent email exchange, in which Alefantis and Podesta discuss a fundraising event for the Clinton campaign.
Subsequent speculation among users of an online message board called 4Chan on the nature of possible links between the pizzeria and the Democratic Party meshed with insane theorising in the conservative blogosphere that Democrats are big on child trafficking; creating a supposed gospel truth, that then was picked up by an online page called The Donald; which, in turn, spawned a Reddit discussion thread called Pizzagate which, in the blink of an eye, had 20,000 subscribers.
Suddenly, the pizzeria came under attack. Among hundreds of threats on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, Alefantis was warned, "we're on to you", "I will kill you personally" and "this place should be burnt to the ground". His phone rang off the hook – with people screaming obscenities and threats; inexplicably, neighbouring business came under attack too – one was threatened with a firing squad.
Fake Pizzagate news reports mushroomed, replete with images of children pilfered from the Comet Ping Pong employees' social media pages – presenting them as the victims of trafficking abuse. The reports alleged the existence of a network of tunnels and claimed that a faded decoration on the restaurant's awning was an international symbol of paedophilia.
Among reports on websites like The New Nationalist and The Vigilant Citizen, one headline read: "Pizzagate: How 4Chan Uncovered the Sick World of Washington's Occult Elite." Later, a Twitter message urging "Don't let up. #PizzaGate EVERYWHERE," was reposted and liked hundreds of times.
One evening, a man appeared among diners at the restaurant's tables with their red-and-white check tablecloths, insisting that he was there to investigate the allegations.
In a separate incident, the police removed a man as he shot live video during Comet Ping Pong's busy evening rush.
Then on Sunday the shooter – 28-year- old Edgar Maddison, from North Carolina, walked in and pointed an assault rifle at a servers who fled before he fired. The police say Maddison claimed he was "self-investigating" the child trafficking claims.
Among the many disturbing aspects of Trump's sensational election win, is that he and his surrogates and aides, and even some among his nominees for high office, happily embrace fiction as fact, and seemingly get a kick from seeing the mainstream media flounder as they grapple with how to merge the political unreality of Trumpland with the very real circumstances of living in and running the US in a post-fact or post-truth era.
Trump's tweets, and what he has retweeted, often have no basis in reality.
Less clearly understood, and never articulated by the President-elect, is just what his game plan might be.
His appointed national security adviser retired General Michael Flynn, who inanely adorns his tweets with an image of a four-leaf clover and a surfer riding a wave, tweeted early in November about another anti-Clinton conspiracy theory involving paedophilia. And his son, Michael Flynn Jnr, whose use of a .gov email address suggests he too will have a gig with the new administration, is a Pizzagate true believer who retweets messages alleging a media conspiracy to normalise paedophilia.
And of course, hand in hand with Trump's obsessive Twittering is his record as a dab hand in the fake news department.
Exhibit A: His leadership in the birther movement, which claimed that Barack Obama was not born in the US and, therefore, was not eligible to be president – not true.
Exhibit B: His claim that "thousands and thousands" of Muslims in New Jersey cheered the 9/11 attacks – not true.
Exhibit C: His claim that Obama and Clinton were "co-founders" of the Islamic State – not true.
Exhibit D: His reliance on a report in the supermarket scandal rag, the National Enquirer, to claim that the father of Senator Ted Cruz's father had a hand in the JFK assassination – not true.
Exhibit E: His repeated claims that Clinton was seriously ill – not true.
Exhibit F: His claim that "illegal" votes robbed him of winning the popular vote – not true.
On National Public Radio last week, jaws dropped among panelists on the Diane Rehm Show when Trump surrogate and CNN commentator Scottie Nell Hughes blithely declared of the Trump fantasies: "One thing that's been interesting to watch this entire campaign season, is that people say facts are facts, [but] they're not really facts.
"Everybody has a way, it's kind of like looking at ratings or looking at a glass half-full of water. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not true. There's no such thing, unfortunately, any more, as facts."
Lest that be seen as Hughes' personal flight of fancy, on-again, off-again Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski, also speaking last week, castigated the media for taking Trump at his word – and even bothering to report some of what he actually says. "You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally," he said. "The American people didn't. They understood it. They understood that sometimes – when you have a conversation with people – you're going to say things, and sometimes you don't have all the facts to back it up."
On Sunday, ABC TV host George Stephanopoulos made little headway in a 10-question exchange as he grilled vice-president elect Mike Pence on the absence of reality in Trump's baseless claim that he had been robbed of winning the popular vote, which Clinton leads by about 2.6 million votes, because "millions of people voted illegally".
Stephanopoulos: "It's his right to make false statements?"
Pence: "Well, it's his right to express his opinion as President-elect of the United States. I think one of the things that's refreshing about our President-elect and one of the reasons why I think he made such an incredible connection with people all across this country is because he tells you what's on his mind."
Stephanopoulos: "But why is it refreshing to make false statements?"
Pence: "Look, I don't know that that is a false statement, George, and neither do you. The simple fact is that ..."
Stephanopoulos: "I know there's no evidence for it."
Pence: "He's going to say what he believes to be true and I know that he's always going to speak in that way as president."
A media commentary in The New York Times sets out a part of the challenge for reporters: "How to cover a president's pronouncements when they are both provocative and maddeningly vague? Does an early-morning tweet amount to a planned shift in American policy? Should news outlets, as some readers argue, ignore clearly untrue tweets, rather than amplify falsehoods further?"
In some ways the media can't win. They can't not report what an incoming president says, however off-the-wall it might be; report the tweets without contrasting them with a semblance of reality, as some do, and they get kicked; qualify them with useful facts and contrast them with that other planet called the real world, and they get accused of devoting time and resources to a Trump-inspired distraction.
