by David Frum
As the Defense Department’s spokesman I espoused the thesis that the indisputable requisite of a government information program was that it be truthful. But I also stated that on occasions (such as the Cuban missile crisis) when the nation’s security was at stake, the Government had the right, indeed the duty, to lie if necessary to mislead an enemy and protect the people it represented.27
Whatever you may think of Sylvester’s position, it has nothing in common with Donald Trump’s. Trump’s lies were never deployed for national security purposes—or often for any public purpose at all. They were deployed to soothe his ego and protect him from his own incessant wrongdoing.
A CNN analysis released on June 29, 2017, counted 770 presidential tweets since Inauguration Day. Twenty-seven tweets mentioned veterans, his third most common subject. The runner-up subject, “jobs,” was mentioned sixty-seven times. Far in first place: attacks on the press, eighty-five tweets.28 Negative media coverage became a powerful resource for Trump—in fact, his only resource, as actual accomplishments eluded him. By inflaming antipress feeling, Trump could wall his supporters within an alternative information system controlled by him.
Evidence of the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia could not be refuted or suppressed. But Trump’s supporters could be manipulated into disregarding it. As of July 2017, only 9 percent of Republicans accepted the unanimous assessment of US intelligence agencies—including Trump’s own appointees—that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump.29 One-third of Republicans refused to believe the uncontested fact, acknowledged (if condoned) by Trump himself, that Donald Trump Jr. had met with Russian agents to seek information harmful to Hillary Clinton.30
Supporters could be fed “alternative facts” and extenuating excuses. Did Trump falsely imply that he had “tapes” of his conversations with FBI director James Comey? “That was a smart way to make sure [Comey] stayed honest in those hearings,” gushed Fox & Friends’ cohost Ainsley Earhardt.31 Had Trump improperly demanded that the FBI director pledge personal loyalty to him? “If you’re a CEO or a leader, that’s what you want your team to be, a bunch of people who are loyal to the team,” explained Fox & Friends’ lead host, Steve Doocy.32 As noted in chapter 2, Trump falsely claimed that the MSNBC morning host Mika Brzezinski had paid court to him at Mar-a-Lago bleeding from a face-lift. Sean Hannity justified Trump’s harshly personal untruth. “The destroy-Trump media—they’re a bunch of crybaby whiners. They can’t handle return fire. Oh, it only goes in one direction in their world.”33
Trump and his supporters hoped to drive independent media out of business altogether. As early as November 2016, Sean Hannity demanded on Twitter that the Trump administration refuse to engage any independent media organizations. “If I were @realDonaldTrump NO ACCESS!”34 Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich exceeded Hannity, urging President Trump to bar CNN and other independent media organizations from entering the White House briefing room.35 Press Secretary Sean Spicer would experiment in February 2017 with Hannity’s and Gingrich’s advice, by punitively barring the New York Times, CNN, and the BBC from a briefing open to their competitors.36
Trump’s attacks on the media ventured beyond criticism to outright incitement of violence. His campaign rallies triggered furious audience outbursts at members of the media—and the strategic mobilization of antimedia rage defined the Trump presidency as well. “I really think they don’t like our country. I really believe that,” Trump said of journalists at an August 22, 2017, rally in Phoenix, Arizona.37 His supporters responded exactly as Trump hoped and anticipated they would. Mark Landler and Maggie Haberman reported for the New York Times:
Pointing repeatedly to the cameras in the middle of a cavernous convention center, Mr. Trump whipped the crowd into fevered chants of “CNN Sucks.” Members of the audience shouted epithets at reporters, some demanding that the news media stop tormenting the president with questions about his ties to Russia.38
Verbal violence can turn real. When it did so, Trump supporters loudly cheered. In the final hours of the May 26, 2017, special election for Montana’s single congressional seat, the Republican candidate, Greg Gianforte, was asked a question he did not like by a reporter, Ben Jacobs of the Guardian. Gianforte, a large man, body-slammed Jacobs and then punched him. Gianforte’s campaign spokesperson immediately issued a statement blaming Jacobs for initiating the confrontation. Within hours, audio and videotape of the encounter—including a police recording of the ambulance call—contradicted that statement.39 Gianforte was charged with assault. Three Montana newspapers that had endorsed him withdrew their support. And then . . .
