1 YEAR 1,000 LIES
Donald Trump’s 365 days as president have been an endless parade of dishonesty. But polls show voters aren’t buying it.
WASHINGTON— If you are looking for anecdotal evidence that evidence no longer matters in American politics, you can call up someone like Lana Shardea.
Shardea, a 73-year-old in Phoenix, believes Donald Trump is “the most intelligent, powerful, courageous president we’ve had in years,” a man with not just knowledge but “superpower knowledge.” She didn’t pay close attention to politics before Trump came along, but she knows enough to know the mainstream media is unfair to him. Thus, she has found three alternative sources of information.
She follows Trump’s tweets. She watches video from proTrump cable channel One America News. And she relies on her friends on Facebook, where she shares videos from Fox News and an article from a website called The Real Conservative.info.
Its headline: “Rothschild: Donald Trump is threatening to destroy the New World Order.”
Shardea is genuinely confused when she is told that many people believe Trump is dishonest. This president, she says, never changes his personality even a little bit. Isn’t “take me the way I am” the very definition of honesty?
“I don’t see how anybody can say he’s dishonest,” she said. “Dishonest about what? What would it be that he’s dishonest about?” About almost everything, honestly. On the day of his inauguration, one year ago Saturday, Trump lied about the weather. The next day, he lied about the size of his inauguration crowd. He has become no less brazen in the 12 months since. The president who won’t change isn’t so much untruthful as anti-truthful, his words so frequently and flagrantly wrong that they amount to a comprehensive rejection of the very idea of accuracy.
The Star has counted 1,064 false claims since his inauguration, an average of 2.9 per day, about everything from media outlets to legislation to the head of the Boy Scouts calling him to pay him a compliment. (Didn’t happen. He just made it up.) As Trump careens from policy to policy and outrage to outrage, lying has been the most consistent feature of his presidency.
“We’ve had presidents that have lied or misled the country, but we’ve never had a serial liar before. And that’s what we’re dealing with here,” said Douglas Brinkley, the prominent Rice University presidential historian. “We haven’t seen anything like this. It’s a storybook, ‘emperor has no clothes’ kind of thing. Or it’s like dictators in countries where they just make up all sorts of crazy things and people are supposed to nod in agreement.”
That tens of millions of Americans are indeed nodding in agreement, of their own free will, has created a profound angst among Democrats and others who worry about a spiral into truthlessness. Some of them despairingly tell journalists not to waste their time fact-checking the lies, since facts have obviously become irrelevant. A hard look at the facts suggests that view is too pessimistic. This is no good-news story. Trump’s year of lying shamelessly has deceived tens of millions, fomented hate, left the world unable to accept even the most trivial words of its most powerful person, and forced Americans, like the residents of totalitarian states, to expend precious energy grounding themselves in the reality their leader is deliberately trying to get them to forget.
What it has not done is work. In office, at least, Trump’s lies have hurt him more than they have helped.
Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress think-tank, is a longtime adviser to Hillary Clinton. In what she calls “the tragedy of 2016,” she watched as Trump deployed daily deception to outmanoeuvre Clinton into the Oval Office.
Today, Tanden is chipper. This year, she said, shows that “facts matter to a majority of the country — a strong majority of the country.”
Trump devotees like Shardea are interesting to talk about, so they’re overrepresented in media coverage. In truth, as Tanden notes, true believers are a distinct minority.
The polls are consistent: there are nearly twice as many Americans who think Trump is dishonest ( just under two thirds of the public) than think he is honest ( just over one third of the public). And the gap might be growing a bit: Trump’s performance in a November CNN poll — 34 per cent called him honest and trustworthy, 64 per cent said he was not — was the worst he had done in a CNN honesty poll since 2015.
Critically, the numbers are even worse for Trump on policy. When it comes to legislation, even many of his own voters are not buying his lies. Other voters, meanwhile, are believing almost nothing he says.
Trump touted his health-care bills as a miracle cure for Oba- macare, a “wonderful” marvel that would provide better care at a lower cost. The bills, in fact loathed by experts, had the support of less than 20 per cent of the public. Trump sold his tax legislation as a “big, beautiful Christmas present” for everyday Americans. That bill, in fact aimed primarily at the wealthy, was mired in the mid-30s and lower.
“Really, the story is he says things and they’re just generally disbelieved by a majority of the country,” Tanden said. “I think people have kind of confused Trump’s base with the majority of Americans. These are not one and the same. (The lying) doesn’t seem to matter to his voters, but it matters to the country.”
For every thoroughly profiled Trump-believer like Lana Shardea, there is more than one Trump-loather like Romeo Newbold.
Newbold, 47, is a car salesman in Orlando. A successful immigrant from the laid-back Bahamas, he said he has always been a low-stress kind of guy. Now, for the first time ever, he is besieged by anxiety, and he says Trump’s barrage of dizzying lies is much of the reason why.
“It’s almost like living in a washing machine. You sit there and you know that eventually somebody’s going to turn it on. But you don’t know when and you don’t know how long it’s going to last,” he said.
What gets him most infuriated is how the media is treating the dishonesty. Lying Trump and his lying minions, Newbold complains, are still being handled with traditional deference — their fictional claims debated rather than flatly declared nonsense.
