The Death of Truth in the Trump Era

The ongoing criminal trial of Donald Trump (the first one; others are to follow) continues to expose the difference between what he and his followers believe and anything related to evidence, truth, or facts. Trump lies. Blatantly, shamelessly, openly, and frequently. He lies so often that quite literally nothing he says can be trusted as truthful or factual. It’s not simply opponents who are aware of his lies. His followers must know too, because his lies are so glaringly obvious and are debunked in all but the extremist, pro-Putin, rightwing media (Fox Newz and Breitbart at the top of that list).

Remember the wall he promised Mexico would pay for? They laughed at him and paid nothing. Last fall he lied and said at a rally he only promised Mexico would pay for “a piece” of that wall rather than the 100% he is documented claiming many times previously. He now tells his cultist followers his administration built nearly 500 miles of new border wall, but in fact only built “52 miles of new primary wall systems and 33 miles of new secondary wall systems where there were none before.” It cost Americans $16 billion.

Remember his promise to release his tax returns when elected? In office he refused. He lied when he said he was being audited by the IRS which prevented the release. He lied about closing an account in a Chinese bank. Remember when he pledged to donate his $400,000 presidential salary back to the U.S. government because he was so rich he didn’t need it? He lied and kept it. He paid a mere $750 in taxes in 2015 and ’16, claiming millions of dollars of losses in his companies. Trump’s COVID response was a tissue of lies and misinformation that cost almost 500,000 Americans their lives. But his supporters are claiming more lives have been lost to COVID under Biden: another lie.

The list of Trump’s broken promises is depressingly long. But even outside his campaign lies, he lies about so many other things. He promised he would testify in his criminal fraud case. Last week he lied and said the gag order placed on him prevented him from testifying. That gag order only bars him from “publicly commenting on witnesses, jurors, prosecutors, and other court staff involved in the case.” Nothing prevents him from testifying before the jury, as the judge has made clear.

And then there is his endless spume of lies about the 2020 election, about how it was rigged, about how he really won it. In March, Trump claimed “Eighty-two percent of the country understands that it was a rigged election… A poll came out: 82%. But they go after the people — they don’t go after the people that rig the election, they go after the people (that are) looking.” But that is just another lie: no such poll ever existed. His followers know that but they don’t care.

Trump’s followers filed 62 lawsuits contesting the 2020 election processes and results. As Wikipedia notes. “Nearly all the suits were dismissed or dropped due to lack of evidence or lack of standing, including 30 lawsuits that were dismissed by the judge after a hearing on the merits. Among the judges who dismissed the lawsuits were some appointed by Trump himself. Judges, lawyers, and other observers described the suits as “frivolous” and “without merit.” Yet Trump continues to lie about the election at every campaign stop. On the other hand, Trump’s attempted interference in the results spawned two criminal cases against him and his followers:, The State of Georgia v. Donald J. Trump, et al. (a racketeering case against Trump and 18 other defendants), and United States v. Donald J. Trump (an election obstruction case in the District of Columbia.) His followers know and don’t care if he gets convicted. Truth is irrelevant to them.

And even as he continues to spread his “Big Lie,” Trump has made it clear that he won’t accept any result if he loses the 2024 election, The Guardian noted:

Americans should be prepared for a rocky election aftermath, should Trump lose in November to Biden. After the Democrat defeated him in 2020, Trump spent weeks attempting various plots to prevent Biden from taking power, culminating in the attack on the Capitol on January 6.

Trump lies so often that the media have become exhausted trying to document them all. The New York Times published an extensive list that covered hundreds, but only to Nov. 2017. The Toronto Star tallied 5,276 false claims merely from January 2017 to June 2019.  The Washington Post did a tally of more than 30,000 of his “false or misleading statements” while president: an average of 21 per day. He was a firehose of lies, misinformation, and disinformation.

While it’s somewhat facile to state that “all politicians lie,” the lying of Donald Trump and his followers is a class unto itself, well about the usual bland self-interest of politicians. It finds itself deeply settled in the sort of cult territory that Jim Jones and his followers traversed. Trump normalized lying. not just exaggeration or hyperbole: barefaced lies. And his followers, as well as a cabal of extremist media, accepted — and continue to accept — it, knowing full well that he is lying.

Carole McGranahan wrote in the American Ethnologist journal in 2017 that “Donald Trump is different” from other politicians and “the most accomplished and effective liar” to have ever participated in American politics. She added that “the frequency, degree, and impact of lying in politics are now unprecedented.” as a result of Trump.

Similarly, Michiko Kakutani wrote in her book, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump, “Trump… lies so prolifically and with such velocity… he routinely assails the press, the justice system, the intelligence agencies, the electoral system, and the civil servants who make our government tick… [T]he more clownish aspects of Trump the personality should not blind us to the monumentally serious consequences of his assault on truth and the rule of law, and the vulnerabilities he has exposed in our institutions and digital communications.”

