The Real Donald Trump Story: Lies, Cults And The Destruction Of Truth
First time I laid eyes on Señor T, I was sitting on my girlfriend Doreen’s family’s stoop on Avenue Z. I’m going to guess that I was 12 and Señor was 14. It was summer; we were all in t-shirts and shorts. He was with his detestable father and both were wearing suits and ties. I’ve been keeping my eye on his career since then and the first time I ever wrote about him, I noted he is a liar, crook, cheat and racist. He wasn’t famous yet. Now that he is famous, the word “liar”— or a synonym— is attached to his name more than any other descriptor. Every poll shows that voters, even many who support him, consider him untrustworthy and inherently deceptive. The fifty words other words, besides “liar,” most frequently used to describe Trump are— not in order of frequency— Demagogue, Narcissistic, Authoritarian, Vindictive, Manipulative, Corrupt, Inflammatory, Divisive, Amoral, Megalomaniac, Opportunistic, Grandiose, Egomaniacal, Ruthless, Braggadocious, Impulsive, Thin-skinned, Intolerant, Obsessive, Vain, Incendiary, Pathological, Paranoid, Conspiratorial, Destructive, Irresponsible, Demoralizing, Pompous, Volatile, Unprincipled, Polarizing, Deceitful, Mercurial, Chaotic, Dogmatic, Delusional, Subversive, Racist, Xenophobic, Misogynistic, Craven, Greedy, Callous, Incompetent, Fearmongering, Uninformed, Cowardly, Tyrannical, Sycophantic and Dishonorable. Too bad none will be on his tombstone.
Yesterday, Scott Clement, Amy Wang and Emily Guskin reported that although most Ohio voters don’t believe Trump’s and his weirdo running mate’s lies about the Haitians eating people’s pets, Trump is still leading Kamala by 6 points (51-45%), down slightly from his 8 point margin in 2020. Even 29% of Republicans admit Trump was lying but, overall, nearly one in 4 voters believe the lies about the Haitians.
Still, on Wednesday, it was interesting— and if not satisfying— to read a column by Bill Adair, the founder of PolitiFact, What I Didn’t Understand About Political Lying. “For American politicians,” he wrote, “this is a golden age of lying. Social media allows them to spread mendacity with speed and efficiency, while supporters amplify any falsehood that serves their cause. When I launched PolitiFact in 2007, I thought we were going to raise the cost of lying. I didn’t expect to change people’s votes just by calling out candidates, but I was hopeful that our journalism would at least nudge them to be more truthful. I was wrong. More than 15 years of fact-checking has done little or nothing to stem the flow of lies. I underestimated the strength of the partisan media on both sides, particularly conservative outlets, which relentlessly smeared our work. (A typical insult: ‘The fact-checkers are basically just a P.R. arm of the Democrats at this point.’) PolitiFact and other media organizations published thousands of checks, but as time went on, Republican representatives and voters alike ignored our journalism more and more, or dismissed it.”
“Lying is ubiquitous, yet politicians are rarely asked why they do it,” so Adair decided to ask them and that’s what his column is about. And certainly since Trump has come to the fore, politicians, who as a class, have always played to their base, are now encouraged to do little more in this Trumpian age of uber-polarization. “Now that many politicians speak primarily to their supporters, lying has become both less dangerous and more rewarding... [A]ppeals to ‘reality’ have lost their potency. Several people I interviewed described how partisan media, especially on the right, has fostered lying by degrading our shared sense of what’s real… Tim Miller, a former Republican operative who left the party in 2020, pointed out that gerrymandering, particularly in red states, has made it so ‘most of the voters in your district are getting their information from Fox, conservative talk radio… and so you just have this whole bubble of protection around your lies in a way that wouldn’t have been true before, 15 years ago.’”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar on authoritarians wrote that Trump backing out of the 60 Minutes interview he had agreed to because he couldn’t get a guarantee he wouldn’t be fact-checked, “reminds us that the ‘strongman’ is nothing without his fortress of lies. Falsehoods about the leader’s competence, power, and efficiency prop up personality cults, and are integral to his identity as the only man who can lead the nation to greatness. In an extreme case, one Big Lie— for example, that you are the winner of a presidential election— may become essential for a leader’s legitimacy. Then that leader might even make recourse to violence to make reality fit his fabrications, as Trump did with the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection. Who would Trump be if he admitted he lost the 2020 election? By democratic standards, he would be just another president who failed to convince the electorate that he was the best choice given his record. But Trump is an authoritarian: defeat is associated with weakness, and leaves him vulnerable to prosecution.”