A strategy?
Some are convinced Trump is bent on a deliberate strategy, tweeting unsubstantiated nonsense to draw media attention away from the serious and dire implications of appointments he's proposing for his cabinet and White House team or other contentious aspects of the presidential transition.
In The New York Times, Nobel-prize winning commentator Paul Krugman is certain Trump's unconstitutional Twitter rant last week, about stripping citizenship from those who burn the American flag, was a calculated bid to hijack the news cycle, to distract the media from the consequences of his selection on the same day of Georgia congressman Tom Price as secretary of human services – because of what Price is likely to do to Obamacare and Medicare.
And elsewhere in the media, commentators are demanding that Trump's tweets either be reported more selectively – or, unrealistically, that they not be reported at all. A Politico magazine piece headed "Stop Being Trump's Twitter Fool" last week was taken up as a rallying call for the media to go cold turkey on Trump's tweets.
If the press would cover me accurately & honorably, I would have far less reason to "tweet." Sadly, I don't know if that will ever happen!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 5, 2016
Amid claims that Trump wanted to distract attention from plans to enrich his family business through the presidency and from his multiple conflicts of interest, and that reporting his tweets merely legitimised the lies he tells, Slate magazine's Fred Kaplan tweeted eagerly: "I'm almost beginning to believe theory that Trump's tweets are subterfuge to distract us from real scandals. It's time to ignore his tweets."
In The Washington Post, Aaron Blake tried to stay in the real world, writing: "But this is the President-elect of the United States. The job comes with the so-called bully pulpit, and what he says matters and will be the subject of debate no matter what the mainstream media does.
"Everything he says reverberates. It doesn't matter if he says it on Twitter or at a news conference; either way it's going to be consumed by tens of millions of people, and the media has an important role to play when it comes to fact-checking and providing context."
Much media resentment is rooted in the fact that Trump gives only occasional interviews and has not held a conventional, all-in press conference since July.
But ProPublica writer Jessica Huseman argues: "If he had said something similar in a press conference, no one would be concerned that journalists are getting distracted by his absurd language. But because it was a tweet, that's somehow different?"
Unfortunately, this President-elect has decided to make Twitter his main means of communicating with the American public, and the American public listens deeply to things that he says on Twitter.
Kaplan's Slate colleague Dahlia Lithwick fell into the report-it-all camp, writing: "The truth for journalists is that we cannot pick and choose which of Trump's words matter, and the larger truth is that we shouldn't try. All of his words matter, and none of us has any notion of which [of Trump's] threats are predictors of doom and which are mere burps and farts."
Attacking reality
Arguing that Trump's tweets should be reported, if only as proof of his bid to create the kind of alternate reality that demands a "strongman" presidency, Lithwick quotes ThinkProgress writer Ned Resnikoff: "By attacking the very notion of shared reality, the President-elect is making normal democratic politics impossible. When the truth is little more than an arbitrary personal decision, there is no common ground to be reached and no incentive to look for it."
In The New Republic, Jeet Heer arrives at a more plausible explanation than that Trump is seeking to distract the media pack – Heer argues that the President-elect has to stay in perpetual campaign mode, rather than attempt to heal a fractured nation or to be seriously or aloofly presidential, because it's the only way his style of politics can function.
Heer's point is that because Trump campaigned as a populist, losing the popular vote becomes embarrassing. So he's driven to rewrite history, lest he be seen to have won less votes than not only Clinton in 2016, but the Republicans' Mitt Romney in 2012 as well.
More importantly, to the extent that a volatile Republican coalition held together in defeating Clinton, now that she's been dispatched, Trump has to keep positioning himself as a winner over inevitable challenges from internal GOP factions – "Paul Ryan's belt-tightening budget at odds with Stephen Bannon's desire for a new populist economics, and Mike Pence's social conservatism at loggerheads with Trump's own personal libertinism," Heer writes.
So yes, the Trump Twitter sprays do distract the media and they do get people talking about things other than Trump University, about whether his daughter Ivanka should accompany him to meetings with world leaders, or about the latest Trump conflict of interest.
But most of all, they give Trump direct and unfiltered access to his millions of followers.
Consider this – when he arrives at the White House at the end of January, he'll likely combine his near 30 million social media followers with the 12 million-plus that are already signed on to the POTUS account that Barack Obama has operated for the last eight years.
Why would Trump bother with tiresome questions when he can get away with 140 characters?
And for the man who knows more about Islamic State than the generals, his Twitter account is more about send than about receive. Trump follows just 40 other Twitter accounts – mostly Trump family and Trump business, and just a handful of conservative, media figures and analysts.
Media referendum
The reality for the media is this – just as the advent of the internet was an existential threat to mainstream media, so too is Trump and his very deliberate social-media campaign to destroy its remaining credibility and to rob it of its institutional respect in a democracy.
The thin-skinned toddler in Trump can't cope with criticism, the autocrat in him won't tolerate it either – and, in all probability, nothing is going to change. Trump's view, shared by many of his supporters, is that the election was a referendum on the mainstream media – and the media lost.
When The New York Times enquired if Trump might give his Twitter thumbs a break when he arrives in the White House, the response emailed by his spokeswoman Hope Hicks amounted to a "not really".
"President-elect Trump has amassed an incredible social media following, one he used very effectively throughout the campaign to communicate his message," she said. "He intends to continue utilising this modern form of communication, while taking into account his new role and responsibilities may call for modified usage."
What we see is what we'll get with Trump. When CNN's Jake Tapper asked Trump adviser Kelly Anne Conway if it was "presidential" for Trump to issue his nonsense Tweet about illegal voters preventing him from winning the popular vote, she didn't miss a beat, telling him: "He's the President-elect, so that's presidential behaviour."
