Donald Trump broke something fundamental in our politics: the value of facts and truth. He alters the truth based on whims, and spreads both accidental and deliberate misinformation. His more cynical followers view this as part of his five-dimensional chess game, but America is now a post-truth republic, to our detriment.
In 2020, Trump is counting on his ability to lie his way to a second term. He will do so shamelessly, constantly, and even proudly.
Trump’s endless, torrential outpouring of outright bullshit has become a primary feature of American political life, a Colorado River of mendacity slowly carving itself into a Grand Canyon of lies. This corrosion of the value and power of truth is a political weapon in the hands of a man with so little regard for it.
Trump has always been, to put it mildly, a lying liar who lies. His business empire was built on lies—lies to customers (“This is the most luxurious condo tower ever built in the history of the world, and every world leader and all Fortune 500 CEOs have apartments here”), lies to his contractors (“The check is in the mail, in full”), and lies to his bankers (“I’m really, really rich, lemme hold your wallet”).
What should concern Trump’s opponents in 2020 is how readily voters have abandoned honesty and truth as necessary to a healthy society. In fact, many revel in the transgressive thrill of knowing the president of the United States is spouting bullshit. They wink back at him about how fun it is to own the libs with lies bordering on pathological.
Two quotes have been rattling around in my brain since the first focus groups we conducted on Trump in late 2015.
The first is from Eric Hoffer in The True Believer, his study on mass political movements:
It is the true believer’s ability to “shut his eyes and stop his ears” to facts that do not deserve to be either seen or heard which is the source of his unequaled fortitude and constancy. He cannot be frightened by danger, nor disheartened by obstacle, nor baffled by contradictions, because he denies their existence.10
The second is from my dog-eared copy of Hannah Arendt’s 1951 Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she writes something that could map so perfectly onto the Trump voter it’s as if she had a time machine:
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction…and the distinction between true and false…no longer exist.11
In the 2020 campaign, Democrats need to plan to combat the effect his lies have had on the media, and on Americans. Trump has conditioned them to a quick-cycle pattern of behavior: He tells an outrageous lie, media condemnation rains down, he repeats the outrageous lie, and he blames lying libtard failing fake news outlet X for daring to call him a liar.
Major news outlets have wrestled mightily with calling the president of the United States a liar. They are complicit in accepting his lies—often delivered personally, late at night from his own cellphone—and in amplifying them, at most times uncritically. Trump, a creature born in the fever-swamp New York tabloid media culture, understands the awesome power of the access journalism addiction. He’s not bothering with “John Barron” any longer; now, he’s a “senior White House official.”
Second, while fact-checking is both meritorious and necessary, it’s also almost completely ineffective for Trump voters. You can’t and won’t move them with facts. The defense of Trump’s lies has become a core tribal signaling function inside the hollowed-out husk of the GOP. Of course, elected officials still keep getting away with the Washington game of whispering to reporters, “Well, that’s just Trump being Trump. It’s not hurting anyone. It’s just his style.”
No, folks. It’s not a style. It’s a pathology, and in 2020 the Democratic candidates need to prepare for a picture of America painted by this president, both the fake good and the fake bad. They’ll see it as the equivalent of a madman smearing the walls of his padded cell with his own feces, but the framing of the 2020 campaign will look much more like the 1984 campaign than they currently care to admit. Trump will paint the picture as one of unparalleled economic success, and the lies will come down fast and furious.
On the negative side, fear is one of Trump’s few weapons, and the GOP and the conservative media apparat have weaponized and monetized fear based on ludicrously overdrawn lies. Expect the 2020 campaign to feature breathless lies about the millions of criminal gang members forming armed caravans to storm the borders. Expect more stories of how immigrants are bringing smallpox, Ebola, and the plague over the border. You’ll hear stories about the mythical Antifa army sweeping the nation, Black Panthers outside every voting booth, and the terrifying scourge of godless homosexuals luring preschool children into sex-change surgery. He’ll paint the Democrats’ technocratic semi-, demi-, hemi-socialism as the second coming of Stalin, with deplorables in the place of kulaks.
He’ll lie about the scope and intent of the culture war, because Trump understands how deeply conditioned his base is by Fox, talk radio, and the grievance culture of the right. Trump’s framing will be apocalyptic: It’s me or sharia law. It’s me or the scourge of government death panels. It’s me or godless communism (and/or Muslim theocracy) in the dark future.
All the golden oldies are coming back! The war on Christmas. Kneeling NFL players. Taquerias replacing the local diner. You know, all the real threats in the minds of Facebook boomers with Fox News on 24/7.
Rather than disputing the lies, it’s crucial to keep up the fact pressure to discredit the liar, and get back to what’s real and relevant to the targeted voters in the swing states. All the economic happy-talk in Trump world doesn’t fix the devastation Trump’s trade war has wrought on Midwest farming communities.
Trump’s 2016 win relied on suburban Republicans, many of whom voted against Hillary Clinton rather than for him. In 2020, he’ll offer both a tribal and an economic choice to those same voters—that’s why we’ll hear all the “Look at your 401k!” rah-rah reaching a fever pitch. He’ll be working very hard to present a false but compelling case that choosing the Democrat means a quick slide in the markets, the destruction of John and Jane Suburbanite’s retirement fund, and a future not in a luxury condo in Del Boca Vista but one of living below a highway overpass, scrounging for roadkill.
No matter where the economy goes in the next year, he’ll argue that the tax bill—arguably the biggest legislative action of his presidency—helped most Americans. Democrats must make the case that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was not a bailout for America but a monster payday for a small number of hedge funds, banks, and tech billionaires. As of this writing, Elizabeth Warren has come closest to working out a solid message on this, but it’s not rocket science, and it solidly falls into the category of making the election a referendum on Trump. His hallmark legislative accomplishment was a lie.
America knows by now that he lies, but no one is really prepared for a body of deception so large it’s like the meteor that crashed into the Yucatán and killed the dinosaurs, only instead of a Texas-sized rock it’s a mass of Trumpian bullshit that will plunge through the atmosphere.
Trump’s strategy is the mirror image of what the Democrats’ should be; he wants to make this a base-only election about a core package of issues relying on horseshit. He’s going to lie both to the American people and about the Democratic candidate, every day. Democrats still harbor some faint hope that they can shame him into telling the truth, or that the media fact-checkers can do it.
Whoever the nominee for the Democrats is, he or she has a magnificent opportunity to repeat the famous “Where’s the beef?” moment in which Democratic candidate Walter Mondale wrecked his competitor Gary Hart. Driving hard on Trump as a liar, a discredited and weak man dependent on a curtain of absurd deceptions to maintain his fragile self-image and political status, can be a striking, viral moment, and the Democratic nominee should be practicing for it, every day.