Truth seems at an ever greater premium in America right about now. What’s worse, way too many don’t seem bothered much by the development. It’s certainly a cliche, but that doesn’t make it any less a fact, democracy’s lifeblood is truth. There simply isn’t a way forward for free and open elections if voters lose confidence in what they require to inform them. When most simply shrug and discount truth’s preeminence, accepting the inevitability of malleable facts, the entire exercise loses its basis for being. I mean, what’s the point?
HBO’s important mini-series, Chernobyl, offers a long overdue look at the world’s worst ecological disaster. And while the production provides a riveting narrative as to how exactly it occurred, and the many unsung heroes responsible for mitigating what could have been a far worse catastrophe, the moral of the story centers on the ceaseless and interdependent lies on which Soviet science was based. The fact that, were it not for a few brave Russian physicists, a critical design flaw in most of the country’s nuclear reactors would have continued to exponentially enhance the possibility of another Chernobyl-like accident unabated, speaks to the existential threat government without any duty to truth reflects.
The dark specter Trumpism represents isn’t just embodied in the constant stream of lies its namesake produces, but in the pathological way his wretched core struggles to consume them and render them somehow palatable to the broader body politic. It’s no longer disputed that the President lies continuously; his massive output is impossible to adequately gaslight and sanitize. Even false equivalence – the proposition all politicians are dishonest and Trump is no more or less guilty of what we have always accepted as a norm – is tacitly deemed inadequate to digest the profligacy of his falsehoods. No, now the narrative has become far more odious, Soviet in nature…. that lies are an appropriate part of the arsenal required to stem liberal assaults on our “freedom.” It’s just “Trump being Trump” and looking past his lies is a patriot’s duty, a failing that can be made a strength so long as one isn’t saddled with the weakness of sentimentality toward absolutes. After all, the ends justify the means.
That Trump seems to be genuinely losing his ability to tell fact from fiction hardly matters anymore. Whatever he says is immediately cleaned up for wretched core consumption by Fox/AM… separating the pit from the fruit and reinterpreting as needed. On the internet false memes, most devoted to either sanitizing Trump or demonizing his critics are shared without thought, original written material being a kryptonite to most Trump supporters. That most of the memes being redistributed are fabrications doesn’t phase the base at all; if it supports the narrative, use it.
Recently an old friend of mine from a youth gone by, and a virulent Trumpie, shared a meme that came by my feed. It was an outrageous lie that quoted Hillary Clinton in 2013 declaring business titans like Trump should run for office while praising his honesty. The message covered all bases, Clinton hypocrisy, Trump greatness, Liberal selectivity of storylines, the full trifecta. I commented to my friend how outrageous the whole thing was, that by 2013 Trump was a leading birther and Obama’s Secretary of State would surely have nothing good to publicly say about him. I asked why he would spread such a clearly fictional message. His response was inane but, taken as typical of a millions-strong sensibility, fully chilling. He lol’d and told me to relax, proclaiming how funny it was. I countered by asking whether he felt any responsibility to be truthful, his response was a full set of lols. Since I was trolling his page, Trump backers came to the rescue, all putting their own stamp on a unified theme…. so what if it’s not true, it could and should be!
Of course, this isn’t to say ignoring fact doesn’t occur on both sides of the aisle, and it certainly isn’t to contend that US political history isn’t rife with distortions and outright lies being introduced for electoral benefits. What’s different now is a dismissal of truth as the final arbiter and judgement mechanism of bad behavior. Trump doesn’t care, or, evidence now seems to indicate, even realize he is lying. And he enjoys a 24/7 multi-media operation intent on regurgitating his thousands of falsehoods into buoyant ballast of the shit river narrative that both created and sustains his viability. No different at all from a state-run information service. TASS in red, white and blue.
For the President’s wretched core, and the new GOP leadership, which now fully reflects and supports Trumpism’s nihilist propositions, “honesty” is now defined as Trump’s constant attacks on the parameters of responsible government. “Truth” is now but a tool to be employed to justify and normalize what just three years ago was unacceptable and politically suicidal. Not much daylight is left between Trump’s complete dismissal of truth as a constraint on behavior and the Republican Party’s allegiance to the concept as a guidepost for government. Right now Mark Meadows and Jim Jordon traffic in Trumpism deceit just as recklessly as the President, no surprise there. But GOP leaders in the Senate are beginning to follow suit, instead of no commenting about one White House lie after another, the Thunes and Grassleys appear ever more willing to act in line with fictional presumptions.
When Trump was elected economic indicators and Department of Labor statistics were corrupt and unreliable. Three months later they were biblically accurate proof of an economic miracle. Before Trump, “tariff” was a dirty word in GOP halls, now the party is engaged in full-time spinning of its ruinous effects on wide swaths of its constituency. Negotiating with North Korea was traitorous in 2015, now Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have trouble speaking English after Trump, with zero evidence or ambition to do any more than simply state a falsehood, disputes US Intelligence on renewed missile testing by Pyongyang. Across the board, from fully inane (“I never said she was nasty”) to the critical (“I never had any business in Russia. Nothing!), we now suffer a compulsive liar as President. What uncharted waters this will lead the country toward, and how we will endure that voyage, most likely will decide whether American democracy goes past tense.
Most critical will be what has always represented the tipping point of authoritarian and totalitarian consumption of societies: will truth lose its status as the absolute standard for both the creation and reflection of reality. Will we accept the premise reality is but a product of what the state deems it to be, or will we demand government tailor its actions to the truths it is forced to face. Near every hour Trump lets us know where he stands on that question. Moreover, certainly his wretched core, and ever-increasingly the GOP, appear consumed by the notion a maniac’s whims should be permitted to supplant inconvenient facts when political ends require it. The degree of comfort the rest of us are capable of finding in such an Orwellian landscape, and whether it will temper the lengths we are prepared to go to in opposing its consummation of our national life, may very well spell our future. The highest of stakes. BC