In an opinion piece about President Trump’s false claim that previous presidents didn’t call Gold Star families, Paul Waldman hits on a point that’s been gnawing at me in much more fragmentary and less eloquent form for a while now. Assessing the consequences of the president's ceaseless lying in the context of Trump's conversation with the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson and its aftermath, he describes the cycle of political fragmentation these lies propagate:
Now here’s why this matters. Yes, many news outlets pointed out that Trump wasn’t telling the truth. But there are probably three interns at Fox News who are now scouring old news reports to find some family member of a fallen soldier who didn’t get a call from Obama. If they find it, that person’s story will then become the subject of a segment on Sean Hannity’s show, and it will then get retold on a hundred talk radio programs and conservative websites as proof that Obama was a monster and the media are all lying about this. (Trump’s insistence that there was “fake news” at work is another way of telling his supporters not to believe whatever they hear about this subject that comes from sources not explicitly supporting him.) And I promise you that if you took a poll two weeks from now, you’d find that 40 percent of the public (or more) believes that Obama never called the family of any fallen soldier, and only Trump has the sensitivity to do so.
And that’s how Trump takes his own particular combination of ignorance, bluster and malice, and sets it off like a nuclear bomb of misinformation. The fallout spreads throughout the country, and no volume of corrections and fact checks can stop it. It wasn’t even part of a thought-out strategy, just a loathsome impulse that found its way out of the president’s mouth to spread far and wide.
If you’re one of those who marvel at the fact that Trump’s approval ratings aren’t even lower than they are, this is a big reason for that. It’s absolutely necessary to correct Trump’s falsehoods, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves into believing that any poisonous lie he tells won’t find an eager audience. And the whole country gets dumber and dumber.
This is one of the single most frightening confluences of our political moment: that we have entered a stage where an enormous percentage of the American people are susceptible to what we should rightly call political propaganda, propagated by an extremely extensive right-wing media apparatus, at the same time that we have a president who lies as easily as he breathes. As Waldman would no doubt agree, not only does the whole country get dumber and dumber, but it gets more polarized as well, based on mutually contradictory bodies of evidence.
There are reasons for this state of affairs beyond the right-wing propaganda machine, most of which have nothing at all to do with Donald Trump, and which many smart people have explored, documented, and theorized upon, such as a generalized loss of faith in institutions. But as others have also noted, Trump has skillfully exploited and accelerated a pre-existing situation. A recent poll by Politico provides more hard evidence for the widespread lack of faith in news sources and a belief that the media lies about the president: 46% of voters said they believe the news media makes up stories about Trump, including 76% of Republican voters and a startling 44% of independents. (In an unexpected twist, Trump himself tweeted about the 46% figure — not to bemoan it, of course, but to praise it, as a positive sign that people don't believe what the media reports.)
Waldman's piece crystalized for me why all the lies coming out of Trump's mouth are so painful and angering to hear. Words that to me further confirm Trump's unfitness are heard by other people as further evidence that he's the perfect man for the job; uncorrected, these lies poison the possibility of rational dialogue in our politics. We are in desperate need of innovative ways to fight the lies, and to revive common faith in a free press.