Then the conservative world rallied to condone Gianforte’s entirely unprovoked violence. A local Fox news team had witnessed the attack and provided crucial corroboration of Jacobs’s version of events. Its members were never invited onto Fox’s national programs to tell their story. Instead, a Fox panel cheered Gianforte and jeered Jacobs. From Fox News’ Specialists program, May 25, 2017:
Guest 1: What happened there in Montana, apparently the snowflake reporter invaded Gianforte’s safe space. We have a saying up there, “You mess around, you mess around, you might not be around.”
Guest 2: This guy was not a reporter looking for a fair story. He was obviously doing a takedown on him. And this guy got his back up—he got a little bit of Montana justice.40
That same day, the radio host Rush Limbaugh added his own endorsement of “Montana justice.” (The reference to Limbaugh’s laughing is from the Limbaugh program’s own transcript of the monologue.)
Ladies and gentlemen, I must do something. I must join the chorus of people condemning what happened out there. This manly, obviously studly Republican candidate in Montana took the occasion to beat up a pajama-clad journalist, a Pajama Boy journalist out there.
The story is he grabbed his neck and threw the guy to the ground because the journalist was being insolent and disrespectful and whiny and moany and accusatory. And the manly, studly Republican simply didn’t realize that on the big stage you can’t do this kind of stuff and kicked the guy’s ass to the ground. This cannot be accepted. This must be condemned. I wonder how many people in Montana are now gonna vote for the guy, though? [Laughing]41
Limbaugh was not wrong that many conservatives liked Gianforte better after the assault than they did before. In the twenty-four hours after the attack, on the actual election day in Montana, Gianforte received $116,000 in donations—more than his total in the previous week. The haul was even more startling since election-day donations are by definition useless to influence the outcome of the vote.42 The proceeds of Gianforte’s attack were so lucrative that two days later the National Republican Campaign Committee used Gianforte’s name and signature in a mass-mailing to fund-raise for the Republican candidate in a special election in Georgia’s Sixth District. “I know with your support, [name], we can defeat Pelosi and the liberals in Georgia and the remaining special election. Can I count on you to continue your support before the last crucial FEC deadline before Georgia and the other special elections?”43
Gianforte’s violence against a member of the press had become a monetizable asset.
The term “fake news” entered common speech to describe a very real phenomenon: manufactured disinformation then disseminated by click-maximizing hucksters, racist trolls, and foreign intelligence agencies to susceptible users of social media. As discussed in chapter 3, the most trafficked of these stories was the claim that the pope had endorsed Donald Trump. Prominent others: that Hillary Clinton was suffering from Parkinson’s disease; that her aides were running a pedophile sex ring out of a pizzeria in northwest Washington, DC; that she was somehow responsible for the murder of a Democratic staffer victimized by an attempted robbery.
This kind of fake news was often concocted and then propagated with help from Russia’s huge social media disinformation infrastructure. Adrian Chen offered a close-up view of this infrastructure in the New York Times Magazine in June 2015,
well before anybody imagined how it could sway American politics:
One Russian newspaper put the number of employees at 400, with a budget of at least 20 million rubles (roughly $400,000) a month . . . creating content for every popular social network: LiveJournal, which remains popular in Russia; VKontakte, Russia’s homegrown version of Facebook; Facebook; Twitter; Instagram; and the comment sections of Russian news outlets. One employee estimated the operation filled 40 rooms.
