Can the US move on from Trump?
The first US election I covered was the 2004 contest between George W. Bush and John Kerry. In Crawford, Texas, where the Bushes had a ranch, I tried the president’s favourite dish, chicken fried steak, and was met along the way by Rosalind, a 61-year-old Republican, who greeted me with an American flag, a Bible and a cassette tape recording of her local pastor.
The tape included a sample of ‘‘patriotic’’ songs, she told me in her soft Texan drawl. Rosalind worried terribly about what would happen to America if Kerry won. She told me a story about something she had read calling into question the decorated veteran’s Vietnam War service, a claim that was later discredited.
Rosalind knew what she knew, however, all but calling Kerry a traitor. ‘‘Sometimes you have to fight,’’ she told me. ‘‘Freedom isn’t free.’’
2004 also happened to be the year Facebook began, of course; Twitter and iPhones were still a couple of years away.
Dirty politics and misinformation were around long before social media. But their ability to reach a massive and receptive audience in seconds has amplified and corrupted the political landscape in a way that was unimaginable in the days of Rosalind’s cassette tape of patriotic songs.
I don’t know what she would have made of Trump; she claimed to have been a lifelong Democrat who turned Republican in disgust at Bill Clinton’s extramarital affairs. Presumably Trump’s documented womanising would have been equally unforgivable. But the power of social media to repeat and spread misinformation has made the truth indistinguishable from lies. Trump grasped that fact early on; he is a president made for social media, using an ungovernable internet to spread misinformation and manipulate facts while convincing his followers the real lies were the ones perpetuated by traditional media.
On the 2016 campaign trial, I lined up for a Trump rally for hours with his supporters; they were kind – to me, a journalist – while also voicing their hatred of the media and its ‘‘fake news’’. The media’s ‘‘lies’’ were all part of the conspiracy by the mainstream media and the Washington elite to discredit Trump and, by extension, keep them down.
Yet they had no trouble believing some of the lurid and frankly implausible stories about Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Out of everything that happened last week this is what should truly scare us; not the violence so much, but the ability of a man caught out lying again and again to incite such hatred and disharmony and tear apart the very fabric of the world’s biggest democracy.
It’s not hard to see how America got to this place; months of fear and uncertainty amid the Trump Administration’s mishandling of the pandemic; schools and businesses closed, a way of life upended, and a society so polarised that the two sides can see events like the Black Lives Matter protests through totally different eyes.
Where will it end? Will it? Or is this only the beginning?
What should truly scare us is not the violence so much, but the ability of a man caught out lying again and again to incite such hatred and disharmony.