Yes his speech offered hope, but Trump’s fatal flaw is his inability to tell the truth
ON TUESDAY in Washington, President Donald Trump addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress, and Democrats blocked their ears in fearful anticipation of what they might hear.
A declaration of war on China or North Korea? A promise to bomb Iran? A threat to pull out of Nato?
In the event, they got none of these things, but instead an oration moderate in tone by the standards of Trumpery, dominated by waffle that was not much worse than that spouted by many other national leaders.
Such as: ‘ Everything that is broken in our country can be fixed. Every problem can be solved. And every family can find healing and hope.’
Optimists claim Trump’s speech did, indeed, offer a gleam of hope; that this presidency may prove less disastrous than even many Republicans in his own party fear.
Yet a towering problem persists. Nobody around the world, nor even many people inside the White House, can readily believe anything the President of the United States says, even about whether it is Wednesday or Thursday.
As a result, the Washington Post scores Trump’s demonstrably false public statements, awarding them ‘Pinocchios’ — he amassed almost 150 in his first 40 days of office.
The President’s Congressional speech added another fat batch. For instance, he claimed that 94 million Americans are unemployed. Yet only 7.6 million are seeking jobs. He said that America has spent $6 trillion on its Middle East wars — when a realistic figure is less than a third of that.
He made claims for his achievements since taking office, above all for repatriating ‘American jobs’, that don’t survive much scrutiny.
A fortnight back, he made an almost demented assertion about an alleged incident involving immigrants in Sweden — which turned out not to be true, but based on a TV report about apparent migrant- related crime problems in that country.
Threats
Tuesday’s announcement to Congress that he plans to increase defence spending by $54 billion so ‘nobody is going to mess with us’ reflects a 20thcentury vision of threats to Western security, and is unsupported by any credible account of where they’ll find the cash.
Fundamentally, I believe the issues of truth and falsehood will prove central to the fate of Donald Trump’s presidency.
Forget the arguments about his plan to replace the ‘disastrous’ Obamacare health insurance scheme, concerns over China reducing U.S imports if Trump imposes steeper tariffs on Chinese goods, relations with Russia and a free-for-all in American gun ownership.
What matters most is whether the Trump White House can show — against all signs so far — that it understands the difference between what’s true and what is not.
Meanwhile, hostilities with America’s media are proving difficult to satirise. Last week, staunch critics (such as the New York Times) were barred from a White House briefing.
Trump’s government cares to communicate only with its own conservative constituency, and sticks with his denunciation of the mainstream media as ‘the enemy of the people’ — which prompted Republican Senator John McCain to say: ‘ That’s how dictators get started.’
No one was surprised when a dictator such as President Vladimir Putin denied that his government shot down a Malaysian airliner and murdered 298 innocent people over Ukraine in 2014, because Russian leaders have always peddled such lies.
The world laughed in 1966 when Chinese propagandists published a photograph showing Chairman Mao Zedong, aged 72, purportedly during a ten-mile swim down the mighty Yangtze river.
Dictators claim to have written War And Peace, discovered the Theory of Relativity, wrestled a grizzly bear or impregnated a thousand women.
Thank goodness that does not happen in democracies.
Fake
Only now it does. Last month, President Trump made the outrageous public claim — as he tried to defend Putin against allegations that the Kremlin ‘killed’ journalists — that the U.S. ‘does plenty of killing, too’. It was a gift to Putin’s lie machine.
Meanwhile, Trump rejects as ‘fake news’ those media reports that not a single American has been killed since 1975 by a terrorist from any of the seven Muslim countries whose citizens he is seeking to prevent from entering the U.S.
Yet the Trump faithful stubbornly believe their hero, rather than provable facts.
They get their information not from the New York Times, the BBC or mainstream U.S. networks, but from social media — through which they exchange ‘alternative news’ with other like-minded folk — or rabidly Right-wing sources such as Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch, who, it is said, enjoys a close personal relationship with Trump.
A recent poll showed while only 19 per cent of all Americans regard Fox as their prime news source, 40 per cent of Trump supporters do. Facebook is also big in their lives — and their lies. Many of the most damaging charges made against the President simply are not aired by such outlets.
The Washington Post has become the most formidable crusader for the cause of truth, deploying a regiment of fact- checkers to highlight Trump’s falsehoods.
It may prove to have been one of the President’s big mistakes to attack Jeff Bezos, billionaire overlord of Amazon and owner of the Post. A friend of mine who spent most of his career on the newspaper says: ‘Bezos used to be completely non-political. Now, Trump has politicised him big time.’
Bezos never interferes in editorial policy, but for the past four years he has poured cash into the Washington Post in a fashion that has restored its position as one of the world’s great newspapers.
The Post leads the charge to show the U.S. that much of what their President tells them is for the fairies.
In Britain, enthusiasts for implementing the pernicious proposals of Sir Brian Leveson and Max Mosley for shackling our Press might do well to heed this lesson. For all its limitations, a free media is the most effective check on a government that threatens to run amok, or a national leader who displays symptoms of megalomania.
Indeed, some psychologists suggest Trump is not so much a purveyor of mendacity as a man in thrall to self- serving delusions. He and his supporters inhabit a parallel universe, in which reality is whatever they decide. This is just as dangerous as deliberate lying.
There was nothing wrong with the tone of the President’s speech to Congress — he was on his best behaviour.
Terrifying
But he offered essentially the same promises he dished up on the campaign trail — to ‘make America great again’, bereft of any hint of how he will fulfil his dreams, far less pay for them, almost certainly because he has no idea how to do it.
Republican strategist Rick Wilson, a Trump critic, suggests that a recent White House news conference ‘could have been evidence in a mental competency hearing’, adding: ‘It was really pretty disturbing and terrifying to watch this guy and think: “What happens when the stakes are higher?” ’
We must cling to wisps of hope for the sanity of the Trump administration, because there is no choice: this is the only leader the Western world has got, presumably for the next four years.
But it was a Republican, not a Democrat, who said after Trump’s Congress speech that it ‘still does not prove that this man is fit to govern’.
Until Donald Trump acknowledges that the world is round, rather than flat, we may be forgiven for staying pretty scared about what goes on in the White House.