A recent, chilling article in The New Yorker quoted Ryan Kelley, the head of a Michigan-based militia known as the American Patriot Council, explaining why he and others flocked to the capitol building in Lansing, some heavily armed, to protest the efforts of that state’s governor to limit the spread of COVID-19.
“Chaos across the United States,” replied Kelley, a real-estate agent from Grand Rapids. “Antifa taking over areas of the country.”
Asked about the pandemic, which to date has killed around 7,000 Michigan residents with no end in sight, Kelley replied, “COVID is nonsense.” Kelley attributed all the fuss to “the Democratic Party continuing to do anything they can to get Trump out of office—including hiring people to riot and loot in our streets.”
Outrageous untruths have become the new national currency, and they will remain in circulation long after the November 3 election, no matter who wins.
This is what the past four years of Donald Trump have wrought: a willingness on the part of large swaths of the American public to believe anything, thanks to a President who lies about everything.
There is, as a matter of fact, no evidence of a cohesive, nationwide antifa movement, much less one orchestrated by Democrats. COVID-19 has needlessly cost more than 200,000 U.S. lives, or an average of more than two 9/11s each week since mid-March. But none of that matters to people like Kelley, because they share the President’s disregard for objective reality.
Outrageous untruths have become the new national currency, and they will remain in circulation long after the November 3 election, no matter who wins. The damage that Trump has done to international diplomacy, racial justice, immigrants’ rights, the courts, reproductive rights, and the environment is horrendous; but the damage he has done to the notion that truth matters is worse.
As The Nation’s Eric Alterman reminds us in his new book on presidential mendacity, Lying in State, all U.S. Presidents have at times been dishonest. But none has matched Trump’s record for near-constant fabrication, which according to The Washington Post has included some 20,000 false or misleading statements since his Inauguration in January 2017. During a fourteen-month period that included the events that led to his impeachment trial, he averaged nearly two dozen lies per day.
Some of the untrue things Trump says may count as political spin, such as his efforts to paint Democratic Party challenger Joe Biden as a tool of “wild-eyed Marxists” eager to destroy the American economy. Some may be chalked up to wishful thinking, as when he blithely insists that COVID-19 will suddenly “disappear.” But Trump is such an outstanding liar that he will even say things that are entirely and demonstrably untrue, including his claim that “thousands and thousands” of Arab Americans in New Jersey celebrated the attacks of 9/11.
Trump’s lying is not just pathological. It is also strategic. It serves the President’s interest to create an environment in which facts can be freely ignored.
Recently, Trump has taken to proclaiming that the upcoming election will be rife with fraud, as more voters opt to vote absentee rather than wait in lines during a pandemic. There is absolutely no factual basis for this incendiary assertion and abundant evidence that voting by mail can be successfully conducted, but that does not deter him from saying this, or keep his followers from believing it.
That is something very new, and very dangerous.
In the current campaign, Trump has portrayed his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, as both laughably ineffective (“In his best days he was weak”) and the single most powerful political force of the past five decades (“We have spent the last four years reversing the damage Joe Biden inflicted over the last forty-seven years”). He calls Biden “the most extreme leftwing candidate in history,” declaring that he is going to “abolish the police” and “abolish the suburbs.” Biden, he argues, is even “against God.”
After months of ignoring and contradicting the advice of his own health experts, allowing COVID-19 to cause greater calamity and loss of life here than in any other nation on Earth, Trump declared that “we are focusing on the science, the facts, and the data.” He made this claim during his nomination acceptance speech from the White House, before a live audience that mostly spurned social-distancing and mask-wearing guidelines.
Trump’s behavior defines the term “shameless liar.” But that’s not the scariest part. The scariest part is that he gets away with it, because of the willingness of others to bend reality to match his delusions.
In September 2019, Trump incorrectly asserted, in a tweet, that Alabama “will most likely be hit” by Hurricane Dorian. The National Weather Service in Birmingham quickly tried to set the record straight, tweeting “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian.”
Trump responded by insisting he was right, even displaying a map doctored with a Sharpie pen to make it look like Alabama was included in an early forecast. More troubling still, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued an unsigned statement falsely claiming that Dorian “could impact Alabama.” Issuing false weather reports, which can endanger lives, is actually illegal. For government scientists to be pulled into Trump’s charade is unconscionable.
This is not something we should shrug off. The death of truth is a clear precursor to the death of democracy. In her classic 1967 essay, “Truth and Politics,” philosopher Hannah Arendt warned of “a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth” as a necessary prong of a totalitarian dictatorship.
Here’s the only sure thing about the November 3 election: No matter what happens, Donald Trump will lie about it. If he wins, he’ll exaggerate the margin; if he loses, he may try to start a civil war. He’ll call it a fake election, and his followers will believe him.
Between now and then, Trump will do everything he can to cheat his way to re-election, from weaponizing the U.S. Postal Service to bollixing up mail-in ballots to encouraging his supporters to commit a felony by attempting to vote twice. He has refused to promise to abide by the election results if he loses.
After the election, as before, roughly four in ten Americans will consider Donald Trump a good President, despite all evidence to the contrary. They will march into battle for him no matter how outrageously he lies about the reasons for doing so. (The one bright spot is that the U.S. military, made up of people he considers “losers” and “suckers,” is unlikely to have his back.)
The issue is not whether truth can be rescued. It can be. But it may still remain a dead concept in some people’s minds. The damage created by the Trump presidency is deep, and it will be long-lasting. The November election will not bring truth back to life. But the election can prescribe consequences for its killers, or let them off the hook. The jury is about to convene.
Justice Ginsburg's Successor
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s untimely death presents a do-or-die moment for American democracy.
If our democracy is going to survive, Trump and the Republicans must not be allowed to pick her successor to the U.S. Supreme Court—unless they win the next election.
The GOP’s pronouncements in 2016, when the Senate refused to even hold a hearing on President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, were crystal clear. Back then, Senator Mitch McConnell and the Republicans said the 237 days between Garland’s nomination and the election that brought Trump to power was not long enough. Back then, they said the American people must get “to weigh in on whom they trust to nominate” to the court.
Now they are saying that the forty-six days between Ginsburg’s death and the November 3 election is not too short a time to move forward with a new pick. They want to be able to fill Ginsburg’s seat with her ideological opposite no matter who wins.
In 2016, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, told the Senate Judiciary Committee: “I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican President in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said, ‘Let’s let the next President, whoever it might be, make that nomination.’ ”
Now Graham, who became the committee’s chair in 2019, says he will support Trump “in any effort to move forward regarding the recent vacancy created by the passing of Justice Ginsburg.”
The hypocrisy is beyond sickening. It is dangerous.
As former-President Obama wrote in his statement on Ginsburg’s passing, “A basic principle of the law—and of everyday fairness—is that we apply rules with consistency, and not based on what’s convenient or advantageous in the moment.” Among the issues at stake, he noted, were “whether or not our economy is fair, our society is just, women are treated equally, our planet survives, and our democracy endures.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a lifelong champion of the ideal of fairness. As a lawyer she argued six sex-discrimination cases before the Supreme Court, winning five of them. As a Supreme Court Justice, she wrote powerful dissents against court rulings that denied recourse to victims of gender-based pay disparity and opened the door to state voter-suppression efforts.
What Trump and the Republicans have in mind is the defilement of Ginsburg’s legacy. “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed,” she said in a statement dictated shortly before her death to her granddaughter.
This is a moment that will test our character as a nation because the right course of action is so clear. Mitch McConnell and the Republicans must not be allowed to apply a wholly contrary standard to what they swore by before.
They must be stopped. By any nonviolent means necessary.