Should we shut off his mike now?
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Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, damned lies, and more lies. There has never been a presidential campaign so driven by lies as this one being conducted by Donald Trump — a relentless torrent of lies.
“24 Hours of MAGA Misinformation” headlined one piece by Aaron Blake in The Washington Post last week.
The day’s deceptions included tweets by the notorious liar Elon Musk that Democrats are flying undocumented immigrants into swing states to turn the election; a claim by Trump that he was forced to use a small 750-seat venue for a rally in Wisconsin because President Joe Biden wouldn’t afford him Secret Service protection, and that 50,000 people had to be turned away (yeah, sure); another by Trump that North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, is shuffling aid for victims of Hurricane Helene away from Republican areas; another that Kamala Harris allowed 13,000 migrants convicted of murder into the country (this is actually a list of noncitizen border crossers extending back decades); and another, this one from Rep. Byron Donalds, a Florida Republican and lying Trump stand-in, asserting that crime is “massively up,” when it is actually massively down.
In just 24 hours!
In the same paper, columnist Jennifer Rubin called Trump a “master liar,” a “compulsive” liar, and then cited just a few of his greatest hits: Nancy Pelosi was responsible for the attacks on the Capitol on January 6; everyone wanted to repeal Roe v. Wade; his economy was the “greatest ever.” And she writes, “His lies are so prolific, they prompt some to question whether he knows he is lying.” (Let me answer: If he is still sentient, which is debatable, he knows.)
And more: CNN did a fact check on his comments about Hurricane Helene, discovering, surprise!, that they were lies that hampered rescue and aid efforts; Caitlin Dickerson of The Atlantic, wrote a piece about Trump’s numerous lies about immigration and the harm they do; and The New York Times tabulated Trump’s lies in a single 63-minute speech — 64 of them, literally more than one a minute — as opposed to six misstatements, not outright lies, in a Harris stump speech.
You get the idea. Every time Trump opens his mouth, he lies. During his 2016 campaign, Politifact classified only 17% of his statements as “true” or “mostly true.” And the truthfulness bug didn’t suddenly bite him once he was in office. There were roughly 30,000 of those lies during his presidency, as calculated by Glenn Kessler of the Post. This is compounded by the fact — a truth! — that the apples don’t fall very far from the tree, and his surrogates are every bit as untrustworthy as he is. Liars all. Think of the firehose of lies that GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance sprayed during his debate. I bet you didn’t know that Donald Trump saved the Affordable Care Act rather than did his best to torpedo it!
RIP the Truth
You might call this normal campaigning, bending facts, making misstatements, if you had no awareness of the past, but it isn’t. Trump degrades everything he touches, so why not degrade campaigning itself? He doesn’t misstate or bend. He lies.
There was a time when a candidate who lied to the public would pay a penalty for it. “I will never lie to you,” Jimmy Carter promised the American people in the wake of Watergate, when Richard Nixon was the purveyor of lies, adding that it would be a betrayal of their confidence in him (Carter, in fact, didn’t).
Not lying was part of the contract between a public official and his or her constituents — a political norm. It was even part of American mythology: George Washington, after chopping down that apocryphal cherry tree, could not tell a lie. Lincoln was “Honest Abe.” We purported to believe in truth-telling. We purported to want truth-telling from our candidates.
“To abandon the facts is to abandon freedom,” Timothy Snyder wrote in On Tyranny. “If nothing is true then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis on which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.” Which is a perfect summary of Trump’s political career.
But truth-telling, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof, was more than a political norm. It was and is a political necessity in a democracy.
Lying weakens trust, and in Trump’s case destroys it among the majority of Americans, displacing trust from the community and the nation onto him, and him alone. It muddles and confuses. It knocks down yet another guardrail, which is why lying is integral to authoritarian governments. “To abandon the facts is to abandon freedom,” Timothy Snyder wrote in On Tyranny. “If nothing is true then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis on which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.”
Which is a perfect summary of Trump’s political career.
And if lying is integral, basically foundational, to authoritarianism, so is it integral and foundational to Trumpism, which is America’s own brand of fascism.
Trump, who does have a profound understanding of the dark depths of the country, understood how his fellow Americans were susceptible to fictions, attracted to them to the point where one might say that America was a confabulated nation — a nation created out of fictions, including the fiction of equality in a country that embraced slavery.
Americans loved tall tales and exaggerated fantastical folk-heroes. They fell for obvious scams, which prompted con artist extraordinaire P.T. Barnum to issue his famous dictum: “There is a sucker born every minute.” (Little did he know.) We are the nation of self-invention — Trump’s career began with the invention of himself as a successful businessman.
And there is a reason, I think, why the movies sprang up in America, besides the historical ones usually adduced. Americans loved pulling the truth and deforming it or merging it with confections. They got joy from it — a thrill. Here in America, truth was especially malleable.