Hannah Arendt wrote in her groundbreaking 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism,

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

In an article on OpenCulture, Kakutani added, “Why the constant, often blatant lying? For one thing, it function[s] as a means of fully dominating subordinates, who would have to cast aside all their integrity to repeat outrageous falsehoods and would then be bound to the leader by shame and complicity… Arendt’s analysis of propaganda and the function of lies seems particularly relevant at this moment. The kinds of blatant lies she wrote of might become so commonplace as to become banal. We might begin to think they are an irrelevant sideshow.”

In 2018, during Trump’s presidency, the Rand Corporation (described by Mediabiasfactcheck as “centrist…minimal bias and use very few loaded words…The reporting is factual…) produced a report titled Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life (video here). In it, the authors noted a “blurring of the line between opinion and fact” that led to the rise of “opinion and personal experience over fact.” The threat from truth decay was “the erosion of civil discourse, political paralysis, alienation and disengagement of individuals from political and civic institutions, and uncertainty about U.S. policy.” All of which are hallmarks of Trump’s presidency.*

Arendt also wrote,

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

And that certainly describes Trump’s followers. But more than merely no longer seeing the distinctions between fact and his lies, they simply don’t care. And that’s why they are a cult, not merely followers. He is their messiah and they are willing to accept his lies knowing that’s what they are. They are well aware of this threat to democracy, his threat to their freedoms, his threat to their livelihood. They don’t care. Trump claims only he is the “saviour” of democracy and “predicted an end to US democracy if he doesn’t win the race.” His followers know Trump is the real threat, they know he will dismantle the institutions and the government. They don’t care. The Guardian noted:

The “threat to democracy” retort was Trump’s latest attempt at rebranding the truth, a practiced part of his effort to create an alternate reality for his disciples. In that mirror world, Trump is both the victim and the strongman, the only person who can drive out an underworld of deep-staters who control the country and have unjustly targeted him because he threatens their supposed dominance. The wealthy businessman casts himself as an everyman, the guy willing to say what others are thinking, no matter how uncouth.

Arendt noted that “both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.” Just as the twice-impeached Trump did in his earlier campaign and does now. His record of chaotic, toxic, and shambolic governance in the White House is well documented in more than 150 books, many written by Trump’s former staff or appointees. His followers know his term was a debacle; they don’t care..**

In 2017, Sally Yates, former attorney general of the USA, wrote in a piece in USA Today:

… there is something else that separates us from an autocracy, and that’s truth. There is such a thing as objective truth. We can debate policies and issues, and we should. But those debates must be based on common facts rather than raw appeals to emotion and fear through polarizing rhetoric and fabrications.
Not only is there such a thing as objective truth, failing to tell the truth matters. We can’t control whether our public servants lie to us. But we can control whether we hold them accountable for those lies or whether, in either a state of exhaustion or to protect our own political objectives, we look the other way and normalize an indifference to truth.***

Objective truth, already suffering under endless siege by Trump and his cabal of extremist minions, will be the first victim as he takes the USA to a totalitarian regime, should uninformed and credulous voters grant him another term in the White House. If the USA falls to fascism — as is likely under Trump — many of the other Western democracies will also soon fall (Canada included) if the far-right infection spreads. Putin’s agenda to destroy the West will have been accomplished. And that’s who really will benefit from a Trump victory.

Notes:

* In Canada, we see a similar cult forming around the equally dissembling and gaslighting Pierre PoiLIEvre who mimics Trump in his language, gestures, insults, and accusations. PoiLIEvre’s followers also recognize his lies but simply don’t care because they agree with their existing, anti-democratic worldview. They know PoiLIEvre is a proto-fascist, a threat to our democracy, and will become the supreme gatekeeper of morals, truth, justice, and law he blames others for being. He promises freedom: they know he will bring repression. His followers don’t care. They want an authoritarian government. They want totalitarianism. They believe, wrongly of course, that under fascist rule they will dominate their enemies, and will be able to exact revenge on opponents for all the imagined hurts and insults they have suffered from liberals, immigrants, women, and environmentalists.

** Trump was impeached twice — a historical record for any US president — for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress and for being engaged in high Crimes and Misdemeanors by inciting violence against the Government of the United States (the Jan. 6 attempted insurrection he encouraged). More than 1,200 people involved in the attack on the US capital have been convicted and sentenced, but Trump has called them patriots and promised to pardon them if elected. He demanded the police protecting the Capital be charged instead. As NPR noted, “Experts on extremism and authoritarian politics say Trump pardons could encourage political violence… A lack of consequences emboldens criminals.”

*** Noted in the Hill Times: “Yates writes in USA Today about the importance of “objective truth,” adding that it is up to the American people to hold political leaders accountable when they spread disinformation… Trump also fired Yates, then-acting attorney general, after she refused to defend his first travel ban, saying that she had “betrayed” the government”  for speaking out against his lies.

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