The Founders were acutely aware of the defects of human nature, and they built government structures to harness ambition and control the power of self-interest. But to an extent that we often forget today, they also knew that American government would depend on American virtues. Federalist 55 put it clearly: “As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”[1] Among these qualities was honesty.
In his Farewell Address, George Washington mentioned a proverb that Benjamin Franklin had coined: “I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy.”[2] That phrase has become a cliché, but it meant something profound to the people who built this country. Instead of relying on fiats from above, Americans would govern themselves through reflection and choice. There would be constant debate and deliberation, which would only work if people could believe one another. “This I hope will be the age of experiments in government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1796, “and that their basis will be founded in principles of honesty, not of mere force.”[3] Or as Jefferson wrote another time, “The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.”[4]
Behind the virtue of honesty is a belief in the very existence of truth itself. Trump’s attitudes bear a curious relationship to an influential school of thought that denies the very existence of objective truth, even holding that the natural and physical sciences are mere social constructs with no claim to neutrality or universal validity.[5] Like jesting Pilate, they ask “What is truth?” and do not stay for an answer. America’s early leaders had a different philosophy, believing that perception and reason could reveal the truths of the physical and moral worlds.[6] Hamilton started Federalist 31 by writing that in every discussion, “there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasonings must depend. These contain an internal evidence which, antecedent to all reflection or combination, commands the assent of the mind.”[7] Lincoln said something similar. “One would start with great confidence that he could convince any sane child that the simpler propositions of Euclid are true; but, nevertheless, he would fail, utterly, with one who should deny the definitions and axioms,” he wrote in a letter. “The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society. And yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show of success. One dashingly calls them ‘glittering generalities,’ another bluntly calls them ‘self-evident lies,’ and still others insidiously argue that they apply only to ‘superior races.’”[8]
American history has hardly been free of falsehood. As Lincoln’s letter suggests, too many people have believed in myths, such as the pseudoscience that “proved” African American inferiority. And too many politicians have told too many lies. What sets Donald Trump apart, however, is not just the volume of his untruthfulness, but his relentless assault on truth itself. What Lindsey Graham said of another president applies even more today. “This case is requiring parents and teachers to sit down and explain what lying is all about. This case is creating confusion. This case is hitting America far harder than America knows it has been hit.”[9]
Maggie Haberman writes in the New York Times: “His long career in the New York real estate world convinced Mr. Trump that all people are prone to shading their views according to their own self-interest. Objectivity is not something he expects of people, and he long ago came to believe that ‘facts’ are really arbitrary.”[10] During his early years in the public eye, it was already evident that he lied all the time. When Tony Schwartz was writing Trump’s 1987 book The Art of the Deal, he realized that he had to spin Trump’s dishonesty. “I play to people’s fantasies,” he wrote in Trump’s name. “People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and it’s a very effective form of promotion.”[11] Decades later, Schwartz expressed regret to journalist Jane Mayer: “‘Deceit,’ he told me, is never ‘innocent.’ He added, ‘Truthful hyperbole’ is a contradiction in terms. It’s a way of saying, ‘It’s a lie, but who cares?’ Trump, he said, loved the phrase.”[12] Keeping in character, Trump would lie about the book that rationalized his lies. He called it the best-selling business book of all time (not even close).[13] Announcing his candidacy in 2015, he took personal credit for Schwartz’s work: “We need a leader that wrote The Art of the Deal.”[14] (He just made some marks on Schwartz’s manuscript.)
In a 1993 deposition concerning the bankruptcy of the Trump Taj Mahal, one of his attorneys said: “Hey, Trump is a leader in the field of expert—he’s an expert at interpreting things. Let’s put it that way.”[15] The attorney was Patrick T. McGahn, whose nephew Donald McGahn would later serve as Trump’s White House counsel.
In 2007, Trump sued journalist Timothy O’Brien for questioning his net worth. O’Brien’s attorneys deposed Trump, confronting him with numerous statements that he had made. Thirty times during the two-day deposition, they forced him to admit that what he had said was false.[16] He had this dialogue with attorney Andrew Ceresney:
Ceresney: Mr. Trump, have you always been completely truthful in your public statements about your net worth of properties?
Trump: I try.
Ceresney: Have you ever not been truthful?
Trump: My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with the markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings, but I try.
Ceresney: Let me just understand that a little. You said your net worth goes up and down based upon your own feelings?
