War on truth
From “swiftboating” to slippery definitions of sex, US politicians have a long and dishonourable history of lying on the campaign trail.
From “swiftboating” to slippery definitions of sex, US politicians have a long and dishonourable history of lying on the campaign trail.
Well before he took office, we knew that Donald Trump was, at best, a Walter Mittyesque fantasist and, at worst, a pathological liar. We knew he was a petty, insecure narcissist who must be the hero in every narrative and emerge superior from every comparison.
So, leaving aside the breathtaking “alternative facts” gambit of presidential spin doctor Kellyanne Conway – why do almost all Trump’s inner circle look like cartoon villains? – we shouldn’t be surprised when this president claims black is white. Trump may be engaged in a war on truth, but he didn’t start it: it has been going on – and truth has been taking a beating – for a long time.
Part of the reason Trump gets away with it is we take it for granted that politicians lie and don’t necessarily think poorly of them for doing so. In his case, it helps that, for most of his time in the public eye, he has been a glorified salesman: who in their right mind expects a salesman-turned-politician to tell the truth?
Consider post-war US presidents. Lyndon Johnson supposedly won a tight congressional race by spreading a rumour that his opponent was unnaturally and illegally fond of pigs. (It was in Texas, okay.) “I know it’s untrue,” he told appalled staffers, “but let’s make the son of a bitch deny it.”
Bush father and son played the man in election campaigns with a similar lack of concern for the truth or the damage done. The 1988 presidential election quite possibly swung on George HW Bush’s relentless linking of Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis to convicted murderer Willie Horton, an African-American. Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, a renowned practitioner of anything-goes campaigning, boasted, “By the time we’ve finished, they’re going to wonder whether Horton is Dukakis’ running mate.”
As governor of Massachusetts, Dukakis had vetoed a bill that would have denied first-degree murderers the right to weekend furloughs. While on furlough after a decade in prison, Horton skipped the state; 10 months later, he committed armed robbery, assault and rape. Ironically, in light of the current furore, he was shot and captured by a police officer named Yusuf Muhammad.
In the crucial 2000 South Carolina Republican primary, George W Bush’s team mounted an underground campaign claiming rival John McCain, a former Navy pilot who had spent five and a half grim years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, was a “Manchurian candidate” who’d fathered a child with a black prostitute. The McCains had adopted a Bangladeshi girl: as they say, no good deed goes unpunished. McCain’s campaign never recovered: he went into the contest ahead by 5% in the polls; he finished 11% behind.
KERRY-GO-ROUND
John Kerry, recently US Secretary of State, got the treatment as the Democratic nominee in 2004. Kerry served in Vietnam as officer in charge of a swift boat, winning the Silver Star and three Purple Hearts. On his return, he joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War and became a prominent and outspoken critic of US policy and conduct. During the election campaign, a group of swift-boat veterans and former prisoners of war calling themselves Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT), and funded by Republican donors and Bush supporters, ran television ads attacking Kerry’s military record to the point of insisting he shouldn’t have been awarded his medals. Very few SBVT members were first-hand witnesses; most of those who served alongside Kerry supported his account and the official version of events. The SBVT campaign, which McCain called “dishonest and dishonourable”, was eventually discredited, but some commentators felt it had an influence on what was a tight race. Bush was re-elected and “swiftboating”, meaning to undermine your opponent via a smear campaign that, among other things, questions his or her patriotism, entered the American political lexicon.
Richard Nixon was known as “Tricky Dicky” long before Watergate. That didn’t stop him winning two elections, the second, against George McGovern in 1972, being one of the biggest landslides in US history. Trump mischaracterises his victory over Hillary Clinton as a landslide: he won the Electoral College 304-227 – there were seven so-called “faithless” votes – but lost the popular vote 45.9%-48%; Nixon won the Electoral College 520-17 in 1972 and the popular vote 60.7%-37.5%.
