Trump Has Made Alternative Facts a Way of Life
The president has taken
his degradation of the truth to new lengths, but the basic project has been the
same from the start.
By Peter Wehner
Contributing
Opinion Writer
·
June
13, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET
No president in the
history of our Republic has been as disorienting as Donald Trump. His goal,
even before he became president, was far more ambitious than to tell mere lies.
It was to annihilate the distinction between truth and falsity, to make sure
that we no longer share facts in common, to overwhelm people with
misinformation and disinformation. It was to induce epistemological vertigo on
a mass scale.
What happened in
Lafayette Square earlier this month was the most recent link in a long chain of
events. To summarize: On June 1, the president sought to make a point by
walking to St. John’s Church, across the park from the White House. The church
has suffered some vandalism during the protests, and Mr. Trump wanted to be
photographed standing in front of it, holding a Bible as a prop. But getting
the president from the White House to the church — and making the walk the show
of strength Mr. Trump was desperate for — required militarized security forces
to clear out hundreds of overwhelmingly peaceful protesters who had gathered in
Lafayette Square, to protest the killing of George Floyd in police custody. A
Washington Post investigation reported that a
few protesters threw eggs, candy bars and water bottles, but that security
forces used smoke canisters, explosive
devices, rubber bullets and horses to clear the area.
That wasn’t the
coverage the president wanted, so, as Tim Miller of The Bulwark wrote, Mr. Trump’s staff and right-wing media
apologists distorted facts in order to paint a different picture. They
portrayed the protesters as rioters and Mr. Trump as a man of faith who was
restoring peace and order.
Using
the military as part of this charade was egregious enough that it caused Mr.
Trump’s former Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, to take the extraordinary
step of breaking his silence on
the president by denouncing him as a threat to the Constitution and national
unity, and it caused the nation’s top military official, General Mark Milley,
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to apologize for taking part in the
photo op in his combat fatigues. “I should not have been there,” General
Milley said.
The whole thing, from
beginning to end, was about creating yet another false narrative. So was the
president’s Tweet earlier
this week promoting the conspiracy theory that a 75-year-old man who was shoved
to the ground by Buffalo police and hospitalized as a result “could be an
ANTIFA provocateur.” (The elderly man’s lawyer issued a statementsaying
the president’s claim was “dark, dangerous and untrue.”) And so was the
president’s previous Tweet several
weeks before that, promoting a cruel conspiracy theory that MSNBC’s Joe
Scarborough was responsible for the death of a female staffer in 2001.
This is all part of a
long-established pattern. The first hours of the Trump presidency began with a
demonstrable lie, when Mr. Trump, his press secretary and his closest advisers
lied about the size of his inaugural crowd, photographic evidence to the
contrary be damned. The point of it was to convince the public that Mr. Trump
was the object of more adoration than the black president who preceded him, and
to distort reality with what Kellyanne Conway famously referred to as
“alternative facts.” This should have signaled — and was intended to signal —
that Mr. Trump would govern in a world of his own creation, a world of
make-believe.
At a fundamental
level, then, the Trump presidency has been about projecting shadows on walls
and asking us to believe they are real.
The president’s
brazen assaults on truth were jolting at first. Today, however, we have grown
accustomed to them — and to the fact that Republican officeholders have almost
without exception stood behind him during the last three-and-a-half years.
Some
Republicans have had no objections to how Mr. Trump has comported himself; they
are thrilled to be his courtier, to earn a pat on the head or the back from the
president. Many others, though, made the judgment that it was in their interest
to go along to get along, that standing up to Mr. Trump would weaken them
within the party and derail their political futures, causing them to lose power
even before they were turned out of power. They calculated that giving voice to
their consciences was not worth incurring the wrath of the Republican base. It
was easier, less wearying and a lot less of a hassle to fall into line behind
Mr. Trump. In one sense, of course, they were right. But doing so comes at a
price.
In his extraordinary
1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” which has been brought up with some
frequency during the Trump administration, the Czech dissident (and later
president) Vaclav Havel famously refers to a greengrocer who puts in his shop
window a Marxist slogan — “Workers of the world, unite!” The greengrocer
doesn’t believe in the slogan, or the regime, which is built on lies. But he acts
like he does, or at least abides the lies in silence. He doesn’t have to accept
the lie, according to Havel; he merely needs to live within it. But what
happens, Havel asked, if one day the greengrocer, among other things, stops
putting up slogans merely to ingratiate himself?
