Trump
Is Far from the First Presidential Liar, But He’s Definitely the Worst
PATHOLOGICAL
Updated Aug. 23, 2020 12:20PM ET Published Aug. 22, 2020 5:05AM ET
As
the nation prepares itself for four days of non-stop racism, conspiracy-mongering, incitement to violence,
and hundreds if not thousands of outright falsehoods to
be communicated to the public by the president, his party, and their supporters
this week at the virtual Republican convention, it behooves us to take a short
look backward and try to understand how we arrived at this point: where we have
a president who has proven himself to be an almost comically pathological liar;
one whose word cannot be accepted on literally any topic, whether it be toilet
flushing, cancer-causing windmills or imaginary terrorist attacks—and yet, has
a credible hope of being re-elected.
Back
in 1991, I published an op-ed article in The New York Times about
presidential lying. It did not mention, however, that then-President George H.
W. Bush was among the many presidents who had lied to the American people
because my editor instructed me, “The New York Times will not allow
anyone to call the president a liar.” I pointed out to this editor, who was a
friend of mine, that this was a rather absurd objection, given the topic of my
article. He did not dispute this but simply replied, “Well, Eric, you may be
right. And if you like, you can photocopy your article and send it to your
friends. [This was before email.] Or you can take out that accusation and about
a million people will read you tomorrow.” I took it out, but it was the
last time I wrote for that page for roughly 20 years.
I’ve
been studying presidential lying ever since. I had just begun working on my
history PhD at Stanford when I published that op-ed, and I later chose
presidential lies as my dissertation topic. I eventually turned that into a
book, When Presidents Lie: A History of Deception and Its Consequences,
in which I examined the long-term consequences of four crucial postwar
presidential lies: Franklin Roosevelt following the Yalta agreements; John F.
Kennedy following the Cuban Missile Crisis; Lyndon Johnson following the
(non-existent) “Second Gulf of Tonkin Incident”; and Ronald Reagan and the
Iran-Contra scandal. It closed with a short discussion of George W. Bush and
the Iraq War, in which I described him as occupying (and embodying) America’s
first “Post-Truth Presidency.”
How They Get Away With
It
When
Donald Trump was elected president despite having already proven himself to be
a pathological liar throughout his entire adult life, and especially during the
2016 campaign, I felt a need to account for myself during what I expected to be
a time of trial for our country. I was reading Ron Chernow’s massive history of
the Warburg family at the time and found myself both amazed and depressed at
the manner in which these elite, intelligent, and well-informed German Jews
kept convincing themselves that Hitler was a problem that either they could
live with or would just go away. So in an attempt to answer the question “How
did Trump happen?”, I put aside the book I was writing and embarked on a
history of presidential lying that begins with George Washington—yes, he told a
lie—and takes us through the first three years of the Trump presidency. The
result is my new book, Lying in State: Why Presidents
Lie and Why Trump is Worse, just published by Basic Books.
You
will have to read the book if you want the whole story, but one of the primary
aspects I seek to examine in it is the role of the media in enabling
presidential lying. Presidents cannot lie effectively to the country unless
journalists conspire to help them do so. If they fail to hold a president
accountable, they undermine their very reason for being, and put democracy
itself at risk. And yet the problem, as The Washington Post’s
legendary editor Ben Bradlee once explained, is that “even the very best
newspapers have never learned how to handle public figures who lie with a
straight face.”
One
of the most interesting things about Donald Trump is that while he is in many
obvious ways a dunce, he is also in others a genius. And nowhere is that genius
on better display than in his instinctive ability to exploit not only the news
media’s desperate search for shiny objects in the form of phony conflicts he
constantly creates, but also in their inability to rein in, or even report
accurately, on his lies. Trump lies so frequently and with such a lack of
self-consciousness that it is impossible for anyone to keep up.
Jonathan
Swan and Chris Wallace have both received well-deserved praise for the relative
toughness of their recent interviews with the president, but the sad truth is
that he got away with many more falsehoods in both cases than the reporters
were able to call him on. And this has been the pattern of his presidency from
day one. Yes, we have The Washington Post fact-checking team,
and the intelligently conceived—and therefore more effectively
contextualized—one-man fact checking operation of reporter Daniel Dale, who
decamped from the Toronto Star to CNN. But the Post and
CNN still publish Trump’s falsehoods in their news stories uncorrected, and so
they aid him in getting away with the very same falsehoods they have identified
elsewhere. Even so, both news organizations find themselves under constant
attack by the president and his allies as purveyors as “fake news” and “enemies
of the people,” for having made even these inadequate attempts to hold him
accountable to a simple standard of truth.
Half of Republicans
Think Trump Won the Popular Vote
Trump
successfully defined the terms of his relationship as president immediately
after winning the election. As I explain in the book, “In addition to winning
the Electoral College in a landslide,” he tweeted, “I won the popular vote if
you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” This was nonsense. When
the returns from the popular vote were tallied, Clinton had beaten Trump by
nearly three million votes. His 46 percent share of the overall vote was lower even
than that of recent losers, including Gerald Ford (1976), Al Gore (2000), John
Kerry (2004), and Mitt Romney (2012). And yet this lie quickly became
conventional wisdom in the pro-Trump media. A July 2017 Morning Consult/Politico
poll found that 47 percent of Republicans believed that Trump had won the
popular vote, just 5 percent fewer than those who knew the truth. Trump’s lie
proved to be a brilliant political stroke, as it addressed three problems
simultaneously. First, for those who believed whatever he said, it eliminated
any uncertainty about the legitimacy of his victory. Second, it advanced his
false argument that undocumented immigrants were undermining America and doing
so at the behest of media elites and Democrats. And third, it provided the foundation
for future lies.