Chen described the artistry behind the highest-priority trolling:
While other workers churned out blandly pro-Kremlin comments, [this] department created appealing online characters who were supposed to stand out from the horde. [Chen’s source] posed as three of these creations, running a blog for each one on LiveJournal. One alter ego was a fortuneteller named Cantadora. The spirit world offered Cantadora insight into relationships, weight loss, feng shui—and, occasionally, geopolitics. Energies she discerned in the universe invariably showed that its arc bent toward Russia. She foretold glory for Vladimir Putin, defeat for Barack Obama and Petro Poroshenko. The point was to weave propaganda seamlessly into what appeared to be the nonpolitical musings of an everyday person.44
This industrial disinformation project would exert its power for Donald Trump in 2016. Massimo Calabresi reported for Time on how it was done:
In one case last year, senior intelligence officials tell TIME, a Russian soldier based in Ukraine successfully infiltrated a U.S. social media group by pretending to be a 42-year-old American housewife and weighing in on political debates with specially tailored messages. In another case, officials say, Russia created a fake Facebook account to spread stories on political issues like refugee resettlement to targeted reporters they believed were susceptible to influence. . . .
Moscow’s agents bought ads on Facebook to target specific populations with propaganda. “They buy the ads, where it says sponsored by—they do that just as much as anybody else does,” says the senior intelligence official.45
Facebook has since confirmed that Russian customers did indeed purchase at least $100,000 of advertising on its site, which was seen by at least ten million people in carefully targeted states and districts. Altogether, Russian messages reached 126 million Facebook users.
The 2016 presidential campaign introduced Americans to fake news as a tool of power. A term that had originated to describe intentional lying was redefined by Trump to dismiss honest reporting.
Trump deployed the term as a weapon against everything from errors made in good faith and promptly corrected (like a mistaken report that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office)46 to the most meticulously documented truths. Trump’s aide Sebastian Gorka called it “fake news” to describe the Muslim travel ban as a travel ban even after President Trump himself had resumed using the term.47 Sean Hannity blamed CNN for staging a “fake news” incident even as he acknowledged that the incident was a hoax and CNN was blameless.48 Increasingly, Trump’s supporters use “fake news” as an epithet to mean any reporting not wholly subservient to pro-Trump messaging.
Trump’s press spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on June 27, 2017, “I think it’s the constant barrage of fake news that is directed at this president, probably, that has garnered a lot of his frustration.” In the very next sentence she promoted the latest release by a notorious producer of fraudulently edited polemical videos: “There’s a video circulating now—whether it’s accurate or not, I don’t know—but I would encourage everyone in this room and, frankly, everybody across the country to take a look at it.”49 To shift in under a minute from denouncing as “fake” news that is true, and then to promoting as true “news” that is fake—well, there is the Trump White House, captured and revealed.
Russian-originated fake news is not a uniquely American problem. Centrist leaders across the continent of Europe have been beset by it. One striking example was deployed in the 2017 French presidential election. The Moscow-disliked candidate Emmanuel Macron had taken part in a campaign event that featured him skillfully gutting an eel—obviously an important credential for any would-be president of France. Eel gutting is messy work, and so after the job was completed, Macron washed himself before shaking hands with local voters. Somebody edited the eel-gutting video to create the false impression that Macron had washed his hands in snobbish disgust after shaking hands with working-class voters. The doctored news was then spread by pro-Putin and pro–Le Pen French-language sites.50
Days before the French vote, hackers dumped a ten-gigabyte trove of emails stolen from the Macron campaign. A Trump-friendly social media troll named Jack Posobiec somehow got advance notice of the impending dump. (Posobiec—then affiliated with Canada’s Rebel Media—was issued White House press credentials in April 2017.) According to security experts quoted by Dustin Volz of Reuters, Posobiec was the very first person to use the hashtag #MacronLeaks.51
Yet even this kind of non-US fakery doubled back on the Trump administration. Emilio Ferrara of the University of Southern California observed the overlap between pro-Trump and anti-Macron social media accounts. In an academic paper reported by Jordan Pearson for Vice Media, Ferrara concluded: “Of the nearly 100,000 users in the sample who participated in the MacronLeaks discussion on Twitter, 18,000 were bots,” many of which had previously tweeted anti-Clinton materials in 2016. Ferrara speculated that perhaps there existed a black market for bot accounts, but it’s surely at least equally plausible that the relationship is political rather than monetary.52
You can expect to see more and worse of this stuff in future elections. Technology already exists—and will soon be commercialized—that will enable Internet trolls to create fake video clips of politicians and celebrities that will look and sound exactly like the impersonated original. Meanwhile, the line between fake-news trolling and ordinary right-of-center journalism is blurring.
