Regarding 2, the other advantage Trump had was that some of the big claims about him were plain and simply untrue. For example, the Slate story about his suppos

Regarding 2, the other advantage Trump had was that some of the big claims about him were plain and simply untrue. For example, the Slate story about his supposed secret communications channel with Russia - it was an outsourced bulk email provider for his hotels, every single piece of evidence was exactly what you'd expect from such a server, and a number of major news outlets had declined to run the story for that reason. But it just took one publication willing to ignore the issues and run it for the story to spread like wildfire on social media, just like fake news, even being repeated by Hillary Clinton's Twitter account which received a huge number of retweets for it. One of her staff members even attacked the FBI for not investigating it, and once the NYT revealed they had investigated and concluded it was a junk email server, her supporters took this as proof the FBI were conspiring with Trump. The comments section on any vaguely related article were filled with people insisting on this right up until the election. Think about that - we had a situation where people believed the FBI was conspiring with Russia and a presidential candidate because the FBI refused to see junk emails as proof of secret communications between the two. We're seeing something similar with the latest Trump story, which is also based on a document that's been doing the rounds in media circles for months but was too dubious to report[1], and is being widely and uncritically spread on social media by people who often openly don't care whether what they're claiming is true or not. [1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/kenbensinger/these-reports-allege-trump-has-deep-ties-to-russia https://www.buzzfeed.com/kenbensinger/these-reports-allege-t...