Lies, Damned Lies and Trump Rallies
Who you
gonna believe, me or your own eyes?
By Paul Krugman
Opinion
Columnist
- Oct. 29, 2020
Donald Trump lies a lot. In fact, he
lies so often that several media organizations try to keep a
running tally, and even try to draw political inferences from
fluctuations in the number of lies he tells in a given month (although the
trend has been relentlessly upward).
But we’ve crossed some kind of
threshold in the past few weeks. It’s not so much that Trump is lying more as
that the lies have become qualitatively different — even more blatant, and
increasingly untethered to any plausible political strategy.
Back in the day, Trump lies tended to
be those like his repeated claims that he was about to unroll a health care
plan that would be far better and cheaper than Obamacare, while protecting
pre-existing conditions.
Those of us following
the issue closely knew that there was no such plan, indeed that there couldn’t
be given the logic of health insurance; we also knew that he had made the same
promise many times, but never delivered.
But ordinary voters aren’t experts in
health policy and might not have remembered all those broken promises, so there
was at least a chance that some people would be fooled.
In a way, Trump’s claims to be the
victim of a vast “deep state”
conspiracy were similar. They were obvious nonsense to people familiar with how
the government actually works. But many voters aren’t experts in civics, and
the conspiracy theorizing — like his claims that all negative reports are “fake
news” — helped shield him from awkward facts.
But Trump’s recent lies have been
different.
On Tuesday the White House science
office went beyond Trump’s now-standard claims that we’re “rounding the corner”
on the coronavirus and declared that one of the administration’s major
achievements was “ending the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Who was that supposed
to convince, when almost everyone is aware not only that the pandemic
continues, but that coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are surging? All it
did was make Trump look even more out of touch.
Wait, it gets worse. In last week’s
debate, Trump declared that New York is a “ghost town.” Eight million people can see with their
naked eyes that it isn’t.
On Monday, campaigning in Pennsylvania,
Trump repeatedly claimed that
thanks to the state’s Democratic governor, “You can’t go to church.” Thousands
of churchgoing Pennsylvanians know that this simply isn’t true.
On Wednesday, campaigning in Arizona,
Trump went on a rant about California, where “you have a special
mask. You cannot under any circumstances take it off. You have to eat through
the mask. Right, right, Charlie? It’s a very complex mechanism.” As 39 million
California residents can tell you, nothing remotely like that exists.
Again, who is this supposed to
convince? It’s hard to see any political upside to such ludicrous
confabulations, which demand that people reject their own direct experience.
All they do — I hate to say this, but it’s obvious — is raise questions about
the president’s stability.
So what’s going on? Trump wouldn’t be
the first politician to lash out wildly in the face of electoral defeat. “You
won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”
Remember, also, that Roy Moore, defeated in Alabama’s 2017 special Senate
election, never conceded.
In fact, almost everyone expects the
mother of all temper tantrums, quite possibly including calls for violence, if
Trump does, in fact, lose next week. To some extent he may just be getting an
early start.
But there’s also, I’d
argue, something deeper going on. What Trump has been revealing, more clearly
than ever before, is that he has a totalitarian mind-set.
After those bizarre claims about
California masks, I reread George Orwell’s classic essay “Looking
Back on the Spanish War.” Observing Spain’s fascists and their fellow travelers
— including many in the British press! — Orwell worried that “the very concept
of objective truth is fading out of the world.” He feared a future in which, if
the Leader “says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five.”
The point is that for Trump and many of
his supporters, that future has already arrived. Does he believe that there’s
any truth behind his bizarre claims that Californians are being forced to eat
through complicated masks? That’s a bad question, because he doesn’t accept
that there is such a thing as objective truth. There are things he wants to
believe, and so he does; there are other things he doesn’t want to believe, so
he doesn’t.
What’s scary about all this isn’t just
the possibility that Trump may yet win — or steal — a second term. It’s the
fact that almost his entire party, and tens of millions of voters, seem
perfectly willing to follow him into the abyss.
Indeed, current Republican strategy is
almost entirely based on trying to scare voters about bad things that aren’t
happening — like a vast wave of anarchist violence sweeping America’s cities —
while not noticing bad things that really are happening, like the pandemic and
climate change.
This strategy may or may not work; this
year it probably won’t. But either way, it will poison America’s political life
for many years to come.