It didn’t take the Monica Lewinsky affair for Bill Clinton to become known as “Slick Willie”; it was said that he’d “always tell a big lie when a small lie would suffice and a small lie when the truth would suffice”. That didn’t stop him getting elected twice, by far more decisive margins than Trump’s fantasy landslide. And despite his sophistries when being interrogated over the tawdry dalliance that dominated his second term – “I did not have sex with that woman;” “it depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” – he left office with an approval rating of 68%, equal highest with Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan for a departing president in the modern era.
Journalists perch just above politicians and used-car salespeople on the untrustworthiness index, although the more palatable the content, the less sceptical consumers tend to be. Nevertheless, the notion that “you can’t believe everything you read in the newspaper” has been around forever and anyone who’s worked in a newsroom is familiar with the breezy tally-ho “don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story”.
Trump’s conduct and rhetoric reveal that he sees himself as a saviour in a dark and dangerous world.
PIONEERING BORIS
According to Libération’s Jean Quatremer, that was Boris Johnson’s inevitable comeback when his fellow Brussels correspondents took issue with his fast and loose reporting on the EU for the Daily Telegraph: “Johnson managed to invent an entire newspaper genre – the Euromyth, a story that had a tiny element of truth at the outset but which was magnified so far beyond reality that, by the time it reached the reader, it was false.” Johnson’s reward for doing as much as anyone to sour Britons on the European project and later co-leading the mendacious Brexit campaign was to be appointed to one of the great offices of state.
Part of the media’s increasingly cavalier attitude towards the truth is reflected in the rise of shock jocks and their print counterparts who will say whatever
it takes to provoke a reaction. Some rightwing American media outlets are now on a virtual war footing and, as we know, truth is the first casualty of war. In 2010, satirist Jon Stewart summed up Fox News’ coverage of Barack Obama thus: “Through their cyclonic perpetual motion machine that is 24 hours a day, seven days a week, they’ve taken reasonable concerns about this president and the economy and turned them into a full-fledged panic attack about the next coming of Chairman Mao.” In Fox’s trademarked slogan “fair and balanced” there’s a faint echo of the Party’s reality-bending mantras in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: war is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength.
Hollywood, that other popular culture juggernaut, has no compunction about falsifying history. Oliver Stone’s 1991 Kennedy assassination movie JFK is a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream, since it directly or indirectly points the finger at the US Government, the Mafia, the CIA, the Dallas police department, Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Vice-President Lyndon Johnson. The World War II drama U-571 (2000) depicts US naval officers capturing the first Enigma machine, a critical development in terms of Allied code-breaking. The events on which the film was based occurred in May 1941; America entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbour the following December, by which time Britain had cracked the German codes. Screenwriter David Ayer explained that the falsification was “a mercenary decision … in order to drive the movie for an American audience”.
The Patriot, a 2000 American Revolutionary War epic starring Mel Gibson, portrays the British as genocidal and virtually ignores slavery, prompting fellow director Spike Lee to describe it as “pure, blatant, American Hollywood propaganda”. Braveheart (1995), starring and directed by Gibson, was ridiculed for its plethora of historical inaccuracies, yet won Academy
Awards for best picture, best director and best original screenplay. It’s interesting to note that, after years on the outer because of his anti-Semitic and misogynistic outbursts, Gibson is re-emerging as a Hollywood player just as the Trump era gets under way.
Hollywood’s stock response is that it’s “just” entertainment, although U-571’ s producers refused to label the movie a work of fiction, as requested by the British naval officer who led the boarding party that secured the Enigma machine. Hollywood is too modest by half in discounting the cultural impact of its output and disingenuous in downplaying the likelihood that some moviegoers assume a film about a historical event in which actors portray the actual participants is, broadly speaking, a historically accurate account. For all the liberties it took, there’s evidence to suggest that Braveheart boosted Scottish nationalism and inflamed anti-English sentiment north of the border.