Trump: Yes, even my own feelings, as to where the world is, where the world is going, and that can change rapidly from day to day . . .
Ceresney: When you publicly state a net worth number, what do you base that number on?
Trump: I would say it’s my general attitude at the time that the question may be asked. And as I say, it varies.[17]
Many times, he has overstated the size of his properties, such as by claiming 68 floors for the 58-floor Trump Tower.[18] In 2012, a Trump financial statement said he owned a 2,000-acre vineyard in Virginia. But a Washington Post check of land records in Virginia showed the Trump family owned only about 1,200 acres. The Trump winery’s website says 1,300 acres.[19] The false claim about the vineyard would have been particularly irksome to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, both of whom worked as surveyors and built reputations for the accuracy of their work. More important, Trump’s multiple lies have exposed his businesses to possible prosecution by state officials. “In this instance, it’s a legitimate business (banks that loaned to Trump) that is being defrauded,” former New York attorney general Robert Abrams told NBC News. Decisions are being made against fraudulent information.”[20]
Trump does not merely lie—he tries to create an alternative reality where the facts are whatever he wants them to be. When inconvenient information crops up, he just dismisses it as “fake news.” As he said in a 2018 speech in Kansas City: “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”[21] Before he became president, for instance, he brushed aside statistics showing a drop in unemployment under the Obama administration:
“So many people can’t get jobs. The unemployment number, as you know, is totally fiction.”[22]
“You hear a 5 percent unemployment rate. It’s such a phony number. That number was put in for presidents and for politicians so that they look good to the people.”[23]
“Nobody has jobs. I wouldn’t have caught on—to be honest—I wouldn’t have been catching on if the economy were real. It is not a real economy. It is a phony set of numbers. They cooked the books.”[24]
As soon as he became president, however, he started endorsing the data. In June 2017, he tweeted: “Regulations way down. 600,000+ new jobs added. Unemployment down to 4.3%. Business and economic enthusiasm way up—record levels!”[25]
Trump lies about his lies. Throughout his early business career, he would regale reporters with tales of his financial or sexual successes while pretending to be a Trump Organization publicist named “John Miller” or “John Barron.”[26] There are recordings, but he nevertheless said on Today: “No, I don’t know anything about it. You’re telling me about it for the first time and it doesn’t sound like my voice at all.”[27] What made that denial particularly weak was a 1990 deposition at which he admitted using a fake name. After the deposition, he told reporters, “Lots of people use pen names. Ernest Hemingway used one.”[28]
A more recent example came in 2018, when he tweeted: “I never said Russia did not meddle in the election.”[29] Yes, he said just that. “I don’t believe they interfered,” he told Time in 2016. “That became a laughing point, not a talking point, a laughing point. Any time I do something, they say ‘oh, Russia interfered.’”[30]
A frequent Trump technique is what conservative journalist Amanda Carpenter calls “advance and deny”—make a false accusation, attribute it to a third party, and deny responsibility. In 2016, the National Enquirer published an outlandish story linking Ted Cruz’s father to Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. “His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being, you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous,” Trump told Fox News. “Nobody even brings it up. They don’t even talk about that. That was reported, and nobody talks about it.”[31] A year later, when Time’s Michael Scherer pressed him on the accusation, he said: “Well that was in a newspaper. No, no, I like Ted Cruz, he’s a friend of mine. But that was in the newspaper. I wasn’t, I didn’t say that. I was referring to a newspaper. A Ted Cruz article referred to a newspaper story with, had a picture of Ted Cruz, his father, and Lee Harvey Oswald, having breakfast.”[32] (The Enquirer photo showed a fuzzy image of someone other than Cruz’s father standing near Oswald. A breakfast threesome would have been impossible, since Ted Cruz was born seven years after Oswald died.)