The fake-news troll Mike Cernovich—a propagator of the hoax that people associated with the Clinton campaign were running a pedophile sex ring out of a Northwest DC pizzeria—not only got access to the White House press briefing room, but began regularly receiving White House tips and leaks. It was to Cernovich that Trump officials leaked their complaint that Obama’s former national security adviser Susan Rice had “unmasked” their Russian ties.53 The trolls at Gateway Pundit, who had assiduously promoted Russian-invented disinformation about the supposed detention of 1,500 US service personnel at Turkey’s Incirlik Air Base, among many other fantasies, were accredited to the White House press corps by the Trump administration in February 2017.54
On the other side of the podium, disregard for truth amounted to a positive job qualification in the Trump White House. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s mulish denials, Sean Spicer’s guilty squirming, Kellyanne Conway’s brazen non sequiturs, made TV celebrities of each. But outright lying is a high-risk media strategy. Among the things that made the early Trump White House press briefings such fascinating viewing was the ever more open disdain of the assembled journalists for Sean Spicer, and the ever tarter sarcasm of their follow-up questions. Rather than contest this battle, the Trump administration increasingly avoided it. White House press briefings were taken off camera, then closed even to recording devices, then cut to less than a quarter of an hour. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson refused to allow journalists to travel with him, creating an absurd situation in which the American public often learned about the actions of the secretary of state from the controlled media of foreign authoritarian governments.55
The avoidance strategy, however, also had its limits. It is not as if the press vanishes when an administration declines to speak. The press continues to ask—and sooner or later somebody will answer. The Trump administration, among the least intentionally communicative presidential administrations in history, also quickly proved the leakiest. An AP report of May 13, 2017, wonderfully conveyed the irony:
Trump is said to be seething over the flood of leaks pouring out of the White House and
into news reports. He’s viewed even senior advisers suspiciously, including Bannon and Priebus, when stories about internal White House drama land in the press. A dozen White House officials and others close to Trump detailed the president’s decision-making and his mood on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss private conversations and deliberations.56
All presidents chafe against their press coverage. Donald Trump actually has less to complain about than almost any of his predecessors. No president—not Barack Obama, not John F. Kennedy—has benefited more from slavish and sycophantic coverage from the media organizations that influence his supporters the most: Fox News, Breitbart, Newsmax, and the English-language propaganda outlets of the Russian state, Sputnik and RT. It often seems that, like Stalin’s cabinet ministers, Fox News’ hosts compete to offer the most abject flattery to a president who watches more TV than any other in history.
Even with more independent-minded media, Trump got better coverage than he might have expected. The practices and taboos of traditional media forbade them to report on many things discreditable to Trump but deemed by them not of legitimate public interest. Much that might have been embarrassing in Trump’s personal and family life went unreported for these reasons.
The traditional media’s commitment to “both sides of the story” created within them an insatiable internal demand for positive comments about a president about whom there was otherwise so little good to say. On cable and on prestigious op-ed pages, nothing was a surer path to prominence than devising some—any!—praise or defense of Trump. Hence the desperate hunt by CNN for pro-Trump talking heads; hence the weird participation trophies that even Trump-skeptical commentators awarded the president when and if he behaved in a relatively normal way for a few consecutive hours.