On a dreary morning in April 2011, I found myself facing sleep-addled reporters in a half-empty White House briefing room. From the earliest days of my career, I had dreamed about standing at this very spot.
The “Podium,” as it’s known to everyone in Washington, is the top of the game. It’s like the mound at Fenway for a ballplayer. If you are standing there, then you have made it. The White House briefing room is one of the most famous rooms in the world.1 History has been made in this room more times than one can count.
I had long thought about what it would mean to be in this exact spot as a senior White House aide. This was supposed to be a big moment for me. But as I walked up to the podium, I thought to myself:
Was I there to announce important new government policy?
Nope.
Was I there to joust with the media about the issues that mattered?
Nah.
Was I there to respond to the mad ravings of a conspiracy theory–spreading reality television star?
Bingo.
I had walked into the briefing room that morning with fifty copies of Barack Obama’s birth certificate, so we could prove once and for all that the man who was in his third year as president after winning a historic electoral landslide was an American citizen eligible to be president.
The term “fake news” was not yet part of the political lexicon, but this might very well have been the moment when it rose from something that elicited an eye roll to something that necessitated a full-throated response from the White House.
The era of #FakeNews was born.
“Fake news” may now be on the tip of everyone’s tongue—especially President Trump’s—but it didn’t just magically appear in 2016. The battle against fake news was a defining element of the Obama era. We dealt with it, worried about it, and were disheartened by it from the very beginning of the campaign. It’s something Donald Trump played a large role in perpetuating long before he was a candidate for president, and it just may have cost Hillary Clinton the White House.
But what is fake news? Like so much in politics these days, it’s way more confusing than it should be since it has several meanings.
In the months before the 2016 election, the following stories went viral:
Each of these stories received more than 500,000 engagements on Facebook—much greater than factual articles from the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets during the same period. And they were all complete, unadulterated bullshit. In these cases, the stories were completely made up by outside actors, including the Russians, and then spread on Facebook to influence the election.
There is also the screaming of “fake news” at any piece of information that one doesn’t like, even (and often) when it is undeniably true. This is in some ways a defense mechanism for our infantile and insecure president, but it has an even more alarming purpose. The point is to signal to Trump’s most diehard supporters to dismiss any piece of news that is bad for Trump, even if it is objectively and obviously true. When it was revealed that Donald Trump Jr., Trump’s oldest son and the Fredo of the Trump clan, was corresponding with someone representing the Russian government about their efforts to help Trump win, Trump’s supporters refused to believe the story and questioned the authenticity of the e-mails, even though they were released by Fredo himself.
However one chooses to define it, the fake news phenomenon is about the country moving into an era of post-truth politics, and 2016 was the tipping point.
In the past, even the slipperiest politicians adhered to a plausible deniability of dishonesty. Instead of outright lying, they put some measure of spin on a set of facts. Sometimes the spin was so absurd that it was hard to distinguish it from a lie, but at the end of the day, it was rooted in some truth, even if it perverted that truth beyond recognition.
Trump was a wholly different entity. He was unburdened by the shame that keeps most people from outright lying. The media and the Clinton campaign were entirely unprepared to deal with something like this. Trump didn’t play by the rules. He couldn’t be chastened by criticism or persuaded by facts.
In 2016, Trump and his team (foreign and domestic) were able to take this one step further and used Facebook to weaponize his lies and spread the fake news far and wide.
But like so much with Trump, it’s easy to forget that Trump is a symptom, not the disease that affects the body politic. The underlying causes of the fake news phenomenon have been building for years and they were a defining element of the Obama era. Even if we didn’t use the term “fake news,” we dealt with the seeds of the “post-truth” era from the very beginning of Obama’s first campaign.
When I pictured my debut in the White House briefing room, I did not imagine that it would be for such an absurd reason.
Serious things were happening in the world. We had two active wars, Europe was on the brink of a financial crisis that could collapse the US economy, and we were headed into a major legislative showdown with the new Republican majority in Congress that had massive implications for the future of the country. Yet nearly every time the president or any White House official took questions from the media, they were asked to respond to whatever absurdity had come out of Trump’s mouth in his latest appearance on the Today Show or Fox & Friends.2
In all fairness, most of the time the reporters were sheepish when they asked the question. These were (mostly) serious people who had joined a serious profession to cover serious issues being forced to ask an unserious question because of the never-ending search for ratings, clicks, and retweets. But nonetheless, the president of the United States was being forced to respond to a reality star less relevant than the Real Housewives.3
Beyond the abject absurdity of the messenger, the claim that the president wasn’t born in the United States, which came to be known as birtherism, was a particularly kooky conspiracy theory.