Trump has said that he is a “very stable genius” with “the world’s greatest memory.”[33] But his lies often consist of convenient memory lapses or professions of ignorance. Patrick McGahn explained that his office policy was to meet with Trump in pairs. “We tried to do it with Donald always if we could because Donald says certain things and then has a lack of memory.”[34] During a 2013 deposition, a lawyer asked him about his relationship with Felix Sater, a convicted criminal with reputed ties to the Russian mob. Trump answered, “If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn't know what he looked like.”[35] Sater had an office in Trump Tower, on the same floor as Trump himself, and had business cards identifying himself as a senior advisor to Trump. When CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Trump about his endorsement by white supremacist David Duke, he said: “I know nothing about David Duke. I know nothing about white supremacists.”[36] After that remark sparked wide disbelief, he used the excuse that he had used in his 1987 conversation with Pat Buchanan about reading habits: “I was sitting in a house in Florida, with a bad earpiece. I could hardly hear what he’s saying.”[37] His on-again-off-again memory was especially memorable during a deposition about his Trump University scam. Dozens of times, he answered questions by saying that he could not remember. An attorney reminded him that he had claimed “one of the best memories in the world,” Trump said he did not remember saying that: “I don’t know. Did I use that expression?”[38]
The Russia investigation triggered the off-switch in Trump’s memory. A reporter asked him about the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. He responded with the same words that he had used about David Duke: “I know nothing about WikiLeaks. It’s not my thing . . . I know nothing really about him.”[39] During the 2016 campaign, Trump had said that he loved WikiLeaks and mentioned the organization at least 141 times at 56 events.[40] The Mueller report said: “We noted, among other things, that the President stated on more than 30 occasions that he ‘does not recall’ or ‘remember’ or have an ‘independent recollection’ of information called for by the questions.” [41]
Trump had talked about running for president as early as the 1988 campaign, but his first big political splash came in 2011, when he toyed with a run for the 2012 Republican nomination. It began with a big lie. The heart of this flirtation was his appeal to “birtherism,” the crackpot notion that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and thus was not a legitimate president. On its face, the idea made no sense. In Obama’s birth year of 1961, his mother was an 18-year-old student at the University of Hawaii. Why would she have made a long, expensive journey to give birth in a third-world country? And if she did, why was there a birth announcement in The Honolulu Advertiser?[42]
Nevertheless, Trump raised the issue, starting with vague and unfounded innuendoes. “Let me tell you, I’m a really smart guy,” he said on Good Morning America. “The reason I have a little doubt—just a little—is because he grew up, and nobody knew him. If ever I got the nomination, if I ever decide to run, you may go back and interview people from my kindergarten. They’ll remember me. Nobody ever comes forward. Nobody knows who he is until later in his life. It’s very strange.”[43] (Among the people who knew Obama’s family in his early years was Neil Abercrombie, the governor of Hawaii. And yes, reporters did speak to Obama’s kindergarten teacher.)
Trump went in deeper during an interview with Laura Ingraham: “He doesn’t have a birth certificate, or if he does, there’s something on that certificate that is very bad for him. Now, somebody told me—and I have no idea if this is bad for him or not, but perhaps it would be—that where it says ‘religion,’ it might have ‘Muslim.’ And if you’re a Muslim, you don’t change your religion, by the way.”[44] (Hawaii birth certificates do not mention religion.) Those comments were a double-barreled shot of prejudice, suggesting that the first African American president was not American and that he belonged to a religion that many Americans unfairly linked to terrorism.
When President Obama released a short-form birth certificate, Trump said that it was no good. “I have people that actually have been studying it and they cannot believe what they’re finding,” he said on the Today show.[45] President Obama then produced his “long form” birth certificate, which confirmed once again that he was from Honolulu. That document should have ended the story—but it did not. In August 2012, Trump tweeted: “An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that @BarackObama’s birth certificate is a fraud.”[46] In a 2013 interview, Jonathan Karl of ABC News asked him if he still doubted that Obama was born in the United States. “Well I don’t know. Was it a birth certificate? You tell me. Some people say that was not his birth certificate. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. I’m saying I don’t know. Nobody knows. And you don’t know either, Jonathan. You’re a smart guy. You don’t know either.” In the same interview, Karl asked him if he thought he had gone overboard with the birther issue. “Well, I don’t think I went overboard,” he said. “Actually, I think it made me very popular, if you want to know the truth, OK? So I do think I know what I’m doing.”[47] His response was revealing. To Trump, the only thing that mattered about the birther notion is that it had made him more popular. It did not bother him that it was wrong.
A few months later, he issued a tweet hinting that a murderous conspiracy was afoot. “How amazing, the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s ‘birth certificate’ died in plane crash today. All others lived.”[48] There was no foul play: Loretta Fuddy suffered a cardiac arrhythmia while floating in the water and awaiting rescue.[49] Trump never deleted the tweet or retracted the claim. He just let it hang, cruelly adding to her family’s pain.
