Trump and allies ratchet up disinformation efforts in
late stage of campaign
By
September 6, 2020 at 5:50 p.m. CDT
For
President Trump and his allies, it was a week spent spreading doctored and
misleading videos.
On
Aug. 30, the president retweeted footage of a Black man violently pushing a White woman on
a subway platform under the caption, “Black Lives Matter/Antifa” — but the man
was not affiliated with either group, and the video was shot in October. White
House social media director Dan Scavino shared a manipulated video that
falsely showed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden seeming to fall asleep during a
television interview, complete with a fake TV headline.
And
Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the second-ranking House Republican, released
a video splicing together quotes from activist Ady Barkan —
who has Lou Gehrig’s disease and uses computer voice assistance — to falsely
make it sound as if he had persuaded Biden to defund police departments.
For the
president and his top supporters, it was a campaign push brimming with
disinformation — disseminating falsehoods and trafficking in obfuscation at a
rapid clip, through the use of selectively edited videos, deceptive retweets
and false statements.
The
slew of false and misleading tweets and videos stood in contrast to the
approach taken by Biden, the former vice president, who in 2019 took a pledge promising not to
participate in the spread of disinformation over social media, including
rejecting the use of “deep fake” videos.
Trump
has built a political career around falsehoods, issuing more than 20,000 false or misleading statements during
the first three-plus years of his presidency. But many experts said the
onslaught of the disinformation efforts by Trump and his team in the late weeks
of the campaign make the deception particularly difficult to combat, not to
mention dangerous to the country’s democratic institutions.
“When
you have this disinformation and it’s introduced to one side of the forest, for
example, it can travel so quickly through so many different communities and
does so many unintentional things before you can even do a fact check,” said
Whitney Phillips, assistant professor of communication and rhetorical studies
at Syracuse University. “He’s able to muddy the waters so thoroughly that
democracy wilts on the vine.”
By late
August, the deceptions came in quick succession. In addition to the misleading
subway video, Trump repeated a false claim that just 6 percent of the
nation’s death toll in the pandemic was actually caused by the novel coronavirus itself — part of his ongoing effort to
portray the virus as less deadly or pervasive than it actually is.
Trump’s
campaign shared a short video on Aug. 31 of Biden saying, “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.” But
the video failed to include the full context of Biden’s remarks, which he used
to argue the opposite — that Americans are experiencing violence and unrest in
Trump’s America.
Later
that day, in an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, the president pushed
hazy conspiracy theories claiming — again, with no evidence — that Biden is
controlled by people in the “dark shadows” and that a plane full of uniformed
“thugs” was descending on cities with the intent of creating violence and
discord.
During
a Tuesday visit to Kenosha, Wis., which has been the site of unrest after the
police shooting of a Black man, Trump held a photo op that was muddier than he
made it appear. He met with the former owner of Rode’s Camera Shop, which was
destroyed in the riots and fires there, while claiming the man was the current
owner of the shop. In fact, he is the owner of the building and not the shop.
Later
on Thursday, Trump sent tweets seeming to encourage people to vote twice — and
prompting Twitter to place a public interest notice on the missives for violating the site’s “civic integrity policy.” The
same day, in response to an Atlantic story detailing Trump’s repeated
denigration of the military and those who served, Trump falsely claimed on Twitter that he had never
called the late senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) a “loser” — despite calling him
that publicly in 2015, shortly after announcing his candidacy for president.
In the
case of the Barkan video, Scalise eventually updated the clip after a public
uproar. In an op-ed in The Washington Post,
Barkan warned of the “ominous lessons” he gleaned from the experience: “the
ability to use technology not only for good but to mislead and manipulate; the
willingness of those with political agendas to resort to such disinformation
and propaganda; and the way in which America has cleaved into two separate
information universes, with a conservative media ecosystem amplifying falsehoods
that then take root.”
Some
social media platforms, including Twitter, removed some of the misleading and
manipulated content or labeled it as such. The Trump campaign, meanwhile,
claimed its out-of-context video saying voters wouldn’t be safe in “Joe Biden’s
America” was simply in jest, lambasting “all the triggered journalists who
can’t take a joke about their candidate.”
White
House spokesman Judd Deere dismissed the idea that the president is actively
promoting disinformation, saying that “the American people never have to wonder
what the president is thinking or how he feels about a particular topic.”
“The
media routinely manipulates the President’s words and takes him totally out of
context, but that will never stop him from unapologetically calling out their
biased reporting, raising important questions, or suggesting common sense ideas
to solve problems,” Deere said in an emailed statement.
Democrats,
however, argue that the messages spread by Trump and his allies go beyond mere
political trickery.
“Spin
has been something that folks in politics have come to expect, but this is the
invention of a totally new reality,” said Lily Adams, a senior adviser to the
Democratic National Committee’s Trump response team. “Because they can’t run on
the reality that every American is seeing, they’re inventing a new one.”
Joan
Donovan, research director at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center,
described Trump’s strategy as “terminal incoherence,” a deliberate effort to so
“flood the zone” with misleading information that “it really makes it hard for
people to understand what the stakes are of life-and-death information, like
what’s going on with the coronavirus.”
Trump
has repeatedly retweeted false, misleading and controversial videos and
content, with his aides sometimes claiming that he never watched the videos or
did not fully understand what he was sharing. His team has declined to put in
place any system to prevent the president from blasting out disinformation.
“Retweeting
is now his plausible deniability strategy. He now says, ‘I didn’t watch the
video, I just retweeted,’ ” Phillips said. “If it’s not an active strategy
that they sat down to work through, it is still what is communicating the most
pernicious elements of his communications strategy in 2020.”
There
were several prominent examples of deceptive videos presented at the Republican
National Convention last month, when Trump formally accepted his party’s
nomination. In one instance, event organizers created a video featuring four
tenants of federal housing programs in New York talking about Trump’s record on
public housing — but three of the four people interviewed for the video later
said they didn’t support Trump and were misled about the purpose of the production.
The
president also hosted a naturalization ceremony at the White House that was
used in another convention video — but again, several of the participants said they were not aware that
their ceremony would be featured prominently at the convention.
Daniel
Effron, an associate professor of organizational behavior at the London
Business School, said that from a psychological perspective, repeating a false
claim is an effective strategy because it makes the falsehood more familiar.
“The
concern is not just that we’re post-truth in the sense that you can say
anything and people will believe it,” Effron said. “It’s that we’re post-truth
in the sense that people won’t believe anything that anyone says and, worse,
they won’t care. It’s that we become morally numb to all the falsehoods
swirling around.”
Biden
spokesman TJ Ducklo said in a statement that Trump’s misinformation is intended
to obscure his poor leadership.
“The
coordinated effort by Donald Trump’s campaign to promote conspiracy theories,
manipulate media to mislead Americans and lie about Joe Biden is the clearest
signal yet they know they’re losing,” Ducklo said.
For
some like Barkan, the actions of Scalise and others in Trump’s orbit are not
missteps. They are deliberate “disinformation test balloons that should put
every single one of us on alert.”
“If
they can without consequence make it seem as though I said something I didn’t,
what else can they do?” he wrote in the op-ed. “What else will they
do?”