Birtherism wasn’t new when Trump turned it into a crusade. It had been around since the early days of the campaign. It was the subject of a series of malicious e-mail chains that were being forwarded around the Internet. These e-mails contained a wide array of false and particularly ridiculous information about Obama including:
This was the era of journalism before social media, so the media mostly responsibly refused to cover the e-mails. They would check out the rumors, find them to be ridiculous, and then refuse to amplify them.
Despite this mainstream media blackout, birtherism was gaining a disturbing amount of traction among some of the voters in rural Iowa—which hosted the critical first-in-the-nation caucus. Our field organizers were getting questions from the voters they were contacting. Most of the questions were well intentioned. Democratic primary voters were scarred from consecutive losses and were viewing this information through the prism of Obama’s electability. If we nominate Obama and this info comes out, will the Republicans win again? Our field staff would tell people it’s not true, but they wanted proof to soothe their own concerns but also to share with their friends and family.
So we made the decision to post Obama’s “Certificate of Live Birth “on the Internet. This was not an easy decision. It ran counter to one of the cardinal rules of political communications: Don’t give oxygen to malicious rumors. It’s better to ignore them than dignify them with a response that would catapult rumors from the dark corners of the Internet to the front pages of the New York Times. But that rule—like most of the rules that governed public relations strategy—was written before the Internet.
To a certain extent this tactic worked—the voters who wanted to support Obama were mollified by this information. Like all campaigns, we focused all our energy and resources on the people who might support our candidate. These are the people on whose doors our organizers knocked and whose phones they called. It’s one of the realities of campaigns that you cannot afford to spend any energy talking to voters or campaigning in states that will never support your candidate. Therefore, we didn’t have any insight into how the Far Right of the Republican base was feeling about Obama’s citizenship. As far as I was concerned, the issue had been put to bed.
Once we got to the White House, we were inundated with the more serious issues that come with running the world and I didn’t think about those old campaign rumors. Every once in a while, I would get called up to the White House counsel’s office to get a briefing because a collection of crackpots had sued the president to challenge the legitimacy of the election over the birther issue. The lawyers told us not to worry about it, and I didn’t.
While we were focused on things like saving the economy and passing a health care bill, however, the right-wing fringe was in overdrive. They had become convinced that the “Certificate of Live Birth” we’d released during the campaign was a forgery. A major part of the conspiracy centered on the difference between the “Certificate of Live Birth” we released and his “long-form birth certificate,” which was on file with the state of Hawaii. It’s hard to overstate how dumb a discrepancy this is, but it is also hard to overstate how dumb the Far Right of the Republican Party can be.
And then Donald Trump, a man whose depraved desire for attention would make a Kardashian blush, latched on to the cause. Trump was embarking on a press tour to promote the next season of The Celebrity Apprentice and was looking for ways to juice up the middling ratings of the show. He was even floating a presidential run, which is an old PR tactic for tricking the media into covering you. Almost no one took the idea that Trump was going to run seriously, he had employed this gambit before, but all the media needed was an excuse to put Trump on the air to say absurd things. And he certainly obliged again and again. Early on in this effort, he realized that he could get even more attention if he brought up the birther conspiracy.
All of a sudden, the media could talk only about Donald Trump and the president’s birth certificate (or the lack thereof). Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, was being asked to respond to Trump almost daily. It was coming up in Obama’s press interviews. It was becoming clear we had a problem.
One day I was walking back to the Oval Office with Obama after yet another encounter with the press where he was asked to respond to questions about his birthplace.
“Maybe we should put the birth certificate out and be done with this,” Obama said half in jest or so I thought.
“That would show them. But you know we can’t do that, right?” I responded also half in jest.
Obama said he agreed with me, but I could tell he didn’t really mean it. I had seen this before, when he was working his way to a certain position. I made a mental note to warn Plouffe so that he could head it off at the pass.
A few weeks later, we were on a fund-raising trip to Chicago. Whenever we spent the night in Chicago, the president would stay at his house. He would often say that his Chicago home was frozen in time from the moment right before he took office. On his desk was the mail that came in January 2009 before they moved to DC. Whenever he was home, often alone, he would root through all his stuff. On this particular trip, he was going through a box and found what he believed was his birth certificate. To this day, it isn’t clear whether he stumbled upon this document or went looking for it. I have always suspected the latter.