Lies Like Shrapnel
Most of this was whimsical. But lying is not always whimsical, and it is not always small. Hitler mastered the “Big Lie,” the idea that if one told a lie so large, so beyond the realm of plausibility, the sheer audacity of it would make it more credible rather than less. In effect, a big lie overwhelmed the default of truth.
Trump is a big liar too. His insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him is a lie so large, so ridiculous, so often refuted by any sensible individual or group, including the entire American legal system, that it has, among a very large minority of Americans, adumbrated truth because otherwise no one would dare tell it.
Like Hitler, Trump realizes that big lies work, and like Barnum, but one better, he realizes that there is a sucker born every second, not every minute. In a nation of suckers, the liar is especially dangerous.
But Trump discovered something else. He discovered that it wasn’t only the size of the lie that mattered; it was the number of lies that mattered.
A Big Lie, like election fraud, was an atomic bomb, cratering truth. But a series of lies, non-stop lies, continual lies, nothing but lies, was like shrapnel; it would perforate truth. As Trump confederate Steve Bannon described the process, dismissing Democrats, “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Flood it.
The trick was not mixing truth with lies, or even propounding a Big Lie, though Trump has kept doing that. The trick was creating a whole new epistemological universe — one that was so averse to truth that truth no longer existed.
I have written previously here that the deepest and most profound polarization in America isn’t political; it is cosmological. And I used that word advisedly and deliberately, to attempt to capture the scale of the self-deception practiced by Trump, his enablers, and his MAGA suckers, for suckers is what they are.
For them, truth is anathema. They actually believe that Haitians in Springfield eat pet dogs and cats; that Trump took a “bullet for democracy” when some madman nicked his ear; that the economy is terrible, absolutely terrible, when, in the words of economist Mark Zandi, “This is among the best performing economies in my 35+ years as an economist”; that crime is soaring; that Biden is a criminal; and that the last election was stolen from Trump, and that this one might be too.
Let’s be honest, if uncharitable: Only a complete idiot would believe any of these things, much less all of them.
Tell Me Lies, Tell Me Sweet Big Lies
But in calling the MAGAites “suckers,” even idiots, I am actually giving them the benefit of the doubt. They are not simply falling for these obvious lies. Trump isn’t some rhetorical prestidigitator or political hypnotist. They are willful disbelievers in the truth.
They have conjured their own truth. They see what they want to see. They hear what they want to hear. The truth is inconvenient for them, so they simply deny it. And worse. They regard facts as a force wielded by the liberalism they so detest. You can’t lift the scales from their eyes. They would never let you.
We have had different interpretations of fact in the past by opposing groups. Politics is largely a function of those interpretations. But this is something very different from that. This is a form, to put it bluntly, of madness — a completely different and entirely false belief system. It is one in which facts are counterfeit and information bent to one’s will.
And how do we know that these folks aren’t just suckers who really know better? Because, as a survey last April by NBC revealed, they deliberately eschew traditional and more trustworthy forms of information or disregard information altogether: 53 percent of Trump supporters didn’t follow political news (as opposed to 27 percent of then-Biden supporters), 55 percent relied on YouTube and Google for their information, 46 percent on cable news (read “Fox”), and only 21 percent on newspapers. In an AP/NORC poll, 70 percent of Republicans trust Trump when it comes to election results, and only 50 percent the government. They live in this bubble of untruth. They choose to live there.
And the Trump campaign itself isn’t even shy about acknowledging its animosity toward truth. It insisted — and CBS News surrendered — that there be no fact-checking during the vice-presidential debate — the only reason for which is that fact-checking might have curbed Vance’s penchant for never daring to speak a truth. And when he was fact-checked anyway — albeit lightly — for his absurd pronouncement on those pet-chowing Haitians, he actually had the temerity — call it the chutzpah — to protest, basically saying, “You weren’t supposed to call me out. I am supposed to lie with impunity, just like the head of our ticket.”
That is how far it has come — from Jimmy Carter promising not to tell a lie to JD Vance promising to tell not just one but many.
The problem should be self-evident. To Masha Gessen, a Russian dissident and New York Times columnist, the whole debate idea itself was a dangerous one because it placed first Harris and Trump, and then Walz and Vance, on “a sort of level footing,” and “treated them both as normal politicians,” when there was clearly no equivalence between them. As Gessen explained:
When you place lies and facts on an even footing, it basically creates a political sphere in which there’s no fact-based reality. That’s a pre-totalitarian condition. You can’t have politics if you don’t have a shared reality and if you don’t place an absolute value on the truth.
Today there is no shared reality; there are two very divergent “realities” — one truthful, the other a vast web of fabrications, some of them so zany, so beyond the pale, that even Hitler might have been impressed by the level of belief in them.