“In this revolt,”
Havel writes, “the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He rejects
the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his
suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance.
His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth.”
There is a cost to
this action, Havel acknowledges, but by doing so the greengrocer “has shattered
the world of appearance, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the
power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated
that living a lie is living a lie.”
Havel goes on to
point out that the greengrocer “has said that the emperor is naked. And because
the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by
his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to
peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to
live within the truth.”
During the Trump
presidency, Republican lawmakers who know better have been putting up
propaganda signs in their storehouse windows in the name of party loyalty and
self-aggrandizement. The price they would pay for honesty would be much lower
than that of the citizen of a totalitarian regime. It’s still not too late to
take the signs down, to break the rules of the game, and to rediscover their
suppressed identity and dignity.
In important
respects, though, the most worrisome thing about the Trump era isn’t the
president or elected Republicans; it’s the base of supporters who have shown an
unbreakable devotion to the former and an eagerness to intimidate, when
necessary, the latter, to keep them aligned with Mr. Trump.
Even
Mr. Trump’s media enforcers know their assigned roles. If they don’t fulfill
them, they recognize they will suffer the consequences: an uprising among their
viewers and listeners. Dissent is simply not permitted, and if you’re a media
personality who does dissent, it can be a career-killer.
The reasons the
Republican base has shown such fidelity to Mr. Trump are multilayered. Many
support his policy agenda and have a near-existential fear of what an ascent to
power by a Democratic president would mean. Among Mr. Trump’s supporters, there
is not just dislike but detestation for the left (and those feelings are
reciprocated by progressives).
Resentments and grievances over being the object
of the left’s contempt have built up for years. The president’s supporters view
him not just as their defender; they see him as their avenging angel. And on
top of all that is the acute political polarization that characterizes this
era. Those with a tribalistic mind-set believe that refusing to support a
Republican president is traitorous. So they have stayed loyal to the president
through all the carnage, all the lies, all the appeals to our ugliest impulses.
But this, too, has a
cost. What Mr. Trump requires of his supporters is that they enter his world of
unreality. For most people it’s too psychologically painful to acknowledge that
the person they support is deeply corrupt, pathologically dishonest and
brutish. Human beings feel a need to justify their defense of such a person;
this can only be achieved by distorting reality, by pretending that Mr. Trump
is not who he is and that facts are not what they are.
But epistemological
anarchy is a mortal threat to a free nation. If there are no knowable truths to
appeal to, no common set of facts we can agree on, no shared reality that binds
us together, then everything is up for grabs. Justice is impossible to achieve.
Might makes right.
If this trend toward
political and moral chaos is going to be reversed, it will be because ordinary
citizens understand the cost of it and push back against it; because they grow
weary of the manipulation; because they decide that living within the truth is
better than living within a lie.
Sometimes these
things can be catalyzed by honorable individuals like General Mattis saying
there are some lines the president should not step over or Senator Mitt Romney,
who has called out the president’s ethical transgressions while the rest of his
colleagues, through their near total silence, are complicit in them.
Still, for those of
us who believe politics is an honorable profession that can make the world
somewhat better and more just, and who at one time believed that the Republican
Party, while flawed, was an instrument for good, this is a difficult and even
disillusioning time. I’m not cynical enough to give up on politics, since the
human cost of doing so is much too high. But I’m not naïve enough to deny that
grave damage has been done to our nation and our politics, and, especially, to
the Republican Party.
Earlier
I alluded to Plato’s allegory of the cave. In the story, Plato imagines that a
prisoner in the cave, who had been chained with the others, escapes to the
outer world. Initially he is blinded by the sun but then he adjusts. He can see
the beauty of the world, the sky and the stars. Previously he had been looking
only at phantoms; now he is nearer to the true nature of being. Even so, Plato
asks, “Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than
the objects which are now shown to him?”
Donald
Trump’s supporters have been looking only at phantoms. There is still time for
more of them to see the world as it is, to be dazzled by the sunlight, to live
their lives in accord with truth. Plato knew that everybody would not make this
choice. But everybody should.