The president was excited about his find. He brought it back to the White House and showed it to Plouffe and Bob Bauer, the White House counsel. He told them that he wanted to release the birth certificate and put the issue to rest. Bauer took one look at what Obama had in his hand and knew that it wasn’t his actual birth certificate. Instead, the president had found a ceremonial document that is sold in hospital gift shops. This is the document that families often frame, but you can’t use it to get a passport or debunk a racist conspiracy theory burning up the Internet.
Obama was clearly disappointed by this fact, but was not deterred. He directed Bauer to begin the process of acquiring his official or long-form birth certificate from the state of Hawaii. He didn’t commit to releasing it, but he told Bauer and Plouffe to get it so we had it in our back pocket just in case.
During this period, I was living in blissful ignorance of these machinations even though I knew the president was interested in releasing his birth certificate. This was a classic Barack Obama move. He had a natural tendency to want to address the elephant in the room, even if it took him off whatever we thought was the best message. His instinct was usually right, but in this instance, I couldn’t bring myself to give in to Donald Trump and the band of racist nutjobs that he represented.
In late April, I got a call to head up to Bauer’s office. When Lauren Thorbjornsen, my assistant, asked about the topic of the meeting, she couldn’t get an answer. Being called to the White House counsel’s office was a lot like getting sent to the principal’s office in high school. If you were there, there was a good chance you were in trouble. This was a particularly anxious time to be summoned by the White House counsel, since the Republicans had taken over Congress and were launching politicized investigations into Obama administration activities in the hopes of finding wrongdoing somewhere.4 We all lived in fear of being subjected to a congressional subpoena, having our e-mails and other documents released to the world, and amassing tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills that we couldn’t afford.
I walked into Bauer’s wood-paneled office with more than a little trepidation. Plouffe was sitting on Bauer’s couch. This was another alarming sign. My boss, the lawyer, and me; this can’t be good.
“Am I going to jail?” I asked to break the ice.
“Almost certainly, but that’s not the purpose of this meeting,” Bauer responded with trademark sarcasm.5
As I sat down on the couch, Bauer started explaining how he’d ended up requesting the president’s long-form birth certificate from the state of Hawaii and how the president was intent on releasing it to the public. As I processed this piece of information, Plouffe chimed in to say that the president wanted to go into the White House briefing room and release it himself.
“Well, that’s fucking crazy,” I said.
Plouffe explained that the president wanted to use this opportunity to take the conversation to a bigger idea beyond the birth certificate. He wanted to talk about the danger of the political conversation getting diverted by these side issues. This was a better idea than simply going before the nation and saying, “Hey, look, I am American. Deal with it.” But I was still horrified by the thought of the president being forced to go before the nation to defend his own legitimacy. It felt beneath him. It felt beneath the Office.
I could already read all the headlines and tweets to come about how this made Obama look weak. I tried to make my case, but I could tell by the look on his face that Plouffe had made these points to the president and had not prevailed. The basic message was: Take your case to the big guy.
“And, oh yeah, he wants to release the birth certificate in the next two days,” Plouffe added.
Later that day, I went into the Oval Office loaded for bear. The president was seated behind his desk reading some memos. Before I could get my first sentence out, Obama said without even looking up from his papers, “I bet you don’t love my idea.”
I knew I had lost the argument. Obama had already played out all the scenarios in his head and come to a conclusion. I wasn’t going to tell him some angle that he hadn’t already thought of. I beat a strategic retreat. Instead of trying to convince the president not to release the birth certificate, I focused my energy on two things:
First, separating him from the actual release. I proposed that Bauer and I provide it to the media at a briefing and then later that morning Obama could deliver his message to the world in a speech. This would hardly address my major political concerns, but it would at least keep Obama from having to answer a bunch of logistical questions about how we got the birth certificate.
Second, I argued that the release should be a surprise. If we announced it in advance, the press would lose its collective shit and there would be a CNN countdown clock ticking down to the second of release. In the age of the Internet, where a million things are happening at the same time and everything is dissected and analyzed before it even happens, one of the only ways to break through is to catch the world by surprise. He agreed with my recommendations, and I headed back to my office to plot out how to execute this newly hatched plan. My desire for surprise meant we had to avoid leaks at all costs, which meant we would have a very tight circle for this plan. The president’s top advisors and a couple of members of the press staff would need to pull it off without letting anyone else know.
