WASHINGTON (AP) – The folklore of the cherry trees it’s too good to be true, but it’s no lie that George Washington had a thing for the truth. “I maintain the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is the best policy,” he wrote in his farewell address.
A few decades later, another future president’s reputation for truthfulness earned him a well-known nickname: Honest Abe Lincoln.
Then there’s Donald Trump, who during his presidency faced questions about trade deals in Moscow. “I have nothing to do with Russia,” he said in 2016. He changed his story when the facts of his decades-long effort to build a luxury tower there emerged. “Everybody” had always known about the project, according to Trump, who suggested that only a fool would abandon such a proposal just because he wanted to serve his country as president.
“Why should I miss so many opportunities?” Trump said.
America has had crooks in the Oval Office before, but never one who has been at war with the truth so regularly, on so many different issues. As a candidate and as president, Trump demonstrated a great ability to use broadcast and social media to amplify his distortions, and he was remarkably successful in convincing large parts of the American public.
As Trump seeks a second term while fighting federal and state impeachment charges, the nation faces the prospect of another campaign filled with falsehoods and misinformation, and the possibility that he could be returned to the White House by an electorate that either either believe their falsehoods or not. do not care.
“This is a testing time. We haven’t been in a situation like this,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Jamieson said that before Trump, the assumption was that certain lies — lies that undermine faith in democracy or the courts, for example — would be disqualifying for a person seeking public office. “If saying the election was rigged doesn’t fall into that category, what does?”
As a candidate, Trump made disinformation a major campaign tactic, routinely using falsehoods to degrade his rivals, as he did when he outlandishly claimed that Ted Cruz’s father may have played a role in the Kennedy assassination. Cruz is now an unapologetic Trump supporter.
As president, Trump misled Americans about economic indicators, about a hurricane, about climate change, and about his past actions and meetings with foreign leaders. While leading the nation through the pandemic, he downplayed the seriousness of the coronavirus while endorsing bogus cures.
In today’s fragmented information ecosystem, journalists’ efforts to fact-check the president did not always reach those who accepted his words as truth. That may be changing, according to one Republican strategist who said he believes his party is waking up to Trump’s universe of alternative facts.
“To me, he’s kind of a tragic 77-year-old individual who is totally out of touch with reality, who creates his own reality,” said Craig Fuller, who served in the Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush administrations. . Fuller said he believes the relatively large field of Republicans competing with Trump for the GOP endorsement is a sign that many voters want a more honest alternative, although a large field also improves Trump’s chances of winning.
“I think it’s almost too dangerous to contemplate,” Fuller said when asked to envision a second Trump term.
A message seeking comment from the Trump campaign was not immediately returned Friday.
During his presidency, Trump lied so many times — in person, on TV, on Twitter — that accounts of their falsehoods it quickly reached 100, then 1,000, then 10,000, then 30,000. a whole wikipedia page was created dedicated to tracking.
Elections and voting have long been the most frequent target of Trump’s falsehoods. She won the 2016 race but claimed it was rigged anyway because she lost the popular vote. He declared that the 2020 race was rigged even before election day and said before the vote that the only way to lose the election was because of cheating. Evidence was never offered, and after the election, Trump’s claims were rejected by dozens of courts, including those overseen by Trump-appointed judges.
It was Trump’s lies about democracy and the integrity of elections and courts that most worried experts on voting, politics and history.
“It’s not the first step, it’s the 100th step on the road to despotism,” Jeffrey Engel, director of Southern Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History, said of Trump’s attacks on judicial independence and enforcement. of the law “What surprises me is how open Trump is.”
Conflicts between presidents, Congress and the courts are a fundamental part of American government, Engel said, and many presidents have shaded the truth about personal and public failings. But no one has openly challenged another branch the way Trump has.
For months before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Trump implored his supporters with a steady stream of false claims about rigged elections, mail-in ballots and stuffed ballots. He then did little to disperse the violent mob that soon descended on the Capitol. The congressional investigation into the attack concluded that Trump participated in a conspiracy to overturn the election.
To activists working to strengthen American democracy, the deadly riot showed what happens when lies are allowed to take the place of the truth.
“On January 6, we learned again how fragile our democracy is,” said Nathan Empsall, an Episcopal priest who heads Faithful America, a religious nonprofit that has criticized efforts to rewrite the history of the January 6 “If we do ‘We don’t remember that, if we forget what happened, we might not be able to hold the line next time.’
While Trump did not create the factors that led to our current era of polarization and misinformation, he did exploit those factors, said Julian E. Zelizer, a historian and political scientist at Princeton University.
“I don’t know if Donald Trump is the chicken or the egg, but I know he’s part of the fight,” Zelizer said. “He came into politics in an era of social media and growing issues of mistrust and catalyzed them. He poured gasoline on the burning flames and apparently the statements he makes don’t have to be tied to reality because his believers like his version better.”
When Trump went on trial in New York in April on charges of falsifying business records to hide hush money payments in an effort to influence the 2016 election, many of his online supporters openly compared the scandal-plagued thrice-married tycoon with Jesus Christ, who Christians believe rose from the dead after his crucifixion.
His vocal supporters online have remained just as supportive following his federal indictment this month.
Trump may be emblematic of our current age of misinformation, but mistrust and political polarization cannot be attributed to a single individual and typically stem from deep social fissures and economic pressures, according to Nealin Parker, executive director of Common Ground USA, a non-profit organization that studies ways to bridge America’s political divide.
“People are often looking for a silver bullet: If we didn’t have this political leader we’d be fine,” Parker said. “But that’s not how it works.”
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EDITOR’S NOTE: David Klepper has covered misinformation for The Associated Press since 2019.
