by Peter Wehner
The sheer scope, breadth, and shamelessness of the Trump lies are impressive in their own corrupt way. Mr. Trump told falsehoods about voter fraud costing him the popular vote to Hillary Clinton (it didn’t), Russian intervention in the 2016 election being a hoax (it wasn’t), having won the biggest landslide since 1980 (not even close), and President Obama bugging Trump Tower (it never happened). He prevaricated in claiming his 2018 State of the Union was the most watched of any State of the Union in history, in stating that tax reform cost him a fortune, and in claiming credit for business investments and job announcements that had been previously announced. He was wrong when he asserted that he had signed more bills than any president ever, that counterprotesters in Charlottesville didn’t have a permit, and that the New York Times had apologized for “bad coverage.” Trump claimed the FBI inspector general’s report on Hillary Clinton’s email server totally exonerated him; it did no such thing. He claimed that the policy of separating migrant children from their parents was forced on him by Democrats; the person responsible for the policy was Trump, not Democrats.
For two years President Trump, his legal team, and his advisors denied that he was involved in hush money payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal; we now know that was a lie and Mr. Trump was involved in or briefed on every step of the agreements. On dozens of occasions since the summer of 2016 Mr. Trump said he had “nothing to do with Russia”—no deals, no investments, no business with Russia. Those claims were lies.
Mr. Trump claimed he had never heard of WikiLeaks when news stories about it came out in 2016; in fact, he had spoken about it years earlier. In November 2018, he claimed that “I don’t know Matt Whitaker,” whom he had named to be acting attorney general after he asked Jeff Sessions to resign; the previous month, in an interview with Fox & Friends, Trump had said, “I know Matt Whitaker.” Mr. Trump claimed the Paris Agreement on climate change was binding; it’s not. In 2018 he claimed, “We don’t have tariffs anywhere”; that year the US had placed levies on more than $300 billion in imports. He asserted that America had trade deficits with nearly every country; we have a trade surplus with more than one hundred nations.
The president said thousands of people had been brought in on buses from Massachusetts to vote illegally in New Hampshire; there’s no evidence that occurred. Trump told a group of sheriffs that the murder rate in the United States was the highest it’s been in “forty-five to forty-seven years”; in reality, it has dropped to rates we have not seen since the 1960s. He claimed people in California were rioting over sanctuary cities; no such thing happened. The president claimed that a large migrant caravan moving toward the Mexican-US border included “unknown Middle Easterners” mixed in; there was no evidence to support that assertion. On and on it goes. On a single day, the president publicly made 125 false or misleading statements in a period of time that totaled only about 120 minutes.22
My own experience might provide some useful context here. I recall how, as a White House speechwriter, I was pressed by the staff secretary to prove any conceivably questionable claim. If I raised even the slightest dissent—this claim is self-evident and therefore doesn’t have to be sourced, that claim is too small a matter to worry about—she would say to me and to others, in a tone that conveyed a kind of deep civic conviction, “If the president says it, it needs to be correct.” Now, we certainly got things wrong, as have other administrations. But the mistakes weren’t intentional, and if we discovered them, we tried to correct the record.
What is notable about the Trump presidency are the number and velocity of the falsehoods and misleading statements. They have been made in speeches and tweets, on matters significant and trivial, about others and about himself—and he virtually never apologizes or issues corrections. He says what he wants, when he wants, regardless of the reality of things.
“The man lies all the time,” according to Thomas Wells, Trump’s former lawyer.23 Tony Schwartz, the cowriter of The Art of the Deal, says that “lying is second nature to him.”24 In Bob Woodward’s book Fear, Trump’s former personal lawyer John Dowd describes the president as “a f ****** liar,” telling Trump he would end up in an “orange jump suit”25 if he testified to special counsel Robert Mueller.26 And former White House aide Anthony Scaramucci, when asked during the CNN interview if he considers Trump a liar, admitted, “Okay, well we both know that he’s telling lies. So if you want me to say he’s a liar, I’m happy to say he’s a liar.”27 (In a later interview Scaramucci put it this way: “He’s an intentional liar. It’s very different from just being a liar-liar.”)28
Trump is not simply a serial liar; he is attempting to murder the very idea of truth, which is even worse. Without truth, a free society cannot operate. Which is why Trump’s rhetoric ought to matter to all of us, and why it is our civic duty to call out his lies in every way we can.
THE POST-TRUTH MOMENT
That Donald Trump is a con man is beyond dispute.29 Why he became one is an interesting and important psychological question. But an even more urgent one is how our political culture allowed him to win the Republican nomination and the presidency.
The answer, at least in part, is that polarization and partisanship have reached a toxic level. For a large number of Americans, truth is viewed as instrumental, a means to an end. Everything is liable to become a weapon in our intense political war. And getting to this “post-truth” political moment was a good deal easier than one might imagine.