On that sleepy morning, I walked into a nearly empty briefing room. It seemed that many reporters had assumed it would be a typical newsless briefing and decided to skip it. Even many of the reporters who had decided to come to work that day couldn’t be bothered to walk the hundred feet from their work space to listen in.
Then one of the press assistants started handing out copies of the birth certificate. All hell broke loose.
There were audible gasps. People immediately started e-mailing their news desks to tell them that “real news” was being made. The reporters, who had planned on skipping the briefing, were tripping over one another as they sprinted to their seats to get in on the action. After everyone was in place, I read a statement that explained the difference between the document we’d released in 2008 and the one we were releasing today. The reporters assembled before me were equal parts shocked, amused, and ashamed at the spectacle that was unfolding.
The media’s reaction was not different from my own. I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of the whole thing, but I was also embarrassed by the state of my chosen field. In the back of my mind I wondered if I was standing there due to some failure on my part. Was there something I could have done that would have prevented the president from having to try to convince a decent part of the country of his American citizenship?
The media responded to the release of the birth certificate with the professionalism of a pack of rabid hyenas. All the cable news switched to nonstop coverage. Trump was coincidentally headed to New Hampshire that morning for a speech, which added to the drama. We had turned a quiet day into a major news event.
A couple of hours later, the president came to the briefing room to lay out his case.
“Now, normally I would not comment on something like this…But two weeks ago, when the Republican House had put forward a budget that will have huge consequences potentially to the country, and when I gave a speech about my budget and how I felt that we needed to invest in education and infrastructure and making sure that we had a strong safety net for our seniors even as we were closing the deficit, during that entire week the dominant news story wasn’t about these huge, monumental choices that we’re going to have to make as a nation. It was about my birth certificate…But we’re not going to be able to do it if we are distracted. We’re not going to be able to do it if we spend time vilifying each other. We’re not going to be able to do it if we just make stuff up and pretend that facts are not facts. We’re not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers.”
As I sat in one of the chairs on the side of the briefing room reserved for staff to watch the spectacle, I knew the president had been right and I had been wrong. He was making an important point. This was not the first and wouldn’t be the last time that Obama’s unconventional approach to politics had proven to be more prescient than my own.
The release of the birth certificate shut up Trump to the extent that was possible. The reporters covering his faux campaign visit peppered him with questions about how wrong he was regarding Obama’s birthplace. The media that had been party to Trump’s absurdity turned on him with a vengeance. While there were some who thought we had made a strategic error, the bulk of the coverage applauded Obama for how he’d handled a less than ideal situation.
A few nights later was the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where the president gives an annual comedic speech, and Trump was going to be in attendance. We had been planning to make a number of jokes about Trump and the birth certificate issue before the decision was made to release the document.
My first stop after the president gave me my marching orders was Favreau’s office. He had been working on the speech for weeks with Jon Lovett, Axelrod, and a collection of comedians and joke writers. The speech was almost done. Then I showed up with the information that would upend the whole process.
Favreau’s first reaction was to curse me for fucking up his process about forty-eight hours before he owed a draft to the president, but he quickly realized the golden comedic opportunity it presented.
It was an open question if releasing the birth certificate would forever demean the Office of the President and hurt our chances for reelection, but there was no question we were going to have an epic Correspondents’ Dinner speech.
During the dinner, the president brought the house down with joke after joke about Trump, who sat in his seat refusing to laugh. He reportedly got up to leave not long after this joke, which went to the abject absurdity of Trump’s credentials as a potential president:
Now, I know that he’s taken some flak lately but no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than The Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter, like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac? All kidding aside, we all know about your credentials, and your breadth of experience. For example, on a recent episode of The Celebrity Apprentice, at the steakhouse, the men’s cooking team did not impress the men from Omaha Steaks. There was lots of blame to go around, but you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. Ultimately, you didn’t blame [rapper] Lil Jon or [singer] Meat Loaf; you fired Gary Busey. These are the kinds of decisions that keep me up at night. Well handled, sir! Well handled.6
And then the night after the dinner, President Obama stood in the East Room of the White House and announced that a unit of Navy SEALs had killed Osama Bin Laden on his order. Trump had been ushered off the national stage in humiliation. His foray into politics forever ended (or so we thought).