So what is at stake this fall is not just our democracy, our history, our values, our institutions, and our freedom, but our very reality and our truth. Put it this way: George Orwell’s nightmare is our possible future.
From Truth to Totalitarianism
In On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder describes four “modes” through which the death of truth passes on the way to totalitarianism. The first he calls “open hostility to verifiable reality,” of which he says, “Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld.”
The second is “shamanistic incantation,” by which he means the constant repetition of the same lies “designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable.” (Trump’s repetition is often attributed to his apparent senility, but that senility has a political benefit for his suckers. Say something often enough and a small lie grows into a big one through accretion.) “Build the wall” or “Lock him up,” Snyder writes, “did not describe anything that would actually happen, but their very grandiosity established a connection between the speaker and his audience.”
The third mode is what Snyder called “magical thinking,” which was the “open embrace of contradiction.” Nearly every lie Trump tells is contradictory: Tariffs will lower costs for everything and bring in trillions of dollars when they will actually be a heavy tax on consumers; he is the great protector of women after actively denying them reproductive rights; he is the most pro-Black president since Abraham Lincoln, even though he is openly racist; he is a patriotic American who doesn’t pay taxes; he is the best friend of Jews though he entertains holocaust deniers.
But this is more than obvious contradictions. Snyder again: “Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason.” You lose not only reality and common sense; you wind up losing yourself. And though Snyder doesn’t say it explicitly, you wind up losing your country too.
Finally, there is what Snyder calls “misplaced faith.” Trump is an expert at this, which is essentially a form of self-deification. “I will be your retribution.” “I am your protector.” And the old standby: “I alone can fix it.” This is not at all incidental to one of the largest blocs in Trump’s base: evangelical Christians, who also have a deep aversion to fact and to the generally-accepted sense of reality, and who readily accept a strongman to place beside Jesus, who doesn’t seem sufficiently illiberal for most of them.
As Snyder puts it of this finishing touch: “Fascists despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that resonated like a new religion [“Make America Great Again!”], and preferred creative myths to history or journalism.”
One might readily see that Americans have already marched through these stages of truth-destruction. All that is left is the endpoint: the erection of a new truth to replace the old, traditional one, a giant fiction to supplant our non-fiction. Terrifyingly, we are almost there.
Spreading the Gospel of Sh*t
Lying, however, is not just something a monster perpetrates. It is a process. It requires the monster, and the suckers/willful disbelievers, but it also requires something else: transmission.
So how can one disrupt the process to save the truth and save America and most likely the world from the entropy that Trump promises?
No one can possibly prevent Trump from disseminating lies, especially when he has so many henchmen helping him. Not only the entire Republican Party; not only the entire nutcase right-wing extremist movement; not only the right-wing media ecosphere, like Fox News, in which “news” truly is an Orwellian touch; not only Christian Nationalists and evangelicals; not only one of the most heinous individuals in modern times, Elon Musk and his X — not only all of those reprehensible actors, but also the Russians and the Chinese, who desperately want a stooge like Trump to be president again so they can play him with false flattery, and who bombard morons with disinformation.
And no one can possibly dissuade the suckers from worshiping Trump, from obeying Trump’s instructions, and from accepting Trump’s phantasmagorical vision of reality, which bears no resemblance to the reality in which most of us have lived. Those folks are lost, beyond persuasion, no matter what the Nicholas Kristofs of the world tell us. These aren’t the old Reagan, McCain, Bush, or Romney Republicans. These folks are nuts.
And that leaves us with the transmitters.
The media, as I have said here repeatedly, have never learned how to deal with Trump. They are restrained by their own deficiencies. By the strict rules of bothsidesism, they cannot criticize Trump without also criticizing Harris, even when any equivalence between the two — a psychopathic would-be dictator and a normal, unusually competent political official — is ludicrous. (Look, for example, at how long it took the Times to cite Trump’s obvious cognitive issues — just this last Sunday — after harping on Biden’s for months.)
They feel duty-bound not to fact-check for fear, I suppose, of losing their patina of neutrality. They dare not report Trump’s endless transgressions, no matter how grievous, lest they seem to be picking on him and reinforcing the idea that they are hopelessly liberal.
There is a time when neutrality is really a kind of harmful neglect, a time when those who plead neutrality are nearly as culpable as the monster himself. This is certainly one of those times.
And what do you do about reporting on the sheer quantity of lies without just being repetitious? As Aaron Blake asked in the article I referenced earlier on one day in the life of Trump lies:
How do you tell the story when Trump says for the umpteenth time that he was Michigan’s Man of the Year (an honor the state doesn’t actually award)? Is it a headline every time Trump repeats this fantasy, or do you note the many previous fact checks? Does debunking just promote it?
Trump counts on media and voter fatigue. He counts on being ahead of the fact-checkers. He counts on wearing everyone down, which is why lies serve his cause rather than undermine it.