Some new research regarding confirmation and disconfirmation bias may help us understand how we got here. Confirmation bias is the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs and the tendency to reject new evidence that challenges one’s existing beliefs.
They are perennial human problems, and there are understandable reasons why, starting with the physiological component. Jack Gorman, a psychiatrist, and his daughter Sara, a public-health specialist, have explored this matter in their book Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Acts That Will Save Us. They cite research suggesting that processing information which supports our beliefs leads to a dopamine rush, which creates feelings of pleasure. “It feels good to ‘stick to our guns’ even if we are wrong,” the Gormans told Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker.30 The moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind, says that “extreme partisanship may be literally addictive.”31
On the flip side, “When something is inconsistent with existing beliefs, people tend to stumble. . . . [I]nformation that is inconsistent with one’s beliefs produces a negative affective response,” according to Norbert Schwarz, Eryn Newman, and William Leach, experts in cognitive psychology.32
Brian Resnick reports that researchers at New York University’s brain-imaging center are exploring how our brains are hardwired for partisanship and how that skews our perceptions in public life. Once a partisanship mentality kicks in, according to Resnick, the brain almost automatically prefilters facts—even noncontroversial ones—that offend our political sensibilities.
“Once you trip this wire, this trigger, this cue, that you are a part of ‘us-versus-them,’ it’s almost like the whole brain becomes re-coordinated in how it views people,” says Jay Van Bavel, the leader of NYU’s Social Perception and Evaluation Lab.33
Our beliefs are also often tied up with our identities. “If changing your belief means changing your identity, it comes at the risk of rejection from the community of people with whom you share that identity,” according to Dr. Christine Herman.34 That is difficult for any of us to do, and it explains why we tend to reject facts that may challenge our identity- and group-determining beliefs.
Dan Kahan, a psychology professor at Yale University, points out that fans of opposing teams tend to see different things when there’s a close call by officials.35 It’s not that fans who react one way are faking their reaction while others are authentic; it’s that they actually perceive things differently.
In a sense, we see what we want to see in or
der to believe what we want to believe. In addition, we all like to be proven right, and changing our views is an admission that we were previously wrong, or at least had an incomplete understanding of an issue.
There is also an enormous amount of information to process in the world; we often need categories and ways of thinking and like-minded individuals to help us sort out information. None of us has the time or inclination to closely examine the validity of the endless amount of information coming our way.
For example, what are the best studies on gun control and what do they show us? Do proposed gun control laws work where they have been tried? If so, how well? If easy access to guns makes deadly violence more common—and that is certainly an understandable concern given that gun death rates in the United States dwarf every other developed country in the world—how reasonable is it to expect that we can extinguish the supply of guns in America, which is approaching 300 million? How applicable are, say, the Australian and British examples to ours? Are their models—Australia and Britain have enacted some of the strictest gun control laws in the world after mass shootings36—ones for us to follow?
What about the data on the role guns play in self-defense? And what about the argument that killers often choose no-gun zones (like schools and movie theaters) to commit gun violence? This is a lot to sort through on just this one topic, so we often rely on authority figures in a given field, deferring to their judgments and expertise. And we almost always ascribe greater authority to those whose worldview we share.
As a species, then, we are ever in search of data that confirms what we want to believe, what we already believe. “L’illusion est le premier plaisir” (Illusion is the first of all pleasures), Voltaire said. We are all tempted by delusions and denials so long as they constitute bricks in the walls we have chosen to build and to live behind. We are also profoundly incurious when it comes to thinking in different ways about things on which we have strong beliefs. Our inclination to do this is particularly strong in times of division and dispute, when we seem to lack reliable authority figures in various fields. And we are plainly living in such a moment now.
So why is confirmation bias having a more harmful effect today than it has in the past? A big part of the reason is that because of demographic shifts and communication technologies, we are more likely today to live in a bubble than in the past. We live with—and we get our information from—people who think like we do.
As we have already established, our nation is increasingly polarized and fragmented. Our capacity to hear one another and reason together has become deeply impaired. Facts are seen by many people as subjective and malleable, so we lack a shared context to talk about our problems. As a result, more and more Americans are effectively living in a self-created political reality. It’s now possible to isolate oneself in an information space that entirely confirms one’s preexisting views and biases.
Normal confirmation bias is now on steroids, and some are exploiting this situation for profit and so further exasperating the problem. An influential Republican lawmaker admitted to me that some of those in the right-wing media complex have made a successful business model by defacing facts to fit the worldview of the hosts. His point was that it wasn’t simply a case of dealing with true believers; there’s a financial incentive to distort the truth.
