“Wait a minute,” Todd interjected. “Alternative facts?… Alternative facts are not facts. They’re falsehoods.”
She chided the host: “Your job is not to call things ridiculous that are said by our press secretary and our president. That is not your job.”
In other words: We said it, so it’s true.
Kellyanne is not a dumb person. She’s smart, well-read, and normally quite considerate, but like everyone who hangs around Donald Trump too long, she’s been forced to become a reality contortionist. This is what he asks of her, of anyone, to stay in his good graces. He enjoys watching people go out and compromise their integrity in order to serve him.
The president’s untruths resonate with supporters due to their “confirmation bias.” Humans tend to interpret new information as evidence to support preexisting views. For example, if you think dogs are dangerous and someone tells you that a rabid canine is roaming the neighborhood, you are more likely to accept it as a fact and less likely to question it as a rumor, because you already believe dogs are vicious. The social media age has put this cognitive defect on steroids. We can now reinforce our opinions instantly with supporting “facts” found in tweets, on blogs, on liberal or conservative websites, and beyond.
Donald Trump exacerbates this phenomenon by pandering to common prejudices with false information. When he does, the “false” part gets ignored by followers because of their confirmation bias. The “information” part gets absorbed. They are willing to march with him in lockstep if what he says validates what they already believe. This happens on both ends of the political spectrum, but the president exploits it to a level heretofore unseen. You think your government is corrupt? Donald Trump agrees with you, peddling conspiracies about a faceless Deep State secretly pulling the levers of government. Worried about illegal immigrants stealing US jobs by the millions? You should, he says, because they’re swarming America and will probably be cleaning out your desk on Monday.
The epistemological crisis means Americans can’t find common ground because they can’t agree on the same set of facts. The president fudges the truth so frequently on so many issues that we have difficulty reaching a common starting point when we debate one another. Consequently, Americans can’t move from the what to the so what—from the facts of a problem to a course of action for how to solve a problem. Even the little lies President Trump tells, when repeated over and over, have a big impact by gradually changing public perceptions of what is true and what matters.
We are now living in different realities. As evidence, a 2019 survey found Republicans and Democrats are further apart than ever on the issues they say should be the government’s top priorities. The most recent study found “there is virtually no common ground in the priorities that rise to the top of the lists” between the two sides. Democratic respondents said our nation’s biggest challenges were health care, education, the environment, Medicare, and poverty. Republicans said they were terrorism, the economy, Social Security, immigration, and the military. It’s the least amount of crossover the Pew Research Center has found since it began tracking these metrics more than two decades ago. Trump’s rhetoric reinforces these divisions.
The president’s unconcern about the truth has terrible implications for a free society. The Book of John says, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Our capacity to reason—to see through falsehoods—is one of our sturdiest ramparts against threats to democracy. Without it, our republic is vulnerable to creeping encroachments of authoritarianism. Trump’s words have already undercut the independence of the judiciary, excused the overreach of executive power, and chipped away at public trust in government. They are also being used to attack our last hope for truth: the free press.
The president is engaged in an all-out, guns-a-blazing rhetorical battle against journalists. I know there are many Trump partisans who have no problem with the media getting its comeuppance for long-simmering bias against the GOP. That’s the feeling inside the Trump administration, too. The communications team is gleeful when the president lobs a grenade at the press, yet the media, for all of its flaws, exists for a reason in a democracy. They are our defense against the government, a source of power that can’t be censored. But since he can’t censor them, President Trump has tried to do the next best thing and discredit them.
Trump has attacked the media on Twitter well over a thousand times since taking office and tweeted the phrase “fake news” five hundred plus times. His definition of “fake news” has evolved from outlets that report inaccurate information to outlets that criticize him. Privately and publicly, Trump has fumed at his coverage and looked for ways to retaliate against the news media, ranging from taking away access privileges for White House reporters to suggesting the government should open federal investigations into their reporting.
Trump’s views on freedom of speech are most charitably described as perverted. He once said, “See, I don’t think that the mainstream media is free speech either because it’s so crooked. It’s so dishonest. So to me, free speech is not when you see something good and then you purposely write bad. To me, that’s very dangerous speech, and you become angry at it. But that’s not free speech.” That, of course, is the very definition of free speech—being able to criticize a president when he doesn’t like it.
His attitude has trickled down to staff. I remember a rambling ninety-minute press conference in fall 2018 when the president got into it with CNN’s Jim Acosta, who started asking uncomfortable questions about Russia. The president told him to sit down and called him a “rude, terrible person.” Later in the day, Bill Shine, one of the many White House communications chiefs we’ve had, sauntered into a meeting. “Guess what I just did,” he baited aides. “What?” they asked. “I blocked Acosta from getting into the White House. He’s supposed to be on TV tonight from here, but he’s about to find out that Secret Service won’t let him in!” The team laughed and gave him high fives. Acosta could be a jerk sometimes, but I don’t remember the part of civics class where being a jerk was a limitation on the freedom of the press.
Eventually the president adopted a more incendiary view of the media, “the enemy of the people,” a term routinely used by the Soviet Union when imprisoning or torturing journalists who told the truth about the totalitarian state. After Trump first used the phrase, the United States Senate unanimously (as in every Democrat and Republican in the chamber) passed a resolution rebuking it. “Resolved, that the Senate affirms that the press is not the enemy of the people,” it read, “reaffirms the vital and indispensable role the free press serves,” and “condemns the attacks on the institution of the free press and views efforts to systematically undermine the credibility of the press as an attack on the democratic institutions of the United States.”
Donald Trump’s media hate is infectious. By the spring of 2018 more than half of all Republican voters polled said they agreed with the president that the media was the enemy of the people, while only 37 percent believed the free press was “an important part of democracy.” These attitudes will have long-term repercussions on our ability to return to truth, perhaps even violent ones. A few months following the aforementioned poll, pipe bombs were sent to thirteen media outlets and personalities. All of them were figures President Trump had attacked by name, a chilling example of how his words can jump the tracks from careless rhetoric to real-world danger.