And yet the media must deal with Trump more effectively than they have because he is not a normal candidate, as we all know, and because he is a danger to America, and because not learning how to curb him would be like not curbing Hitler when you are fully aware of what he portends.
We know what Trump portends, and whether 47 percent of Americans approve of it or not is irrelevant or, at least, should be irrelevant to the media. You don’t give Trump credit just because he managed to fool or channel millions of Americans. There is a time when neutrality is really a kind of harmful neglect, a time when those who plead neutrality are nearly as culpable as the monster himself. This is certainly one of those times.
Masha Gessen, in her plea for reality, called for a “harm reduction philosophy” for covering Trump. I love her analogy:
Imagine that information is water and some of the water is poisoned. And if you are tasked with conveying the water to the public, it would be a crime for you to convey poisoned water. And I think that political lies, lies in the public sphere, are just as poisonous to our politics as poisoned water is to humans.
In short, Trump’s lies are the poison, but the media are the pipes.
Stop Transmitting?
Gessen has suggestions for harm reduction, including shutting off the mikes at a debate whenever Trump or Vance begins to lie. But that only covers debates, and the debates are finished.
Meanwhile, the lies are constant, and the lies are broadcast on television and radio, they are printed in magazines and newspapers, they are promulgated on right-wing podcasts like Joe Rogan’s and Alex Jones’s, they thrive on social media like germs.
The lies are everywhere. If the issue is that the media can’t keep pace with the lies, that the media cannot possibly fact check all the lies, that the media aren’t adequate to knowing which lies to headline and which to ignore, Gessen’s plan writ large might work. This is all they have to do: Turn off Trump’s mike. Turn off Vance’s mike. Turn off the mike of anyone who poisons our public debate.
I don’t expect this to happen. I don’t expect the media to accept that responsibility. I would expect them to plead that they can’t judge the magnitude of lies. And I would expect an outcry from the right that this would violate the First Amendment. (It wouldn’t.)
But if you want to get a sense of how effective it would be if every time Trump lied, the media refused to cover it, just think of Vance wailing at the debate that the greatest threat to democracy — the greatest, mind you; not Trump, America’s Hitler — is the effort of the Biden administration to force social media to police misinformation and disinformation.
Why so much wailing? Because Vance and Trump and the Republican apparatchiks fully realize that if the media shut off the valves for the poisoned water or fluoridated it with truth, they would have no chance of being elected. They would look like the charlatans and Pinocchios they are.
(Trump refused an interview on “60 Minutes” because they would fact check him. What does that tell you?)
Desperate times call for desperate measures. No time in American history, save for the Civil War, has been more desperate than this one. If Trump and the suckers win, lies win, and truth dies. And if truth dies, rest assured that democracy dies. Will anyone in the media have the courage to deny Trump that chance?
Probably not. Almost certainly not. But imagine if the German press had quarantined Hitler’s lies, so that no one heard them.
Shut off the mikes. Close the valves. Tell liars that no one will spread their lies, except for Musk on X. Promote truth.
And you just might save the world.
Coda
The Supreme Court convenes again this week, and nothing in this election season frightens me more.
The Court, needless to say, has ceased being a legal institution. It is an arm of MAGA — a right-wing extremist organization that actually turned Donald Trump loose on America by granting him what amounts to absolute immunity. (Forget the “official acts” b.s.; do not be surprised if the Court ultimately rules that every offense Jack Smith outlined turns out to be official.)
But here is what frightens me. Now that the Court has been unleashed; now that it no longer honors the ridiculous pretense that it is a real court and not a political apparatus; now that it is publicly and brazenly in Donald Trump’s camp; now that it is the most activist court in American history, discarding precedent with gleeful abandon; now that it has stripped rights from women and Blacks; now that it has championed Christian Nationalism — after all that, we should be braced for its final act of democratic destruction: the election of Donald Trump.
My optimism that Kamala Harris will be elected has not faltered. I am no prognosticator, but my gut and my common sense tell me she is likely to win.
It is my pessimism about the Court that keeps me awake at night. John Roberts may be the second most dangerous man in America, after His Orangeness. Roberts pretends to be a defender of the Court’s legitimacy, but that guise no longer holds. He is as much a Trump defender as the other right-wing fanatics on the Court.
Should the election be close — should Harris win by a hair in any of the swing states that give her an electoral majority — there is every reason to fear that the Court will find a way to intervene and hand Trump victory.
Yes, I know: What pretext could they find? I say: Any. This is the Court that gave Trump immunity, so don’t think they won’t give him the presidency too.
All of which is to say that Harris must win by more than a hair. So go out and give, work, ring doorbells, make phone calls, write postcards, talk to friends and relatives. And get Kamala the victory she deserves and the victory we need.
It is on us.
Reprinted, with permission, from Neal Gabler’s substack, Farewell, America.