In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries declared post-truth as the word of the year. It refers to circumstances in which “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Oxford Dictionaries’ president Casper Grathwohl said post-truth could become “one of the defining words of our time.”37
The great scholar and senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said decades ago, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” No one disputed Moynihan’s point. But on November 30, 2016, during an interview on the Diane Rehm Show, Trump supporter and then CNN contributor Scottie Nell Hughes said this:
Well, I think it’s also an idea of an opinion. And that’s—on one hand, I hear half the media saying that these are lies. But on the other half, there are many people that go, “No, it’s true.” And so one thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch, is that people that say facts are facts—they’re not really facts. Everybody has a way—it’s kind of like looking at ratings, or looking at a glass of half-full water. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth, or not truth. There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts.
And so Mr. Trump’s tweet [sic], amongst a certain crowd—a large part of the population—are truth. When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some—amongst him and his supporters, and people believe they have facts to back that up. Those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies and that there are no facts to back it up.38
This has been a narrative pushed by Mr. Trump and his top advisors, including his top legal advisors, during his presidency. In a July 25, 2018, speech to a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, President Trump said, “And just remember: What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”39 In other words, who are you going to believe—me or your lyin’ eyes?
A month later, the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, asserted during an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd over the Mueller investigation, “Truth isn’t truth.”40 Another of the president’s lawyers, Jay Sekulow, when called out for making a false claim to defend Mr. Trump, replied, “Facts develop.”41
Comments such as these might be excused as mere slips of the tongue, if not for the fact that the president and all the president’s men and all the president’s women act as if truth were merely subjective, utterly pliable, and completely in the eyes of the beholder. The modus operandi of Trump World is this: If facts exist that are incriminating to Mr. Trump, dismiss the facts. Label them fake news. And go on lying.
Journey back with me to the 1970s. When Richard Nixon’s “smoking gun” tape was released in 1974, revealing an effort to get the CIA to intervene with the FBI to stop the Watergate investigation, no one denied the reality and meaning of the tapes. Nixon knew he would have to resign; his supporters had no way to defend him. The empirical ground on which they stood had crumbled. The facts were the facts, and they were indisputable. Yet if the same thing were to happen today—if tapes were released proving Donald Trump had committed an unlawful and impeachable act—some large number of the president’s supporters would reject the tapes as the product of “fake news.” Trump’s unrelenting battering of the press has discredited it so much in the eyes of many of his supporters that they will reject any and all criticisms of Trump, regardless of the merits.
The television critic for the New York Times, James Poniewozik, says the goal of the president is to argue that “there is no truth, so you should just follow your gut & your tribe.”42
“This is the conversation the White House wants,” according to the Associated Press’s Jonathan Lemire. “Make everything muddy so partisans gravitate to their own corners.”43
Nietzsche coined a term, perspectivism, to describe the idea that there is no objective truth, everybody gets to make up their own reality, their own script, their own set of facts, and everything is conditioned to what one’s own perspective is.
Here’s an illustration of what this looks like in practice. During a segment on CNN, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, one of Trump’s most prominent advocates, defended Trump’s false claim that crime rates were soaring, insisting the average American “does not think crime is down, does not think they are safer.”
When the host, Alisyn Camerota, cited FBI data to support her claim that we are safer and crime is down, Gingrich was unimpressed. He responded, “No. That’s your view.” When Camerota countered that this wasn’t simply a subjective matter and once again cited FBI crime statistics, Gingrich responded, “As a political candidate, I’ll go with how people feel, and I’ll let you go with the theoreticians.”44 In other words, fac
ts be damned; my feelings will create my own reality.
On a large enough scale, this kind of attitude stands to yield epistemological anarchy; that is, there are no knowable truths to appeal to. When that happens, we’re bargaining for a lot of trouble. How does a democracy function if there are no shared facts?
A combination of factors—social media and new technology platforms; micro-targeting and psychometric methods in political campaigns; unprecedented polarization and hyperpartisanship; the fragmentation of traditional media sources and the advent of information silos; and the intervention in our elections by hostile powers using “fake news,” misinformation, and disinformation—has reshaped American politics. The capacity to inject poison into our political bloodstream—in the form of lies and falsehoods, crazed conspiracy theories, smears, and dehumanizing attacks—is unprecedented. And there are very few authority figures or institutions, inside politics or outside, that can provide an antidote to the poison.
The reason is that we live in an age of deep distrust, with Americans’ confidence in the nation’s major institutions having dropped to a historic low point.45 Only one in ten Americans say they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in Congress, highlighting what Gallup has called “the nation’s most important problem: a dysfunctional government that has lost much of its legitimacy in the eyes of the people it serves.”46
Americans, then, remain reluctant to put much faith in most of the institutions at the core of American society. What this means is that there are far fewer institutions and figures of authority who can declare certain things to be outside the boundaries of responsible discourse and be listened to; who can say that certain claims are preposterous and should be ignored. Instead, people who make false, outrageous, and even indecent assertions are finding validation, affirmation, and quite a large audience.