Trump’s lies could linger in politics
In an extraordinary White House address Thursday, President Trump falsely accused Democrats and poll workers of conspiring to steal the election for Joe Biden, raising the prospect he could become the first president in American history unwilling to accede to the peaceful transition of power.
“We can’t have an election stolen like this,” he announced. “There’s been a lot of shenanigans, and we can’t stand for that.”
It was perhaps the most brazen example yet of Trump’s willingness to misinform the public, which now stretches from his earliest tall tale as president about the size of his
inaugural audience to his evidence-free assertion Thursday that Democrats “are trying obviously to commit fraud” and “never believed they could win this election honestly.”
Trump’s years of fabrications — more than 20,000 false or misleading statements while in office, according to a count by the Washington Post — are no accident, and are perversely effective for a president whose frequent social media posts reach tens of millions, according to some political observers and critics of the president. He has, they say, set a dangerous precedent in American politics that is likely to outlive his time as commanderinchief.
“President Trump’s false claims of victory have no legal effect,” said Professor Jessica Levinson of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “But they have a strong political and psychological effect.”
Although Trump may soon be swept from the stage, he won the support of nearly 70 million voters, about half the electorate. While many approve of his tax cuts, his nomination of conservative Supreme Court justices and his crackdown on immigration, many have also been willing to absorb his vision of reality, or at least to overlook his frequent dishonesty.
“Some supporters don’t really believe Trump — but they’re afraid of the alternatives,” said Bruce Cain, a political science professor at Stanford University. “The bottom line is, they are more afraid of ( House Speaker) Nancy Pelosi.”
But Trump’s baseless claims about the election were echoed by pockets of his supporters across the country. In Brentwood on Thursday, a man hanged a mannequin by its neck on a rope with a sign reading, “Sleepy Joe ( Cheater).” Authorities said the resident’s action was protected by the First Amendment, but forwarded the matter to the U. S. Secret Service.
Trump’s false claims are a psychological technique and a “political gambit,” said Joe Tuman, professor of politics and legal communications at San Francisco State University. “His second father was, in many ways, Roy Cohn, the hatchet man for Joe McCarthy,” the senator who accused countless innocent people of treason on false grounds that they were Communists in the 1950s.
It was Cohn, McCarthy’s legal counsel and later a mentor to Trump, “who actually taught Donald Trump about the necessity of lying. Who imbued Trump with this sense of refusing to admit a fault or to accept the blame for something,” Tuman said. “It’s served Donald Trump very well. He lies constantly. But the damage to democracy is that he’s normalizing lying.”
Trump’s Twitter account on Thursday was a testament to his willingness to lie and the difficulty of countering that. One after another, the social media company flagged his posts, hiding them behind a warning: “Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process.”
One Trump post that survived was “STOP THE COUNT!” The tweet quickly became a mantra among his supporters protesting in battleground states where vote counts were trending toward Biden. “Stop the count!” they shouted.
Political observers and Trump critics have called his deceptions a form of psychological warfare meant to disorient and confuse the public, like George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.
“Say it over and over, and people will believe it,” especially if the claim comes from an authority figure such as the president, said Steven Hassan, author of “The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control.”
Trump and his supporters, with little basis, repeated “Lock her up!” in 2016 before Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. This year, Trump has pounded on the idea that a coronavirus vaccine was forthcoming — first in the spring, and then before election day — to downplay the danger of the coronavirus.
Another technique is “projection,” Hassan said, in which the president projects onto others what is true about himself. “That Biden is ‘ against God,’ while Trump is the godless one,” he said.
The success of such techniques “is not magical,” Hassan said. “It’s psychological warfare meant to disorient people, confuse people” and undermine experts and institutions.
Trump will influence the American consciousness for a long time to come, said George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist and professor emeritus at UC Berkeley who has written that conservative voters tend to prefer a “strict father morality” in their politicians more than liberal voters do.
“People ( who support Trump) aren’t going away. The people on Twitter and Facebook aren’t going away,” Lakoff said. “And he’s not going away.”