In September 2016, he gave birtherism a new twist, swapping one lie for two others: “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. I finished it. You know what I mean. President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period. Now, we all want to get back to making America strong and great again.”[50] The first part was untrue. Although some peripheral Clinton supporters circulated birther material, Clinton and her campaign steered clear of the matter. The second part was equally false. Birtherism continued through the release of Obama’s birth certificates and Trump’s “disavowal” of the idea.
The birther lie hurt the country by raising baseless doubts about the president’s legitimacy. It was the kind of tactic that one would undertake to create or deepen social divisions in the United States. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Russians worked in tandem with Trump. During the 2016 campaign, Russian accounts echoed his claim that Clinton had started the controversy. Others continued to promote the Kenya myth.[51] The Russian account TEN_GOP, which looked as if it came from the Tennessee Republican Party, posted this tweet: “Watch: Barack Obama admits he was born in Kenya. #birtherism.”[52]
The movement started to die down when Obama departed the White House, but its legacy lingered like a bad infection. A 2017 survey found that although most American adults did not believe that Obama was born in Kenya, 51 percent of Republicans thought that it was “probably” or “definitely” true.[53]
During the 2016 election, Trump won 306 electoral votes, though two GOP electors declined to support him, bringing his total down to 304. Trump called his showing a landslide, and at one press conference said it was “the biggest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan.”[54] Wrong: George H. W. Bush (1988), Bill Clinton (1992 and 1996), and Barack Obama (2008 and 2012) all got more electoral votes. Trump’s winning share of the electoral vote ranked 46th of 58 presidential elections.
One might shrug off that claim as harmless Trumpian hyperbole, but his bogus assertions about the popular vote were more sinister. In all of American history, no winner in the electoral college had ever lost the popular tally by a bigger margin than Trump in 2016: nearly 2.9 million ballots. In November 2016, he tweeted: “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”[55] There was no basis for that pronouncement. He just made it up. But he repeated the falsehood in his first formal meeting with congressional leaders.[56]
He kept embroidering the voter-fraud myth throughout his term. At a 2018 West Virginia roundtable on tax reform, he veered off topic, claiming that “in many places, like California, the same person votes many times. You probably heard about that. They always like to say, ‘Oh, that’s a conspiracy theory.’ Not a conspiracy theory, folks. Millions and millions of people. And it’s very hard because the state guards their records. They don’t want to see it.”[57] He elaborated in an interview with the Daily Caller: “The Republicans don’t win and that’s because of potentially illegal votes, which is what I’ve been saying for a long time. I have no doubt about it. And I’ve seen it, I’ve had friends talk about it when people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again.”[58] In 2019 he said at a fundraising event: “We’re going to watch those vote tallies. You know, I keep hearing about the election and the—the various counting measures that they have. There were a lot of close elections that were—they seemed to, every single one of them went Democrat. If it was close they say, ‘The Democrat’—Well, there’s something going on—you got to—hey, you got to be a little bit more paranoid than you are.”[59]
There is zero evidence of widespread voter fraud. During the George W. Bush administration, the Justice Department told US attorneys to make it a priority. After years of investigation, the department charged just 119 individuals and won convictions of 86.[60] Those numbers were minuscule in light of the hundreds of millions of ballots that Americans had cast during those years—and in most of the cases, a single person had voted or registered improperly, often by mistake. “It’s remarkable that all of the U.S. attorneys had a mandate and were given adequate resources to raise this to the top of the pile,” one former department attorney told Politico. “They all agree we found a handful of cases . . . and that was it.”[61] In 2017, Trump appointed a commission to investigate the issue and it disbanded after failing to find the massive fraud that it was seeking. In 2018, Democrats did win close races that seemed to lean Republican at first, but only because they had a long-standing advantage among voters who cast provisional or mail ballots.
The 2018 midterm did produce one significant case of election misconduct, however. North Carolina’s bipartisan election commission refused to certify a winner in a race for the US House because of irregularities involving absentee ballots. The situation was so bad that the House did not seat a member and the state had to call a new election. By the way, the election fraud took place on behalf of the Republican candidate.