When
reporters finally asked Trump to support his claim with evidence, the
president-elect reassured them that “the very famous golfer Bernhard Langer”
was waiting to vote in Florida on Election Day and was refused, but some people
“who did not look as if they should be allowed to vote” were allowed to do so.
In fact, Langer said he had never even spoken to Trump. The president-elect had
heard some story probably sixth-hand and then passed it on to the rest of the
country in the hope of undermining the nation’s faith in its democratic
procedures. When a New York Times reporter noted that no
evidence could be found to support Trump’s ludicrous claim, the new leader of
the free world responded by retweeting a 16-year-old fan, who had asked, “What
PROOF do u have Donald Trump did not suffer from millions of FRAUD votes?
Journalist? Do your job!”
When
Trump repeated his nonsensical claim about the allegedly illegal votes in a
private, off-the-record meeting with congressional leaders shortly after his
inauguration, their reports to the press of what he said inspired something of
an existential crisis within the mainstream media. The president was obviously
lying, but almost no publication was ready to say so in black and white. Among daily
newspapers, as tallied by the Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance, only The
New York Times crossed the line and employed the word “lie” in its
headline. The rest ranged from: “Trump Wrongly Blames…” (AP) to “Trump Falsely
Tells…” (Chicago Tribune), “Trump Still Pushing Unconfirmed Claims…”
(New York Daily News), “Trump Repeats Unsupported Claim” (Wall
Street Journal), and “Without Evidence, Trump Tells…” (Washington Post).
At least two allegedly neutral sources, CNN and The Hill, also
repeated Trump’s lie without any qualification: “Trump Believes Fraud Cost Him
Popular Vote” (CNN), and “Trump Continues to Insist Voter Fraud Robbed Him of
Popular Vote” (The Hill). The problem with so many of these headlines
was that they took no position on whether Trump’s boast was true or not. The
CNN and Hill headlines positively encouraged the lie. These
news organizations apparently felt themselves helpless in the face of a
phenomenon they had never faced before: a president who was an unapologetic,
pathological liar and did not care who knew it.
“Journal Editor
Baker admitted “the president probably lies a lot,” but he was only interested,
as editor, in “what my reporters can report as facts.”
And
yet the word “lie” remained off the table for most media institutions. As New
York Times executive editor Dean Baquet would argue, “If you get loose with
the word lie, you’re going to look pretty scurrilous. Right? It’s going to be
in every story.” Similarly, Washington Post executive editor Martin
Baron, following in the footsteps of Ben Bradlee, refused during the election
campaign to allow his news staff to call the would-be president a liar. “I
think you have to actually have documentation, proof, that whoever you’re
saying lied actually knew that what he or she was saying was in fact false,”
Baron said. The then Wall Street Journal editor, Gerard Baker,
concurred. Though he admitted in an interview at the Aspen Ideas Festival in
2017 that he thought “the president probably lies a lot,” he was only
interested, as editor, in “what my reporters can report as facts.”
Faced
with complaints about this policy from his staff, Baker later added a
clarification: “If we are to use the term ‘lie’ in our reporting, then we have
to be confident about the subject’s state of knowledge and his moral intent.”
Other journalists also worried about alienating Trump voters by telling the
truth about his lies. “Every time he lies you have to point out it’s a lie, and
there’s a part of this country that hears that as an attack,” wrote New
York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg. “That is a serious problem.”
And so Trump’s lies, the scale of which had no precedent in American political
history, were treated like politics-as-usual. Although some opinion writers
felt free to call the president a “liar,” in news coverage readers were told
that Trump appeared to “backpedal,” or that he had made statements that were
“belied by the facts” or “proved to be inaccurate.” When Trump spoke in a
“misleading” fashion, making statements whose “veracity” had already been
“undermined,” this was often attributed to his “rhetorical bluster,”
particularly when he found himself walking a “rhetorical tightrope” owing to
his “overbroad boasts”—and the like.
Back
during the Reagan presidency, Ben Bradlee mused on why he felt the press—his
own Washington Post included—had gone so easy on Ronald
Reagan’s falsehoods, even as most reporters did not support Reagan [Lou Cannon
did!] and knew very well they were doing so at the time. Bradlee attributed the
media’s generosity to Reagan as “part of a subconscious feeling… that we were
dealing with someone this time who really, really, really disapproved of us,
disliked us, distrusted us, and that we ought not give him any opportunities to
see he was right.” Bradlee believed that after Watergate, much of the public implicitly
warned the media, “‘Okay, guys, now that’s enough, that’s enough.’ The
criticism was that we were going on too much and trying to make a Watergate out
of everything. And I think we were sensitive to that criticism much more than
we should have been, and that we did ease off.”
Something
quite similar happened with Trump’s election, but this time the consequences
have been far worse than under Reagan. The combination of Trump’s lies about
the coronavirus and his lawless response to “Black Lives Matter” protests
have put tens of thousands of Americans at risk and give every impression of
threatening the future viability of the republic itself. The time to call him
on his lies, and to refuse to pass them along unrebuked, is long past. For
honest reporters covering the president, if you are not part of the solution,
you are, alas, part of the problem.
Eric
Alterman is The
Nation’s longtime media columnist and a CUNY Distinguished Professor of
English at Brooklyn College. Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie and
Why Trump Is Worse, from which some of the above is adapted, published by
Basic Books, is his eleventh book