So Trump and his numerous high-level co-conspirators applied themselves assiduously to what would become one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in history: convincing tens of millions of Americans that he and not Joe Biden had won the election. He did this while operating in an open society with a pluralistic media environment, which makes this an unprecedented feat of indoctrination.
Of course, Trump could never have succeeded without his most influential partner, Fox "News." I remain haunted by the revelation that emerged during the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox that another path for our country, away from institutionalized lying by the GOP, was momentarily possible.
A memo that formed part of the lawsuit's documentation showed that Rupert Murdoch floated the idea that Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and other top hosts trusted by the Fox audience should appear together on television in Nov. 2020 and state clearly that Biden had won the election. Murdoch wrote that presenting a united front "would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election [was] stolen."
Instead, Murdoch & Company went in the opposite direction to preserve audience size and profit margins. That decision had calamitous consequences, legitimating the lie that gave rise to the "Stop the Steal" movement that provided momentum and emotional heat for the insurrection. That failed coup further radicalized the GOP, and involved it in a massive criminal coverup of the attempt to overturn the election and prevent Biden from taking office that goes on to this day.
This situation has transformed the GOP into an autocratic entity dependent on institutionalized lying, so that maintaining party falsehoods about elections, immigration, crime, and other topics becomes a political duty and a test of loyalty for political elites and their media allies. Transgressors of the party line must be publicly disciplined or expelled, and anyone who exposes the truth, informs the public about the leader's and the party's falsehoods, or reveals the mechanisms of the deception, must be intimidated with threats or lawsuits.
The reliance on lying grows as the party is emptied of any fact-based content, and the leader cult balloons further. This has been the case with Trump’s campaign, which is better understood as a disinformation and radicalization machine. This is why he and his associates view fact-checking as an act of aggression.
Authoritarian leaders believe they are above the law, and they also believe that they are above the truth in that they reserve the right to determine what is truth and what is fiction. Just as they transform the rule of law into rule by the lawless, so do they make lies into party and state doctrine.
In authoritarian states, fact-checking the leader is impossible because it holds the leader accountable to norms of honesty and accuracy— norms that run counter to the operation of propaganda. In such situations, telling the truth can become a criminal act. The prisons of authoritarian states are full of people who threaten the leader because they would not give up the idea of fact-based reality and information based on the objective evaluation of data and evidence: scientists, academics, prosecutors, lawyers, judges, researchers, journalists, and more.
Trump has a similar disposition. His aggression towards journalists who want to fact-check him comes from a place of weakness, not strength. As Elias Canetti wrote in his classic study, Crowds and Power, the leader’s attempt to suppress criticism and any discussion of the truth of his speech shows us his insecurity. Even queries are eventually seen as an attack: “Whether or not he is actually in danger from enemies, he always feels himself menaced… all questioning is a forcible intrusion... like a knife cutting into the flesh of the victim.”
For the strongman, facts are formidable adversaries, and fact-checkers are enemies out to burst his bubble of illusions and lies. That is why the prospect of being fact-checked is enough to make an authoritarian politician such as Trump withdraw from an interview.
Also commenting on Trump’s career of lying— How Trump's Lies Undermine Democracy— Jonathan Bernstein noted that “Trump, of course, lies. A lot. Normal politicians (and Bill Clinton was the classic one, but they all do it) stretch and massage the truth but try to keep it anchored in some justifiable version of reality. Trump? Not so much. I used to say he lies like the proverbial used-car salesman (in the stereotype, they’re definitely men) in that he’ll say whatever he thinks it needed at the moment without any concern about the long run. Over time, he seems to have become even more unmoored from reality, perhaps because he’s become the Consumer-in-Chief of GOP-aligned media, especially the more nutty versions of it.”
Politicians and the people around them really think that mistakes they make could cost them at election time. And that’s what really matters, because what politicians believe affects how they act.
Notice that normal political spin keeps the incentives in the correct direction. It’s basically not a problem, at least not for this stuff, if the out-party exaggerates real problems while the in-party downplays them; if anything, it’s probably healthy. As long as it remains tied to some kind of reality.
But Trump-style lies? They break down healthy incentives for politicians, perhaps completely. And without that, it’s not clear how a big part of democracy can work at all.
just pathetic.