Trump’s phony assertions about voter fraud may have affected public beliefs, at least on the Republican side. A 2017 survey found that 47 percent of Republicans thought that Trump had won the popular vote. About two-thirds said that millions of undocumented immigrants had voted and nearly three-fourths said that voter fraud happens somewhat or very often. One truly ominous result came in response to this question: “If Donald Trump were to say that the 2020 presidential election should be postponed until the country can make sure that only eligible American citizens can vote, would you support or oppose postponing the election?” Fifty-two percent of Republicans supported postponement.[62]
Trump’s dishonesty about voter fraud by undocumented aliens was part of a broader set of lies about immigration. “What can be simpler or more accurately stated?” he said in a 2015 statement to the press. “The Mexican Government is forcing their most unwanted people into the United States. They are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.”[63] Immigration does not work that way. More important, the available evidence shows that immigrants tend to be less crime-prone than natives of the United States.[64] And a thorough statistical analysis shows that undocumented immigration does not increase violence.[65]
Throughout his first two years as president, he laid siege to the truth about the issue. He said that the government was already building his wall. (It was not.) He said that Mexico would pay for it. (It would not.) At a 2018 rally in Nevada, he said that Democrats “want to open your borders, let people in, illegally, and then they want to pay for those people for health care, education, they want to give them cars, they want to give them drivers licenses. I said last night, we did a great—we did a great, great rally in Arizona last night, and I—I said last night, what kind of car will they supply them? Will it be a Rolls-Royce?”[66] Some states do provide licenses to undocumented immigrants, but as for free cars, he just made that up. “I don’t think we like sanctuary cities up here,” he continued. “By the way, a lot of people in California don’t want them, either. They’re rioting now.” NBC’s Geoff Bennett asked where the riots were. “You shouldn’t have—take a look. They want to get out of sanctuary cities. Many places in California want to get out of sanctuary cities.” Bennett followed up: “But that’s not rioting, sir, right?” Trump insisted: “Yeah, it is rioting in some cases.” When Bennett asked again where the riots were, Trump took a question from another reporter.[67] There were no riots against sanctuary cities, and surveys showed that most Californians supported sanctuary laws.[68]
Trump bared his brutality by caging migrant children. He compounded it by lying about the death of a seven-year-old migrant girl. On March 29, 2019, he told reporters: “Well, I think that it’s been very well stated that we’ve done a fantastic job. One of the children—the father gave the child no water for a long period of time. He actually admitted blame.”[69] On the day that Trump spoke, an autopsy report confirmed that Jakelin Caal Maquin had died of a bacterial infection on December 8, shortly after the Border Patrol had apprehended her. Her father had supplied her with food and water, and there was no evidence of dehydration.[70]
Some of his lies were not cruel, just foolish. In January 2019, he tweeted: “There are at least 25,772,342 illegal aliens, not the 11,000,000 that have been reported for years, in our Country. So ridiculous!”[71] Ridiculous indeed: just a few weeks earlier, the Department of Homeland Security had put the figure at 12 million.[72]
Trump has helped make the immigration issue even more difficult and divisive than it was before. Looking for ways to undercut American democracy and social cohesion, the Russians have joined the fray. (Notice a pattern here?) The Oxford Internet Institute’s Computational Propaganda Research Project examined how Russia’s Internet Research Agency (a.k.a. “the troll farm”) used social media to misinform and polarize American voters. The troll farm’s most-shared Facebook page was “Stop A.I. (Stop All Immigrants).” In 2016, the report observed, the Russian effort was “geared towards extending the anti-immigrant rhetoric that Trump’s campaign frequently made use of.”[73]
Trump’s dishonesty extends to science, a subject that was much on the minds of the Founders. Though lacking a college education, Benjamin Franklin became a world-renowned scientist. His discoveries and inventions were so significant that he became the only person in the New World to win election both to the Paris Academie Royale des Sciences and the Royal Society of London.[74] In 1743, he founded the American Philosophical Society to promote useful scientific knowledge. Early members included Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison. Another member was Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and America’s most eminent physician.
A scientific frame of mind suffused their thinking.[75] Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia included chapters on geology, demographics, and what a later generation would call “climate science.” Madison and Hamilton seeded The Federalist with learned analogies to physics, biology, and geometry.[76] Abraham Lincoln carried on this tradition. With scarcely any formal education, he schooled himself in science and math, and dabbled as an inventor. On May 22, 1849, he received Patent No. 6469 for a device to lift boats over shoals. To date, he remains as the only president to hold a patent.
