Trump's Massive Mendacity: How Fox News and the Right Gutted the Truth for 'The Donald'

With Donald Trump’s ascension as the GOP’s presidential nominee, we’ve clearly entered a new stage, and as usual this election cycle, it’s happening much more rapidly and in ways that have caught media and political elites by surprise. But how we got here and what lies ahead share much more in common than most are willing to admit, most pointedly, the extent to which the media and the GOP have created the Trump candidacy—despite all their professions of dismay—by decades of devaluing objective reality. 

A classic book on this subject is Mark Hertsgaard’s On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency. In an early passage about the GOP’s role in the abandonment of reality, he wrote:

Leslie Janka, a deputy White House press secretary, who resigned in protest after the administration excluded the press from the Grenada invasion, went so far as to say, “The whole thing was PR. This was a PR outfit that became President and took over the country. And to the degree then which the Constitution forced them to do things like make a budget, run a foreign policy and all that, they sort of did. But their first, last and overarching activity was public relations.

As for the media’s role, Hertsgaard interviewed more than 150 journalists and news executives, most of whom “rejected the idea that Ronald Reagan had gotten a free ride from U.S. news organizations,” he noted, “But this self-absolution by members of the press was contradicted by none other than the Reagan men themselves…. ‘I think a lot of the Teflon came because the press was holding back,’ said [Reagan’s Director of Communications] David Gergen. ‘I don’t think they wanted to go after him that toughly.’”

The book presents wide-ranging evidence of precisely how this came about. A classic example was Reagan’s Star Wars missile defense program, which he claimed would render nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete,” an example of “politics as theater taken beyond the absurd…. Had Reagan bothered to ask he would have found that not one of his senior advisers shared his simpleminded faith that SDI would protect American people and cities from nuclear ruin. Reagan’s dream of a leakproof nuclear umbrella was a fantasy, and all the King’s men knew it.” Yet, to this very day, the media has never accurately reported how utterly impossible the Star Wars promise was. 

But that was three decades ago. In the years since—from the imaginary Whitewater scandal during the Clinton Administration to Iraq’s imaginary WMDs during Bush—the GOP and the media together have created the perfect environment for Trump, a man for whom “everything is negotiable” applies quite literally to the very notion of objective reality itself.

Some in the media understand that something is wrong. Last December, PolitiFact noted that, “In considering our annual Lie of the Year, we found our only real contenders were Trump’s — his various statements also led our Readers’ Poll. But it was hard to single one out from the others. So we have rolled them into one big trophy” and thus awarded is “2015 Lie of the Year” to “the campaign misstatements of Donald Trump.”

And Factcheck.org’s year-end roundup reached a similar conclusion, designating Trump “King of Whoppers,” as it explained:

It’s been a banner year for political whoppers — and for one teller of tall tales in particular: Donald Trump.

In the 12 years of FactCheck.org’s existence, we’ve never seen his match.

He stands out not only for the sheer number of his factually false claims, but also for his brazen refusals to admit error when proven wrong….

In past years, we’ve not singled out a single claim or a single person, and have left it to readers to judge which whoppers they consider most egregious.

But this year the evidence is overwhelming and, in our judgment, conclusive. So, for the first time, we confer the title “King of Whoppers.”

More recently,in late March, the Washington Post’s fact check editor, Glenn Kessler, collected all of Trumps “four Pinocchio” lies in one place, expressing a similar sentiment:

There’s never been a presidential candidate like Donald Trump — someone so cavalier about the facts and so unwilling to ever admit error, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. At last count, 67 percent (26 of 39) of our rulings of his statements turned out to be Four Pinocchios, our worst rating. By contrast, most politicians tend to earn Four Pinocchios 10 to 20 percent of the time. (Moreover, most of the remaining ratings for Trump are Three Pinocchios.)

As a reader service, here’s a running list of our Four Pinocchio rulings. Since Trump never takes anything back — and often repeats the same false claims — voters are likely to hear these time and again during the campaign season.

The problem with all this recognition of Trump’s mendacity is just how little difference it seems to make—and how clueless the press itself remains regarding what to do about it. They seem to understand little or nothing about how the situation came about over time, what they are doing wrong right now, or what they ought to be trying to achieve going forward.