Here’s the bad news: years later, four in ten Republican voters still believed that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. And it’s not that they didn’t know about the birth certificate that was released; it’s that they refused to believe it. They thought it was a forgery. If the mainstream media said it was real, then the mainstream media was lying to cover up for Obama. We had shamed the media into stopping their nonstop, uncritical coverage of Trump’s claims,7 but we hadn’t convinced a lot of people about the truth. They couldn’t hear what Obama was saying because Obama was saying it. And therein lay the problem.
The birth certificate imbroglio was Obama’s highest-profile battle with fake news, but it wasn’t the only one. Over the years, we faced several conspiracy theories propagated by conservative media figures who were believed by an alarmingly significant portion of the populace.
The rumors about Obama’s legitimacy were mostly advanced by figures on the fringes of the Republican Party.8 Notably, establishment figures refused to disavow these conspiracy theories for fear of upsetting their base, but they wanted to avoid being labeled “birthers.” In other words, they wanted weaponized racial animus stoked by people like Trump without being called a racist. In 2012, Mitt Romney made the pilgrimage to Trump Tower to beg for the endorsement of the birther in chief.
This was a sign of things to come.
In 2009, during the battle to pass the Affordable Care Act, better known as “Obamacare,” we saw the first example of mainstream figures utilizing fake news or a false conspiracy theory to advance a specific policy goal.
In a 2009 meeting in the Roosevelt Room prior to kicking off the effort to pass health care reform, David Axelrod presented President Obama with his political analysis of the issue. David made it very clear that even in the most ideal scenario, where we passed the bill quickly and without a lot of fuss, the president would take a big hit—with consequences for the midterm elections the next year and potentially Obama’s reelection in 2012.
David was not trying to convince Obama not to take on health care. As the father of a daughter with epilepsy, he believed passionately in fixing the injustices in our health care system that denied needed health care to people like his daughter. David wanted the president and the rest of the senior White House team to know what we were getting into.
Obama’s response was pretty simple: “What’s the point of amassing political capital if you aren’t willing to use it to help people?” He pointed out to us that if he didn’t try to pass a law to give access to health care to the uninsured on the heels of a landslide election win with huge majorities in Congress, then it would never get done.
“If not now, when?” Obama asked. There was only one answer to that question.
We knew from the failed efforts that came before that health care policy was uniquely susceptible to demagoguery. Fear of the unknown greatly exceeded the public’s concerns about the present system. This factor was the one that was most concerning to me.
We prepared for some of the obvious criticisms of any health care bill: Is it a government takeover of health care? Will it raise your taxes? Will it raise your premiums? Etc. Here’s one we didn’t prepare for: Obamacare will kill you.
I was sitting in my office during a quiet day in August when I received a forwarded e-mail from someone in the White House Legislative Affairs Office asking for talking points to respond to Sarah Palin’s allegation about “death panels” in our health care bill.
Congress had just left town for their monthlong August break, and as far as I could tell, the only people working in Washington were in the West Wing with me. It was also the habit of our Leg Affairs staff, as we called them, to treat any request from Congress, whether it was a request for a bill signing, a White House tour, or talking points from an intern, as if it were a five-alarm fire.
Do I really need to drop what I am doing because some junior staffer for a no-name member of Congress thought it was cool to call the White House? And to top it all off, it was Sarah Palin, who had gone from sensation as Alaska governor and GOP vice presidential candidate to national joke in record time. Palin was last seen delivering her annual Thanksgiving turkey-pardoning speech while behind her a farmer was putting turkeys one by one into the slaughter machine.
Included in the e-mail was the text of something Palin had posted on Facebook earlier in the day:
The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
While no one in the media took Palin seriously, she still had a devoted following on the Far Right. Her post had caused a stir, and members of Congress had started to get calls. I had a decent handle on the details of the health care bill making its way through Congress, and I had no clue what Palin was talking about. I dismissed it as gibberish, forwarded the e-mail to someone on the research staff, and went home for the weekend.
Although I didn’t realize it at the time, Palin was referring to a provision in the law that provided Medicare funding for voluntary consultations with doctors about hospice and other “end of life” care options. This was an innocuous policy that had previously received bipartisan support. Now, in hindsight, using the term “end of life” was a terrible idea, but in a world where facts and truth reigned supreme, it would be impossible to turn this into forced euthanasia for the elderly. But alas, we did not live in that world.