Inventors and scientists must deal with the world as it is. Trump does not recognize that constraint. In 2019, he tweeted that Hurricane Dorian was heading for Alabama. After the Birmingham office of the National Weather Service contradicted his claim, he refused to admit error. He showed reporters a weather map that someone (probably Trump himself) had crudely marked up with a Sharpie to make it look as if Alabama had been in the storm’s path. His initial misstatement may have briefly caused concern in the state, but his behavior was otherwise laughable. Climate change is more serious. According to NASA and the National Ocean and Atmosphere Administration, five different sets of temperature records show rapid global warming in the past few decades, and all show the past decade has been the warmest.[77] Trump dislikes those data, so he dismisses them—except when he is denying that he has dismissed them. At a 2016 debate, Hillary Clinton said: “Donald thinks that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. I think it’s real.” He interrupted: “I did not. I did not. I do not say that.”[78] He said it. In 2012, he tweeted: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”[79] And two years later: “Snowing in Texas and Louisiana, record setting freezing temperatures throughout the country and beyond. Global warming is an expensive hoax!”[80]
He was no more honest about ozone. According to EPA, “The emission of ozone depleting substances has been damaging the ozone layer.”[81] Trump just laughed it off. “If I take hair spray, and if I spray it in my apartment, which is all sealed, you’re telling me that affects the ozone layer?” he asked a 2016 campaign rally in West Virginia. “I say, no way, folks. No way, OK? No way.”[82] Yes, way: indoor gases eventually get outdoors.
In April 2019, he told a fundraising dinner for the National Republican Congressional Committee: “If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value. And they say the noise causes cancer.”[83] Although any energy project can be a locally unwanted land use, wind farms do not have that great an effect on property values. And the suggestion that wind turbine noise causes cancer was so preposterous that the White House did not bother to defend it. Trump has also mocked wind energy in general, saying that electricity goes off when the wind does not blow. That claim was just as silly as his quip about ozone. As the Energy Department explains, “all forms of power generation may sometimes not operate when called upon [so] operators use the interconnected power system to access other forms of generation when contingencies occur.”[84] Oddly, the White House website contained an article by former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke: “As we look to the future, wind energy—particularly offshore wind—will play a greater role in sustaining American energy dominance. Offshore wind uniquely leverages the natural resources off of our East Coast, bringing jobs and meeting the region’s demand for renewable energy.”[85]
Trump’s fake science has been especially harmful when it comes to discussions of vaccines. America’s Founders were passionate advocates of disease prevention. Benjamin Franklin gathered data on the impact of smallpox inoculation and started a charity to provide free inoculation to the poor. General Washington ordered the inoculation of his soldiers because he was losing more of them to disease than to combat.[86] As president, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Edward Jenner, the British scientist who had pioneered the smallpox vaccine: “Medicine has never before produced any single improvement of such utility.”[87] Subsequent presidents supported the science of vaccination. During the 1950s, Dwight Eisenhower met with Jonas Salk and worked with Congress to ensure rapid distribution of the polio vaccine.
Myths have always accompanied vaccines. A new and dangerous turn occurred in 1998 when British physician Andrew Wakefield and a dozen colleagues published an article in The Lancet suggesting that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) might cause autism. The study got a great deal of media attention on both sides of the Atlantic, and some parents became reluctant to get immunizations for their children. Research soon raised serious questions about his work. A dozen years later, after it became clear that it was fraudulent, The Lancet retracted the article, and British authorities stripped Wakefield of his ability to practice medicine. But he had already done permanent damage. Even though many articles had refuted his findings, many people believed in a link between vaccines and autism. This “antivax” movement gradually became more powerful, especially with the growth of social media in the early 21st century.
Trump’s first public comment on the issue came in 2007. “When I was growing up, autism wasn’t really a factor. And now all of a sudden, it’s an epidemic. Everybody has their theory, and my theory is the shots. They’re getting these massive injections at one time. I think it’s the vaccinations.” He made those comments following a press conference at Mar-a-Lago announcing a fundraising campaign by the advocacy group Autism Speaks. He went on: “When a little baby that weighs 20 pounds and 30 pounds gets pumped with 10 and 20 shots at one time, with one injection that’s a giant injection, I personally think that has something to do with it.”[88]
The notion that the vaccine schedule overwhelms a child’s immune system is nonsense. Dr. Paul Offit, a leading expert on vaccines, puts it this way: “Indeed, children confronted more immunologic challenges by receiving only the smallpox vaccine 100 years ago than they do while receiving 14 different vaccines today.”[89] And yet in spite of all the scientific evidence, Trump continued to tweet falsehoods about autism and vaccines.
