Trump’s big lie strategy is not just about women
“What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
President Donald Trump was talking about media coverage of his trade war, but he was also describing his genuinely novel approach to governing: He believes that reality itself can be denied and that big lies can sow enough confusion to keep the truth from taking hold.
Take the recording of his September 2016 conversation with his one-time lawyer Michael Cohen that was released Tuesday night.
Cohen’s attorney put out the tape, which, as The Washington Post reported, shows that Trump “appeared familiar with a deal that a Playboy model made to sell the rights to her story of an alleged affair with him.” Karen McDougal sold her tale to the National Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc. The tabloid never ran her account, which clearly protected Trump from this embarrassing tale before the election, although its management has denied that this was its intention.
Obfuscated in this backand-forth is the fact that four days before the 2016 election, Hope Hicks, Trump’s campaign spokeswoman, denied the affair altogether and said that the campaign had “no knowledge” of any payoff.
Trump’s behavior would be bad enough if it were only about his personal life and his treatment of women. But the big lie strategy extends to policy and national security as well.
For example, the Commerce Department, which runs the census, claimed earlier this year that it added a question asking if respondents were citizens in response to the Justice Department’s desire to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
The question is a terrible idea. Six former Census Bureau directors under both Republican and Democratic presidents urged Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross not to include it.
The fear is that many immigrants, documented and especially undocumented, would be reluctant to answer the census if the question were part of it, leading to an undercounting of places with substantial foreign-born populations.
But for the Trump administration, this is not a problem. It’s the goal. Undercounting immigrants would have the effect of shifting political power — as well as federal money — largely to Republican areas that have lower immigrant populations.
And documents turned over this week in response to a lawsuit against the addition of the citizenship question showed that Ross lobbied for its inclusion much earlier and more actively than his later sworn testimony had indicated.
The Justice Department acted months later, a clear sign that the department’s alleged concern for civil rights was simply a pretext for a politically motivated skewing of valuable public information. Distorting data collection is an attack on the truth, too.
And when it comes to creating new and unhinged narratives to displace those rooted in fact, Trump has no equal.
Trump’s core support, measured by the proportion in Wednesday’s NPR/ PBS News Hour/Marist Poll who strongly approve of him, is down to 25 percent.
The bad news is that among Republicans his strong approval number stands at 62 percent. Trump’s hope of clinging to power rests on the assumption that he can continue inventing enough false storylines to keep his party at bay. His theory seems to be that a lie is as good as the truth as long as the right people believe it.