REAL FACTS ARE CATCHING UP WITH WHITE HOUSE AT LAST
THERE’S always a moment when an electorate falls out of love with a leader, and the leader is the last to notice. Donald Trump has weathered several. Yet try though he might to mark it as a triumph – that the pandemic has claimed “only” 100,000 American lives, the sombre milestone just crossed – the wider population, especially the elderly so critical to his re-election hopes, must see it differently.
Mr Trump believes the truth can be tamed and made to roll over in the White House circus he has created. All the while, he cracks a deafening whip as ringmaster. If you are inside the tent you must be supine and endlessly obedient.
“Facts” will come reflected down a hallway of distorting mirrors: dare to question and risk being dispatched to the freak show.
Many wondered how the terrible toll of the pandemic would be marked, given the heartbreak and trauma which has swept America.
But Mr Trump’s narrative is woven only from success; it is only to be embellished. Anything which might threaten is either dismissed as fake, or ridiculed. Or else it must be ignored.
But the office of the president cannot turn its back on so much tragedy without consequence. For no major public memorial or national commemoration to take place can only add to the hurt.
Mr Trump’s 2016 victory caught most people by surprise, including him.
But now the economy is crumbling beneath his feet. Some 44 million Americans are on welfare.
The fantastical tale he crafted of an outsider against the rest is sounding faintly embarrassing. He claims voting by mail, made necessary by the pandemic, is a conspiracy to deprive him of a second victory, to which he feels he has a right.
He has also declared war on social media with an executive order on the grounds it is hurting free speech. The companies’ crime was to insist on adding fact-check links to his tweets. Twitter and Facebook are not best known for their services to the public record, but there is something preposterous in the truth trampler-in-chief reinventing himself as a champion of free speech.
Not since the McCarthy era have facts been refashioned so ruthlessly to the detriment of the public.
As the ‘Washington Post’ recently recalled, in 1954, the polling pioneer George Gallup penned a prediction about Joe McCarthy’s voters: “Even if it were known that McCarthy had killed five innocent children, they would probably still go along with him.”
Some 62 years later, candidate Donald Trump would issue a similar boast: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Perhaps; perhaps not.
Because despite the bluster, there are no “alternative facts”. There are lies, fake news and misleading messages, but facts must remain facts.
They can and frequently are concealed, on both sides of the Atlantic. But whatever narrative is spun, presidents can come and go but the truth will always be the truth.
Mr Trump believes the truth can be tamed and made to roll over