I think that the really notable insight that Trump has had is that the typical voter has little or no idea what is actually happening in the policy areas being discussed, and that making false or self-contradictory statements isn’t – at least in the existing environment of commentators and media and such – as politically-damaging as is conventionally held to be the case.
He also worked to get people listening directly to him. Like, instead of his statements being mediated by the media – who might call him out – he works to get people following a social media account that he runs directly, on Twitter. When even that media cut him off, he established his own social media outlet. Cut out middlemen, avoid situations where other people might call out your statements as false and have those calling-outs reach your target audience.
I’d add that the problem really doesn’t go away when Trump loses the election or wins and then four years down the road, leaves office. That is, it’s not that Trump has some unique ability to exploit it…he’s just the one who found the hole. If you’ve found a mechanism that is effective and works, other people will also make use of it, unless you restructure the environment so that it isn’t effective any longer. That is, this is going to be an issue into the future, unless it’s possible to redesign things so that it’s not practical to exploit.
The good news, I think, is that we live in an era with a lot of change going on in the media environment. That is, it’s not that the present environment is one that’s been around for a long time and it’s very difficult to come up with anything else. Newspapers and TV are in decline, various social media sources are on their way up, and there isn’t much by way of entrenched and impervious entities. Hell, I’m writing this and you’re reading this on a platform that didn’t even exist a bit back and was put together on a shoestring budget. So there’s a lot of potential for change, including in ways that would make it a lot harder to make outright false claims.