Donald Trump is a tough target for journalists and commentators to hit. Like a high-flying bomber that spews metallic chaff out its back end to confuse the radar of missiles, he so consistently floods the news cycles with outrages that by the time anyone has the chance to report, comment on or fact-check each one, there’s another one coming, and the current news is passé, yesterday and seemingly irrelevant.

On the other hand, he’s an irresistible target. Even though surrounded, concealed and supported by the usual machinery of the chief executive’s office (think Grover Cleveland’s secret surgery for mouth cancer, Woodrow Wilson’s stroke-induced incapacity covered by his wife, or Ronald Reagan’s increasingly obvious dementia), he can’t resist the temptation to go toe-to-toe with inquiring reporters, and the resulting word salads of his unscripted responses are legendary. Still, reporting them verbatim seems to do as much damage to the man as the cannonballs bouncing off the hull of the USS Constitution.

You’ve got to go after the things that irritate or enrage him. You can spot them by the attention they command in his late-night litanies of injuries. The “failing New York Times” is a favorite target of his, which for us ought to be an indicator of its reliability. The social media sites of the internet, however, which may actually report more mis- and disinformation than facts, and at least one opinion per user, is his favorite wading pool.

So it’s pretty clear why many of us snipers on the fringes of the opposition are constantly after Donald like a wolf pack of U-boats, each hoping for a lucky shot that it’s becoming increasingly apparent none of us will ever get. Still, we persist.

The problem with that pursuit of what we fashion truth, clarity, and justice in an ever more repressive atmosphere, but which may in essence be little more than a need to express our opinions with some presumed authority, is that we lose sight of what we claim to be after — a just and equitable society — and focus instead on confounding and convicting the president. Robert Frost describes it in “Mending Wall”: “The work of hunters is another thing: I have come after them and made repair where they have left not one stone on a stone, but they would have the rabbit out of hiding, to please the yelping dogs.”

It’s a trap that many of us fall into without realizing it till too late. Any evidence will do to strengthen our case (we should face the fact that no evidence reinforcing an opinion ever will change a contrary mind). We forget the simple profundity usually attributed to the late Senator Danial Patrick Moynihan: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”

Buoyed by the reported differences between the nationwide attendance at the “No Kings!” rallies and the dismal attendance and spirit of the Washington D.C. parade on Flag Day, I exuberantly referred to a photograph of the Golden Gate bridge so crammed with people that it had visibly sagged, and a photo of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem supposedly cosplaying in a fireman’s helmet and a wet suit. An alert editor, however, pointed out to me that the bridge photograph was from 1987 and the Noem photo from “The Onion.” Whoops!

“Chagrin” barely expresses the feeling evoked by those corrections. Not only had I, in my enthusiasm to skewer the source of so much pain among my friends, been careless and fallen for those untruths, but I had passed them on, as well. As the old saying goes, a lie can run around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

It’s a humbling thing to be so completely wrong, and deeply embarrassing to have propagated a lie in support of an opinion, or in this case a personal attack. Never mind that it’s done routinely nearly everywhere; even the president has so utterly confused our perceptions that many of us hardly know what to believe anymore. The best current example is his claim that his recent bombing raid on Iran’s uranium-enriching facilities was “completely successful.” Maybe so. I doubt it. In any case, Joseph Goebbels’ ideal state is being realized, in which nobody knows for sure what’s true, and as a result believes almost nothing. What a wonderful way to live!