Because Congress was on recess, the members were spending time back in their districts. More and more people were coming to their events and asking about these “death panels.” The idea took off like wildfire. People believed it and were scared.
Unlike the birther controversy, Republicans leaders didn’t stay away. They jumped at the opportunity to score political points. The Republican leader of the House, John Boehner, issued a statement a few weeks later that said, “This provision may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia if enacted into law.”
Boehner knew that what he was saying was complete bullshit. He just didn’t care. He saw an opportunity to cynically exploit people’s fears and went for it.
In August, Iowa senator Chuck Grassley, who was the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, which was helping write the Senate version of the health bill and had been discussing a potential compromise with Obama, was confronted by a constituent sincerely concerned about the rumored death panels in the health care bill.
Grassley, who was intimately familiar with health care policy and certainly knew the truth, had two options at that moment: Tell his constituent the truth and reassure them, or try to score political points. Grassley chose the latter, telling the constituent that “you have every right to fear…[We] should not have a government run plan to decide when to pull the plug on grandma.”
Obama wanting to pull the plug on Granny became a common GOP talking point amplified 24/7 on conservative talk radio and Fox News. One day Sarah Palin posts on Facebook, and before we know it, we have a full-blown political crisis on our hands.
I was the deputy communications director at the White House at the time and auditioning for the top job. Once the death panel rumors started and our political prospects had started to go south, Rahm and Anita Dunn, who had become the interim White House communications director, asked me to oversee the communications regarding health care. My charge was to “bring some Obama campaign style rapid response tactics” to the fight for health care.
Step 1 was to set up a website specifically dedicated to responding to these false attacks. Obamacare as a not-so-secret strategy to kill old people was the highest-profile and most pernicious attack, but it was far from the only one. The Republicans would repeat ad nauseam that our plan would increase the deficit, even though it was completely paid for through a combination of tax increases and spending cuts. They alleged that it would cut the Medicare benefits that seniors depend on. Also completely false. We needed a one-stop shop where people could come for the truth and our allies could easily find the talking points and other information that they needed to respond to questions.
We started using the work done by fact-checking sites such as PolitiFact and Factcheck.org to set the record straight and call out specific politicians for perpetuating this lie.
A major effort was made to shame the major news outlets into running stories that debunked the claim. We deployed surrogates to local TV stations via satellite.
We even had the president address the death panel accusation in a nationally televised address before Congress that was watched by 32 million Americans.
These efforts had an immediate impact. The media began to challenge Republicans who brought up death panels. Most important, we calmed the waters with the Democratic members who were afraid that we were marching them off to slaughter without a plan to fight back.
Here’s the problem we didn’t solve, though: a decent number of people still believed that our health care bill included death panels.
They had been presented with facts from independent arbiters—experts, the media, and other politicians. Yet they couldn’t be convinced to stop believing something so obviously untrue. Every time President Obama or the New York Times told them the truth, Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh would tell them the opposite. For this part of the populace, President Obama and the mainstream media were disqualified as messengers.
Six years after the law was passed, 29 percent of voters (nearly all Republican) still believed that the law included death panels. One would have hoped that after the law was passed and no death panels had convened, people would come around to the truth. Not a chance.
The eventual passage of health care and the short-term humiliation of Donald Trump over his birtherism were the beginning, not the end, of the phenomenon of fake news. The situation got much worse during the 2016 election and even worse in the early years of the Trump presidency.
We elected a conspiracy theorist as commander in chief. In the early days of his presidency, Trump falsely claimed that millions of illegal votes were cast in the 2016 elections and falsely claimed that Barack Obama had wiretapped his phones. In the campaign, he accused Senator Ted Cruz’s father of being involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Snake oil salesmen like Donald Trump pushing conspiracy theories are nothing new in politics, but they have never been more powerful than they are now. It’s not that America is getting dumber;9 it’s that changes in media and technology have weaponized the worst parts of our politics.
First, distrust in the media sowed by generations of Republican politicians screaming liberal bias has reduced the ability of the press to serve as referees in factual disputes. For many conservative voters, the New York Times, CNN, or the Washington Post stating a fact is actually proof positive that said fact is not true. They believe—as Donald Trump so disturbingly stated early in his presidency—that the press is the enemy of the American people. Theoretically, the conservative media could have stepped in and fought for the concept of objective truth. But led by Fox News, they decided to exploit this very belief for profit and partisan gain. We saw this time and time again in the 2016 election: Trump would be accused of everything from sexual assault to rank corruption to bald-faced lies with detailed, fact-based reporting. And he would slip the political noose every time because his voters believed the media was engaged in a conspiracy to bring down a conservative politician.
