[mandelbulb]

>but the people crafting his campaign messaging were not

Yeah, many people would dispute that. In particular, you can't forget that he rarely followed scripts. His team definitely observed and measured what people and the press responded to, and brainstormed how it might benefit them in the future. But it certainly all started as what he could think of or remember best.

The success of campaign slogans and buzzword relies heavily on creativity, luck, and your own success. The work the campaign teams invest is usually more about damage control than profound strategies on how to rule society.

>So, I guess there is a sense in which it connects to his legacy, but not the way you seem to think.

What are You talking about?

Fake news had been a trivial phrase, used in different contexts throughout the years but without any grand emphasis on its own existence—hence the lack of an entry in dictionaries. Even throughout 2016, it had no explicit connection to Trump. Hillary also used it shortly before Trump famously called CNN out as fake news. [1] Even then the term was an unnecessarily misleading trivialization. But Trump redefined and weaponized that afterwards as his own catchphrase.

[1]: https://edition.cnn.com/2016/12/08/politics/hillary-clinton-...