The Lies They Tell
Trump wasn't the first liar and he won't be the last. But the health of democracy remains in danger as long as Fox News and GOP leaders reject the truth and the public buys it.
Politicians lie, right? Everyone knows that. That’s the normalizing attitude that made it possible for Donald Trump to lie and lie, over and over, more than 30,000 times, without consequence.
He was far from the first. George W. Bush launched a war in Iraq based on the lie that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction. Over 4,500 American soldiers and an estimated 288,000 Iraqi civilians and combatants lost their lives there.
Ronald Reagan lied that it was possible to increase military spending, cut taxes and magically balance the budget. Instead, the national debt nearly tripled during his eight years.
For decades, following Reagan’s lead, countless Republicans repeated the lie that by cutting taxes on the rich the economic benefits would trickle down to everyone else by increasing economic output and employment. That same lie has convinced numerous Republican-led states to cut or eliminate income taxes. Instead, the rich have gotten (much) richer, the poor poorer, states have had to dramatically cut public services and the country has careened toward oligarchy.
It’s hard to overstate the danger of a provable lie. It’s not just that it’s employed to convince people to go along with it. Repeated often enough, people lose the capacity to recognize the lie or, worse, care if it is a lie.
You’ve probably seen the quote from Third Reich propagandist Joseph Goebbels: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” We’ve seen the truth of that on a shocking scale in America since Trump lost the 2020 election and tens of millions of Americans—fueled by their hero’s anger, marinating in feelings of grievance, priding themselves on their skepticism of what is knowable—have refused to believe that Joe Biden was legitimately elected president.
As Timothy Snyder wisely noted in his short book, On Tyranny, “You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.” And, “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.” And, “Post-truth is pre-fascism.” (This chapter’s title: “Believe in truth.”)
You might recall that I considered skipping over the propagandists of Fox lying about the real outcome of the election because they knew that their viewers did not want to hear the truth—and telling them the truth would hurt ratings and cause Fox stock prices to go down. The cynicism and hostility to a most basic tenet of journalism—to tell the truth, not just what pleases your audience—should be enough to strip away “news” from this entertainment operation’s moniker forever.
Beyond that, the legal ramifications have been heightened. The smoking gun evidence in texts and emails that Fox employees knew Rudy Guiliani and Sydney Powell were peddling lies—including calling them “mind blowingly nuts” and “ludicrous”—demonstrates a reckless disregard of the truth.
It’s why many legal experts now believe that Dominion Voting Systems will succeed in its $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit. “I think that Dominion both will and should prevail,” said Laurence Tribe, former Harvard law professor.
But two other stories made this topic unavoidable. This week The Washington Post reported that the former Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich lied about the findings of an investigation that he funded to determine the truth of election fraud.
In March last year, after 10,000 hours of staff effort, his office’s investigators concluded that assertions of fraud and malfeasance were not true. Yet the next month Brnovich released an “interim report” claiming that they had discovered “serious vulnerabilities” and then burying the full summary.
Why? Well, one answer: Brnovich was running for US Senate and far be it from him to risk the wrath of Arizona election deniers by telling them the truth. We only know about this now because the new AG, Kris Mayes, released relevant documents to the Post.
This news came in the wake of the previous week when I was invited to the filming of an event called “Red & Blue” that was broadcast on Presidents’ Day by CBS News and included a focus group comprised of about a dozen Arizona election deniers. Moderated by political consultant Frank Luntz, the panel of experts included CBS News White House correspondent Major Garrett and election specialist David Becker—co-authors of the recent book titled The Big Truth—along with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Bill Gates, a top election official in Arizona’s Maricopa County.
I was told that the deniers almost left when they saw who was included on the panel, but by the end this group was asking the authors to sign copies of their book. Sounds good, a sign of civility, except in between was a nearly two-hour rant by these citizens that Donald Trump and Kari Lake were the rightful winners of their elections and there was nothing that the experts could say that would convince them that the actual results could be trusted.
Over and over, they rejected the truth that there was no evidence of election fraud, that there was no ballot harvesting, that the ballot box wasn’t stuffed by unregistered voters, that the election officials had performed their jobs honestly, that the votes were counted fairly. How could Biden have won if he never left his basement? How could Kari Lake have lost since she was so popular?
Nothing they heard was going to convince them to give up their proud skepticism or their tightly held sense of grievance. “I was a-political, I hated the stuff,” insisted one man. “And then, I started paying attention a couple of cycles ago and now: I’ve gone down the rabbit hole and it scares me.”
One of the ways that “truth dies,” Timothy Snyder writes, is “open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts…Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld.”
The creation and expansion of a fictional counterworld does not rest solely on the shoulders of Donald J. Trump. While he has accelerated the downward spiral, he has many predecessors (and a growing number of possible successors) who understood the power of a lie to get power, keep power—and enrich themselves.
But we have reached a point where the lies have become so powerful that millions of our fellow Americans are willing to cheer them on with passionate intensity, no matter if (or maybe even because) democracy’s survival hangs by a thread and their fervor could be all that’s needed to end the project that has made America America. Time will tell if indictments for Trump can help turn this dangerous tide.
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I needed this post today as my brain has been on the verge of exploding all week. From when I was very young, my Dad, a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge in WW II, 1 of the greatest generation who rarely talked about his service in WW II. He was humble and as he said, there was no question that he would take a hiatus from college and enlist. He had to help his generation make the world sage for Democracy. And you have included the quote that my Dad would tell me when he did talk about the war.], the statement from Third Reich propagandist Joseph Goebbels: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
As you note, we’ve seen the truth of that on a shocking scale in America since Trump lost the 2020 election and tens of millions of Americans—fueled by their hero’s anger, marinating in feelings of grievance, priding themselves on their skepticism of what is knowable—have refused to believe that Joe Biden was legitimately elected president.
45 and the woman who lost in AZ (I can't use their names because I get headaches and I get filled with rage ) are destroying our Democracy with their lies, their election denialism, their constant actions to bring the cult along with them and destroy faith in America's election system. Then, of course, I would be remiss if I didn't also mention that state tv (you know the channel) is not a news channel. It is a propaganda machine, established to perpetuate the lies of 45 and the AZ loser woman and to spread election denialism. Yes, state tv is also trying to destroy our Democracy.
How do we undo the damage that the liars have done, for the purpose of stealing their elections and maintaining their hold on power? I go back to the Goebbels quote that my Dad often mentioned to me. It seems that so many have already assumed those lies to be the truth because they have herd those lies so often. Let's follow the instructions and guidance that witnesses are given in court, to paraphrase: tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The truth will set us free. The truth will restore our Democracy. Telling the truth is the correct thing to do; and we must do it. And, in the words of Hillel: if not now, when. Let it be NOW. Happy weekend, everyone.
The psychology of naked
deception coupled with a lack of shame is deeply troubling. When repeated in the closed circuits of conspiratorial media, lies develop the patina of truth. They become revered as dogma and all reasonable discourse is rendered impossible. The solution in psychotherapy is systematic deprogramming, but extending those principles to the culture at large feels Sisyphean. I don’t know what the antidote is for this strangling political climate.