Second, the emergence of Facebook as the primary news source for so many Americans has made it easier for these conspiracy theories to spread across the country in a matter of seconds. Reading the news within Facebook makes it easy to confuse a credible news source with completely fake news or distorted partisan talking points. Facebook tends to promote the stories that draw the most controversy or elicit the most emotional response. The hucksters and political saboteurs pushing an agenda with stuff like birtherism are trying to push the emotional buttons that make stories go viral. Sarah Palin knew exactly what she was doing by posting the death panel theory on Facebook. She would have been laughed off the set if she had done it on Meet the Press or Good Morning America. But on Facebook, the outrageous is rewarded.
We have a plague affecting our democracy that is getting worse by the day; is there anything we can do about it?
There are no easy answers. The fact that one of our two political parties now openly traffics in false conspiracy theories as their primary political strategy poses a threat to our system of government. This may sound dramatic, but if anything, it understates the problem.
The American system of government operates on a set of norms, and if one party decides to regularly violate those norms in order to acquire more power, it cripples the ability to respond to disasters like hurricanes, threats like North Korea, and existential challenges like climate change. The Republican approach is one of immense cynicism and utter cowardice, but there is nothing I have seen in twenty years in politics that suggests Republicans are going to change their stripes anytime soon.
Russia clearly played a huge role in promoting the conspiracy theories that dominated the conversation in 2016 in order to help Trump win. All of our intelligence agencies agree with this assessment. Congressional Republicans agree with this assessment. Yet somehow this still seems up for debate. Why? Because there is one person in our government who doesn’t agree, Donald Trump, which should tell you everything you need to know.
It’s alarming that Russia was willing to be so aggressive, but it is even more alarming that such an absurd strategy worked. The Russians were pushing on an open door. Even if the government was able to stop the Russians from ever doing this again, we now have a conspiracy theorist in chief in the Oval Office. Pure propaganda is the official strategy of the Republican Party, and if Democrats don’t figure out how to combat it, we will be relegated to the opposition for years to come while Republicans flush the country down the toilet.
Here are some lessons from Barack Obama’s encounters with the purveyors of fake news that can be applied to the battles to come:
Whenever one opens up Twitter or turns on the TV and sees some Republican congressman screaming about some made-up scandal that they learned about on Fox News or denying the very idea of climate change as America is hammered by hurricanes, it’s easy to feel despondent about the future of the country.
I feel that way sometimes, too, but then I catch myself. There are some very good reasons to be hopeful about the future.
It’s easy to forget that it wasn’t that long ago that we had a president and an administration that strove to tell the truth and make fact-based arguments. And the public rewarded that president with an overwhelming reelection and high approval ratings.
We are still at the beginning of the Internet age. The power and reach of new platforms like Facebook and Twitter are not yet fully understood, and savvy actors have the opportunity to exploit them with malicious activity. A good portion of Americans—particularly the older ones, who vote most often—did not grow up on the Internet. Their experience is from a different era, where one had reason to trust the things they read in the news.
Most important, millennials are going to save us from ourselves.
The millennial generation is about to become the most powerful force in politics, and they are equal parts Internet savvy and skeptical. They were raised on the Internet. They have a natural and well-earned skepticism about what they read online, as well as the skills to verify or debunk anything. As millennials become a larger part of the electorate, the propaganda tactics of the Right are going to be less and less effective.
In the meantime, the Democrats must learn the lessons of Obama’s battles with fake news, conspiracy theories, and con men. We cannot expect to win power again until we have figured out how to defeat the propaganda forces that created, elected, and are now propping up Donald Trump.
It’s that simple.
No pressure, but the fate of the free world (or at least this part of it) is at stake.
1 It’s also a shithole, but you can’t see that on camera.
2 These two shows did the most to aid and abet Trump’s efforts.
3 This is admittedly deeply unfair to the Real Housewives, all of whom would have been a better president (especially Bethenny Frankel).
4 They didn’t find anything.
5 They probably don’t make this joke in the Trump White House since some of them are undoubtedly going to transition from the White House to the Big House.
6 This joke is even funnier now.
7 This was a temporary victory at best.
8 We can debate whether Trump was on the fringes of the Republican Party.
9 I may feel differently about this after a few more years of Trump.