Trying to knock down Trump’s lies one at a time is a fool’s errand. It’s like trying to cut the head off of the hydra; for every lie you chop down, two new ones take its place. You have to step back and grasp the full magnitude of his lying, how he kneads together a whole multitude of lies into a single narrative, one which he then quickly casts off the moment it becomes advantageous to abandon it in favor of something else—possibly even the exact opposite of what he had been arguing the moment before.

Perhaps the best way to understand him is simply as a salesman. There are no objective facts where he comes from, just selling points. And the only thing he’s really ever selling is himself.Whatever dream or desire you may have, he is the answer to what you want. As I argued back in December, he does not lie so much as bullshit, in the sense of H.G. Frankfurt’s book “On Bullshit”:

[B]ullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant.

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t lie, however. He’s simply indifferent to whether what he says is true or not. Which is why he lies so easily and excessively, even without concern if the lie has already been publicly debunked. The ideal bullshitter could pass a lie-detector test no matter what he said, which seems to capture Trump perfectly.It can help, of course, to recognize his lies. But it’s much more useful to recognize what he’s trying to accomplish with them—or with the sprinkling of truths he freely intermingles with them.First, he’s trying to free himself of any possible accountability to anyone else: If facts themselves are negotiable, no one can call him to account for lying; he is free to define reality in any way that suits him. Second, the ultimate purpose of freeing himself, and defining reality as he wishes, is to establish dominance over everyone else: He is interested in power, pure and simple.Some examples can help to clarify both of these goals.

When it comes to freeing himself of accountability, it’s useful to think of some of Trump’s common verbal tropes, such as “hearing” that Obama wants to confiscate guns, or to admit 200,000 Syrian refugees, or making vague claims about sourcing advice, praise or even resentful admiration from “experts” or “really smart people”—for example, falsely claiming that “Many of the great scholars say that anchor babies are not covered” by the 14th Amendment, or his widely reported, but nonexistent investigative teamhe sent to Hawaii to research Obama’s birth certificate. “I have people that have been studying it and they cannot believe what they’re finding,”Trump told Today Show‘s Meredith Vieiraon April 7, 2011. On April 25he told CNN’s Anderson Cooperthat “somebody” he refused to identify told him “it’s not there and it doesn’t exist.”Two days later, Obama released his long-form birth certificate, and we never heard of Trump’s “investigation” again. Why? Because it never existed. It was all bullshit, from top to bottom.But it was always phrased in a way to free Trump of ever having to prove anything.

The flip side of Trump’s imaginary experts and investigators is his habit of saying “nobody knows” about things that actually are well known — such as whether our nuclear arsenal works (it does), or who Syrian refugees are, perhaps even ISIS! (actually we do), or where Obama was before his public life, expanding on his trademarked birtherism. “He grew up and nobody knew him. You know? …. Nobody knows who he his until later in his life. It’s very strange,” Trump said. “The people that went to school with him, they never saw him, they don’t know who he is. It’s crazy.” Except, they do. From grade school through college. It’s Trump who is crazy—100 percent wrong about everything.

Similarly, Trump likes to say that various good or bad things “never happened before,” such ashis winning 66 of 67 counties in the Florida primary (Bush and Gore both swept the state in 2000), or having GDP growth under zero (which has happened 42 times since WWII). No doubt he has “experts” who research these things for him, too!

Trump’s entire existence is one of ceaseless exaggeration, which appears repeatedly in these sorts of statements, often overshadowed by other considerations—the fact checks above focus on the 14^th Amendment, or the nuclear arsenal, rather than on Trump’s imaginary “great scholars” or who Trump was talking about when he said, “They don’t know if it works.”Cogent—if mistaken—arguments could be made on any of these subjects, based on genuine, specifically cited expert testimony, for example, or specific individuals who could credibly contradict Obama’s life story, or a list of past county-level election results.But Trump is not even remotely interested in making such arguments.He holds them in contempt. However, he is interested in having people take him seriously, because if they all laugh, he can never gain power—which is why we ought to be paying attention to his routine reliance on wild overgeneralizations and hyperbolic, anonymously sourced claims and accusations that go along with them. They represent the soft underbelly of all his extravagant lying.Just imagine an 8-year-old saying these same sorts of things. You’d immediately spot him as a bullshitter, regardless the specifics he was talking about.