“I just don’t understand why we’re debating something we know is a lie. There is no debate. You should be called a liar, because that’s what you are, and people should move on,” Newbold said. “We’re still playing the way the British used to fight — the Redcoats. They would line up and they were gentlemen. We’re playing like that while Trump is hiding in the bushes and shooting, guerrilla warfare.”
Trump’s unceasing attack on facts has challenged not only the
conventions of traditional media outlets, most of which still fact-check him only intermittently, but the habits of fact-checkers themselves. Nobody has quite figured out how to deal with a politician who is this intentionally wrong this frequently. Trump is a human version of computer hackers’ denial-of-service attacks, flooding systems with more disinformation than they are designed to handle.
PolitiFact has never been more popular. The fact-checking website is on pace to receive 80 million page views this year, up from 55 million in 2015. And it has never been more besieged.
Editor Angie Drobnic Holan said her instinct is to assign a reporter to do a fact check whenever the president utters any inaccuracy. “But we’re not doing that with Trump,” she said, “just because there are too many.” Similarly, when Trump repeats a lie again and again — he has falsely called America the world’s highest-taxed nation 27 times as of this writing — PolitiFact will only occasionally fact-check it more than once: she thinks readers would find it “strange” to see the same claim re-checked over and over. There is a “real concern,” she acknowledged, that Trump might just keep saying the same things until “people get tired of correcting them.”
People fighting Trump on policy have decided that doing endless repeat debunking is not useful. During the George W. Bush era, said Ben Wikler, Washington director for the advocacy group MoveOn.org, progressive organizers engaged in a constant struggle to get people to understand how they were being deceived by the president’s sophisticated, carefully crafted lies. From Trump, Wikler said, the lies are so blatant that organizers don’t even bother.
Instead of getting mired in fact-check squabbles, they simply ignore the lies and lay out the truth — wherever possible through stories of real people, Wikler said, “because the only inarguable proof is human beings that people can see and hear.” And they don’t waste time worrying about trying to persuade Trump’s hard-core base.
“Trump doesn’t try to fool all the people some of the time. He has a very clear ‘fool some of the people all of the time’ strategy. And there’s not many of those people,” Wikler said.
Even some of Trump’s most frequent targets can see a silver lining. Trump’s lies about Muslims have had serious consequences, said touring New York City storyteller Aman Ali, contributing to an increase in anti-Muslim hate from the rightwing fringe. But Trump is so widely disbelieved, Ali said, that him lying about Muslims has probably made Muslims more popular among mainstream citizens.
This theory can’t be proven true or false, but some data may support his claim. Asked by Pew Research in 2014 to rate their warmth toward Muslims on a scale up to 100, Americans averaged a 40. This year, they averaged a 49.
“I think his lies have 100 per cent, for the better, improved people’s perceptions of Muslims,” Ali said. “It’s forced people to have a dialogue and understanding: ‘OK, wait, are they really that violent? Are they really that kind of people? I know a Muslim.’ ”
The lies have resonated around the world, damaging perceptions of Trump and of America. One of his most bizarre, about Muslims in Europe, produced one of the most creative responses.
Jeppe Wikstromwas on a ski trip in northern Sweden when he heard the news that the president was talking about a terrorist incident “last night in Sweden.”
Wikstrom, a well-known Swedish photographer, thought he would have heard about such an incident, but he hadn’t, so he did a minute or two of Googling, and, no, there was no terror the previous night in Sweden. The president had just said something not even close to true about a random Scandinavian country.
This was mildly amusing. But it was also alarming. The antiMuslim, anti-immigration “alt-right” has made a concerted effort to tar the reputations of high-tax, refugee-friendly European states like Sweden, Wikstrom said. Trump, he thought, had given ammunition to “dark forces.”
He and his photographer peers decided to respond. They produced a book of photos, Last Night in Sweden, depicting what actually happens in their country.
They sent Trump the first copy. Of course, Wikstrom said, they did not expect him to read it.
“He’s made a point about not reading books,” he said. “Perhaps he was looking at the pictures, because they’re great.”
When it comes to voters like Shardea, Trump’s critics are the equivalent of Swedish photographers mailing the White House an unsolicited package.
The riddle nobody has cracked — not in the media, not in the Democratic party — is how to get facts through to people who aren’t looking for them.
If a Lana Shardea is obtaining her news solely from One America, Facebook buddies and Trump himself, how can she even be reached? Even if the facts were put in front of her, would she ever believe them?
Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth College government professor, is trying to find answers. Nyhan studies how people respond to political lies and corrective facts. During the campaign, he ran a study testing how willing voters of all stripes were to “update” their beliefs when presented with factual corrections to Trump’s false statements.
He has good news and bad news for despairing Democrats. The good news: the Trump voters were willing to accept that Trump’s claims had been wrong. The bad news: “It had no consequence for how they felt about Trump.”
This finding matches the public polling: Trump voters regularly don’t believe him, but Trump voters remain Trump voters.
Obsessed with his base above all others, Trump has found no incentive to alter his behaviour. So expect the lying to continue. Just don’t let yourself be deceived into thinking it’s succeeding.
“I think his lies have 100 per cent, for the better, improved people’s perceptions of Muslims.” AMAN ALI A TOURING NEW YORK CITY STORYTELLER