By politicians who have trained large parts of the public to ignore facts and listen to them instead

I would argue that particular surrogacy was handled by religion, especially fundamentalist evangelicalism, in the United States of America.

For the religious, belief without evidence, and especially contrary to evidence, is the highest virtue and the purest form of devotion. Blessed is he who believes without seeing.

Politicians didn’t have to do any training, unfortunately. We trained ourselves.