And it’s true we are immune
When fact is fiction and TV reality
And today the millions cry
We eat and drink while tomorrow they die
— U2, “Sunday, Bloody Sunday”
That we are in an era of double-speak — Orwell’s phrase from his novel 1984 — is not exactly a surprise. American politicians going back to at least Eisenhower have been pretty good at the presidential lie.
- Johnson used the trumped up Gulf of Tonkin incident to widen the war in Vietnam.
- Nixon told the world that he was not a crook, even as his administration and re-election campaign were trying to rig an election that he was going to win.
- Reagan shipped arms to Iran in violation of an embargo, trading the arms for American hostages even as he continued to tell the American public that the United States did not negotiate with terrorists or terrorist regimes.
- Clinton did not have sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky or inhale.
- And George W. Bush pushed the lie that there were WMDs in Iraq so that he could invade.
In some ways, the presidential lie is an American tradition — in fact, Eric Alterman wrote an entire book about it.
None of these presidents has been quite so brazen as the 45th president has been during his first six days in office. Donald Trump has taken the presidential lie to new heights. He lies about easily verifiable facts, about the smallest and most inconsequential things. And then he — and his press team — lashes out at the media for uncovering the lies.
The presidential lie has always been dangerous to our democracy, and often it has had deadly results — millions of dead in Vietnam, Iraq, El Salvador and elsewhere, for instance.
But something about the brazenness of Trump’s lies stands out. The meme that has gone around — that Washington couldn’t tell a lie, Nixon couldn’t tell the truth and Trump couldn’t tell the difference — doesn’t really get to it. I think Trump does know the difference; he just doesn’t care. And what makes it so damaging, and potentially more damaging than what we are used to, is the sheer volume of mistruths being tossed around, the easiness with which he posits his own reality, with which he recasts the world in his distorted image. And, perhaps more chilling, it is the fact that his supporters are so willing to take him at his word.
We are entering a moment in which the sheer volume of lies is creating a new alt-truth by overwhelming those of us whose job it is to keep an eye on what politicians are doing, and by overwhelming the ability of average people to process the information that is being tossed at them. Most people do not have the time to do the hard work of verifying what they hear and read, especially if they are being subjected to information overload. Take the press out of the equation — by overloading the fourth estate AND attacking it, fostering a mistrust of the only people in our society with the time and skills to dig into the muck — and the lies get to stand.
Reality, then, becomes what the politicians, the Trump administration, say it is. We were able to battle back during the Bush era and — while I hope we can do the same today, and I plan to continue to do my part as journalist, writer, general pain in the ass to push back — I fear we are close to the tipping point.
Send me an e-mail.
Hank Kalet 