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The sudden collapse of the Assad regime in Syria yesterday took oxygen
away from the airing of President-elect Trump’s interview with Kristen Welker
of NBC’S Meet the Press. The interview told us little that we didn’t already know, but it did
reinforce what we can expect in the new administration.
As Tom Nichols pointed out after the interview, when
Donald Trump ran for the presidency this year, he “wasn’t running to do
anything. He was running to stay out of jail. The rest he doesn’t care about.”
Nichols was reacting to the exchange that began when
Welker asked the president-elect: “Do you have an actual plan at this point for
health care?” Trump answered: “Yes. We have concepts of a plan that would be
better.” “Still just concepts? Do you have a fully developed plan?” Welker
asked.
The answer, nine years after Trump first said he would
repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something cheaper and
better, is still no. He went on to add, “I am the one that saved Obamacare,”
although he spent his first term trying to weaken it.
Trump also reiterated his plans for revenge against
those he perceives to be his enemies. He told Welker that when he is president,
the Department of Justice should pursue and jail the members of the House
Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol,
more commonly known as the January 6th Committee. He singled out committee
leaders Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and former representative Liz
Cheney (R-WY).
But it was in his insistence on one specific lie that
Trump was most revealing. He told Welker that there were “13,099 murderers
released into our country over the last three years. They’re walking down the
streets. They’re walking next to you and your family, and they’re very
dangerous.”
This statement sets Trump up
to be a strongman who will save America from great danger, but it is a lie that
has been repeatedly debunked. It originated in a September 2024 letter from Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) to Representative Tony Gonzales (R-TX) listing 13,099 people
convicted of homicide as being “non-detained.”
As Alex Nowrasteh of the libertarian Cato blog
explains, “non-detained” does not mean free to roam the streets; it simply
means that those in prison for homicide are not currently detained by ICE. Once
they have served their sentences, they go back onto ICE’s docket to be deported
unless their countries of origin don’t have repatriation agreements with the
U.S., a condition that affects a very small number of people. Releases of
criminal migrants into the U.S. dropped during the Biden administration from the
numbers released during Trump’s term. In addition, as Nowrasteh points out, the
13,099 figure covers at least 40 years.
Welker tried to correct Trump: “The thirteen thousand
figure I think goes back around 40 years,” she said. “No, it doesn’t,” Trump
insisted. “It’s within the three-year period. It’s during the Biden term.”
Trump was intent on making
Welker and the television audience accept an egregious lie, despite the fact it
has been thoroughly debunked. His insistence echoed
his determination in January 2017 to make the American people accept his lie
that his inauguration crowd was bigger than that of his predecessor, Barack
Obama, although we could see with our own eyes that he was lying. He was demanding
we reject our own experience and instead let him define how we see the country.
Trump built on a history of narrative shaping that ran
through the Republican Party. In 2004 a senior advisor to President George W.
Bush famously told journalist Ron Suskind that people like Suskind lived in
“the reality-based community,” believing that people could find solutions to
problems based on their real-world observations. But such a worldview was
obsolete, the aide said. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore.…
We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality…. We’re history’s
actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
America’s right wing has been able to shape reality in
large part because of the 1996 advent of the Fox News Channel (FNC), the
brainchild of Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Shows on the FNC used
clear, simple messaging with colorful graphics that told a story of an America
overwhelmingly made up of white, rural folks who hated taxes and an intrusive
government, and would do fine if they could just get the socialist Democrats to
leave them alone. To spread the new channel, Murdoch initially offered ten
dollars per subscriber to each cable company that carried it.
That right-wing echo chamber
has expanded until it is now so strong that nearly 70% of Republicans falsely
believe Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election,
despite the fact that the FNC had to pay more than $787 million to Dominion
Voting Systems for defamation after it lied to viewers about that election.
Trump has built on that Republican narrative to create
a fantasy world that is badly out of step with reality. It is not easy to see
how he will reconcile his vision with real-world events.
He and his supporters might try simply to tell voters
that they have done what they promised, and hope that story sells.
When Trump threatened to put a 25% tariff on goods from
Mexico until Mexico stopped undocumented migrants from crossing the border,
Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum told Trump that "encounters at the
Mexico–United States border have decreased by 75 percent between December 2023
and November 2024.” Trump then simply told reporters that Sheinbaum had “agreed
to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively
closing our Southern Border,” and his supporters trumpeted on social media that
Trump had closed the border with one phone call.
But convincing people of an alternative reality might
be harder with issues closer to home.
Trump has vowed to place a tariff wall around the U.S.,
for example, at the same time he has promised to bring down the price of
consumer goods. “Economists of all stripes say that ultimately, consumers pay
the price of tariffs,” Welker told him on Sunday. “I don’t believe that,” Trump
answered. He might not believe it, but producers do: car manufacturers as well
as major shopping chains have warned that tariffs will force them to raise
prices.
On other issues, Trump will have a vocal and
established opposition. After his threat to go after the members of the January
6th committee, former representative Liz Cheney said in a statement: “There is
no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis for what Donald
Trump is suggesting.“
“Here is the truth: Donald Trump attempted to overturn
the 2020 presidential election and seize power. He mobilized an angry mob and
sent them to the United States Capitol, where they attacked police officers,
invaded the building, and halted the official counting of electoral votes.
Trump watched on television as police officers were brutally beaten and the
Capitol was assaulted, refusing for hours to tell the mob to leave. This was
the worst breach of our Constitution by any president in our nation’s history.”
Cheney called for the release of the evidence and grand
jury material special counsel Jack Smith assembled “so all Americans can see
Donald Trump for who he genuinely is and fully understand his role in this
terrible period in our nation’s history.”
Nobel laureates generally try to stay out of politics,
but today more than 75 of them in medicine, chemistry, economics, and physics
wrote a letter to senators urging them not to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,
Trump’s pick for secretary of Health and Human Services. They object to
Kennedy’s stand against the scientists and agencies he would oversee. They
noted that he has no credentials or relevant experience and that he has opposed
life-saving vaccines, promoted conspiracy theories, and attacked the Food and
Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the
National Institutes of Health.
Putting him in charge of the Department of Health and
Human Services, they write, “would put the public’s health in jeopardy and
undermine America’s global leadership in the health sciences, in both the
public and commercial sectors.”
There is also the chance that the Fox media empire will
not effectively push a right-wing narrative much longer. The Murdoch family is
in a struggle over control of that empire after the death of the 93-year-old
Rupert. He and his eldest son, Lachlan, want to lock the company into its
current political slant, but at least two of the three of Murdoch’s other
children who are set to inherit the company do not share their father and
brother’s politics.
Rupert has been trying to change the terms of the family trust to cement
Lachlan’s control of the empire, but today a commissioner in Nevada ruled
against him. Edward Helmore of The Guardian noted that the
decision likely means that even if the children do not take the media empire in
a different direction, divided leadership will weaken the right-wing message.
Almost 30 years after the Fox News Channel began to
shape American politics with a fictional narrative, a different Fox media
empire would almost certainly disrupt the right-wing bubble. A lawyer for
Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch said they will appeal the decision.