By Peter Oliver
Truth in politics is in danger, especially at the conservative end of the spectrum. Trumpism's great and enduring contribution to the American political dialogue of the last eight years has been the persuasive power and intractability of mendacity.
Here's how it works: Say things that are profoundly, even absurdly, untrue, and if you say them often and loud enough, veracity will come with repetition. According to the Washington Post, Trump lied more than 30,000 times during his presidency, and he hasn't eased that pace in the years since. His acolytes in Congress and conservative media have followed suit, keeping the drumbeat of falsehood-as-truth pounding in the psyche of ultra-red America.
One reason Trumpers get seduced: the truth is rarely an infallible, inflexible proposition. Truth usually comes in shades of connotation. It is almost always variegated by belief, perspective, context, and choice. Trump aide Kellyanne Conway was widely ridiculed when she forwarded the notion of "alternative facts" a few years ago, but it was actually a reasonable concept. Consider legal disputes, where the selectivity (and malleability) of facts is central. One side chooses and/or manipulates incriminating facts, the other side exonerating facts. Both sets of facts can be truthful, in alternative ways. That's how truth works, most of the time.
OUTRIGHT LIES
However, truth in the Age of Trump isn't really endangered by alternative facts, which, if alternative, are at least factual. Instead, outright lies masquerading as truth is Trumpism in its purer form. Sprinkling a few alternative facts into the steady stream of falsehood and outright lies helps to reinforce the illusion of truth. When falsehood is then disseminated across an internet landscape where anyone with a blog can project the pretense of credible authority, the transformation is complete: falsehood becomes fact and truth gets shunted to the discard pile.
That leads to a critical question: what is the source of any shading of the truth? Or put another way, who do you trust? According to Trumpist doctrine, Trump's word is gospel and the federal government, riddled with deep-state conspirators, and the "fake news" media are serial misinformationists. That's not a particularly new concept in ultraconservative thinking; Trump might have cultivated (or weaponized) an anti-government, anti-media sentiment, but he was not its progenitor. Such anti-fed stuff as the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s, the Waco, Texas, firefight of the 1990s, and the Bundy standoff of the 2010s preceded him. The guiding premise in a nutshell: Don't believe anything the corrupt and conniving feds do or say. The media's role was complicity, acting as a bullhorn amplifying the government's perfidy.
According to a recent Fox News poll, 86% of Republicans (mostly Trump supporters) distrust the federal government, a spike of 57 points in the last 20 years. According to Pew Research, the percentage of Republicans who trust national news organizations has dropped from 70% in 2016 to 35%.
HARVEST TRUTH
Deeply red conservatives now seek to harvest truth from the barren soil of Trumpism. If Trump, his enablers, and a fawning conservative media (One America, Newsmax, Fox News, etc.) say it's true, it's true. Case closed. Bedrock media outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others might claim a many-decades-long track record of journalistic credibility, but in Trump world, never mind. Traditional standards of credibility no longer apply.
Major media outlets and the federal government, to be sure, have in the past abused the truth. Think back to the lies about Vietnam exposed in the Pentagon Papers, or the tribulations of Watergate, or the string of federal officials obfuscating and deflecting before Congress in the Iran-Contra affair. In 2003, the New York Times famously fired a star young reporter, Jayson Blair, for repeated false reporting. In 1998, a New Republic editor, Stephen Glass, was caught fabricating stories and was fired.
But these deviations from truthfulness were, by and large, occasional -- exceptional -- stuff. Most journalists and civil servants consider fidelity to the truth to be foundational to their job descriptions.
Not so in Trump world, where the truth goes to die. Take the federal case against Trump and company regarding the attempted overturn of the 2020 election goes to court, where evidence of guilt is voluminous. Yet Trump and his sycophantic cadre are reconfiguring their antidemocratic shenanigans as patriotic attempts to assure free and fair elections. That interpretation, a combination of patent falsehood and alternative facts, is likely to play poorly in the courts, traditional arbiters of the truth. But never mind. Unfavorable court decisions are like the fake news from the mainstream media or like federal policy: biased against long-suffering patriots. The courts are in on the conspiracy.
In the online polemical madhouse -- countless alcoves of falsehood trumpeting the make-believe as truth -- acknowledgement or accurate identification of the truth succumbs to ideology. This is not exclusively a conservative concept; liberals often become isolated in their own echo chambers as well. But the conservative arc of the political spectrum seems much more comfortable bending toward disinformation and ungrounded conspiracy theories. This situation will only worsen as the internet honeycomb inevitably mutates and metastasizes. A landslide of disparate belief systems will sweep into oblivion what might once have been considered the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Consensus will become impossible. In the end, the truth, whatever that might once have meant, won't matter anymore.
Oliver lives in Warren.