POST-EVERYTHING
Postmodernism, perhaps the most significant intellectual influence on contemporary culture, and its various threads and offshoots – relativism, social constructionism, structuralism and post-structuralism – have in common a disdain for the concepts of objective reality and absolute truth. Conspiracism, the unthinking person’s world view, goes further, insisting we can’t believe the official version of anything because reality is being manipulated by the powers that be. These two strands of disbelief, high-brow or low-brow, ironic or credulous, converged in postmodernist star Jean Baudrillard’s 1991 book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.
However, the biggest battalions in the war on truth are those deployed by religion and its secular equivalent ideology, since they elevate belief above rationality and groupthink above independence of mind. Both make claims that defy logic, and cannot withstand objective scrutiny; both impose the mindset that, if you have faith/ commitment to the cause, you won’t need evidence to know these claims are true.
So, if you’re a card-carrying conservative and a fundamentalist Christian who believes the Earth was created 5000 years ago and Adam and Eve were real people, why would you scoff when Trump claims God made it stop raining when he rose to deliver his inauguration address? As Newsmax CEO and Trump ally Christopher Ruddy put it, “The Republican base believes they have been victimised by voting fraud. Trump is sort of touching that nerve. People on the right look at [his unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud] and say, ‘He’s telling the truth’.” They don’t require Trump to produce evidence, just as they don’t need to ask how he knows every one of those millions of “illegals” voted for his opponent.
It’s too early to say Trump is creating a cult of personality but his conduct and rhetoric reveal that he sees himself and wants to be seen as a saviour in a dark and dangerous world. Historically, personality cults have been built on relentless propaganda coupled with a state monopoly on information. If the benighted citizens of North Korea believe they’re living in a people’s paradise presided over by a benevolent living god, it’s because that’s all they’ve ever heard, read or seen. We assume it couldn’t happen in an advanced democracy with a free press and a multitude of contending information sources, but the segmentation of the media, along with social media and the ability to connect with like-minded people via the internet, may be changing the equation. We assume Trump watches CNN and reads the New York Times because he frequently assails them (“fake news”), but how many of his followers do? One suspects many of them seldom venture beyond the familiar comforts provided by Fox, Breitbart, Infowars, Rush Limbaugh et al. And if and when true believers do venture out to see what the “lamestream” media is saying about Trump’s immigration crackdown, for instance, does it give them pause for thought or harden their conviction that he’s absolutely right about the “dishonest” media and the need for decisive action to curb infiltration by undesirables?
The segmentation of the media, along with social media and the ability to connect with like-minded people via the internet, may be changing the equation.
LIES INTO TRUTH
The flip side of this coin is that the liberal-media echo chamber can create a false impression that Americans are united in their fear and loathing of Trump, as
happened during the election campaign. When the Huffington Post tells you the US is up in arms about Trump’s executive orders, just remember there are 320-odd million Americans.
It’s also too early to risk falling foul of the corollary of Godwin’s Law that holds whoever makes a Hitler comparison loses the argument, but Trump’s methodology is reminiscent of Hitler’s theory of the big lie, specifically the tactic of lying your head off while accusing your opponents of lying. Thus Trump dubbed his main Republican opponent Ted Cruz “Lyin’ Ted” while pushing a gossamerthin supermarket tabloid story claiming Cruz’s father met Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the Kennedy assassination. Similarly, his false claims about Obama’s birthplace, the American economy, the crime rate and the state of inner cities follow the Nazi blueprint: make it big, keep it simple, keep saying it and eventually they’ll believe it. As Joseph Goebbels, the Third Reich’s Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda and the prime theoretician of the black art, put it: “A lie told once remains a lie. A lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.” The lies will keep coming because Trump’s ego, authoritarian instincts, political brand and stated goal of overturning the established order demand that he presents himself as a 21st-century man on horseback who will save the republic from “American carnage”. And he can’t honestly pull off that trick.