“Massive combined inoculations to small children is the cause for big increase in autism.”[90]
“Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn't feel good and changes—AUTISM. Many such cases!”[91]
“If I were President I would push for proper vaccinations but would not allow one time massive shots that a small child cannot take—AUTISM.”[92]
In his most reprehensible tweet, he said: “I am being proven right about massive vaccinations—the doctors lied. Save our children & their future.”[93] So besides peddling myths, he was carrying his “fake news” theme into the world of medicine, suggesting that physicians were lying when they said that vaccines do not cause autism. Doctors have long worried that the internet was undercutting sound medical advice. With this tweet, Trump made things worse.
He kept up the misinformation after announcing his candidacy. In a 2015 Republican debate, he said: “Just the other day, two years old, two and a half years old, a child, a beautiful child went to have the vaccine, and came back, and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.”[94] Curiously, he had used almost the same words three years earlier. “It happened to somebody that worked for me recently,” he said on Fox News. “I mean, they had this beautiful child, not a problem in the world, and all of the sudden they go in and they get this monster shot . . . then all of the sudden the child is different a month later.”[95]
Vaccination turned out to be a minor campaign issue, but Trump continued to smile upon the antivax cause. In August 2016, he met with key antivaxxers including the discredited Andrew Wakefield.[96] During the transition, he conferred with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a movement figure who had once likened vaccination to the Holocaust. Kennedy claimed that Trump had asked him to lead a “vaccine safety” commission, though the idea fizzled.
Many believers in the vaccine-autism myth claim that they do not oppose all vaccinations but want parents to space them out. This practice is dangerous. When parents delay immunizations, they are putting children at risk for preventable illnesses such as measles, and increasing the chance that they could spread the diseases to other vulnerable people. Even so, by giving this advice, the antivax activists claim that they are not antivaccine. In 2015, Kennedy insisted to New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser that he is “fiercely pro-vaccine.” Trump told her something similar: “I’m totally pro-vaccine.” Then he immediately repeated his favorite antivax canard: “What I’ve seen is that you put these massive injections at one time into a 20-pound baby. I’ve seen children who were 100 percent normal and become totally autistic.”[97] In 2019, as measles outbreaks reached a 21st-century high, Trump answered a reporter’s question by saying: “The vaccinations are so important.”[98] Although some news reports suggested that he had shifted his position, he did not retract his earlier statements about combination vaccines and autism. A few offhand words at a press gaggle did not erase years of fearmongering.
Physicians had once hoped that vaccines had eradicated measles in the United States, but unvaccinated children were now catching measles and spreading it to others. Did Trump bear any blame? It is impossible to prove cause and effect, but there is substantial evidence that Trump’s tweets and public comments may have lent heft to the antivax movement. A 2016 survey found that respondents who did not plan to get vaccinations for themselves or their families most often named Donald Trump as a public figure they thought shared their views.[99] A postelection showed that 31 percent of Trump voters—compared with 18 percent of Clinton voters—agreed that “vaccines have been shown to cause autism.”[100] One experimental study presented people with both true and false statements that Trump had made. Among the latter was: “Vaccines cause autism.” The researchers found that when they attributed such information to Trump, his Republican supporters believed it more than if it had no attribution.[101]
And once again, the Russians were involved. One noteworthy source of online confusion about vaccines was the Internet Research Agency—the same Russian troll farm that helped Trump in the 2016 campaign.[102] A typical Russian tweet read: “Did you know #vaccines caused autism? #VaccinateUS.” The Russian trolls put out some nominally pro-vaccine content as well. According to a study of the Russian disinformation campaign: “This is consistent with a strategy of promoting discord across a range of controversial topics—a known tactic employed by Russian troll accounts. Such strategies may undermine the public health: normalizing these debates may lead the public to question long-standing scientific consensus regarding vaccine efficacy.”[103] There is no reason to think that Trump knew of the Russian effort, much less that he consciously took part in it. But by spreading falsehoods and tacitly encouraging the divisive and destructive antivax movement, he was surely advancing Russian aims.
And as for Russia itself, one paragraph in the Mueller report nicely sums up Trump’s long battle with reality.
Trump responded to questions about possible connections to Russia by denying any business involvement in Russia—even though the Trump Organization had pursued a business project in Russia as late as June 2016. Trump also expressed skepticism that Russia had hacked the emails at the same time as he and other Campaign advisors privately sought information about any further planned WikiLeaks releases. After the election, when questions persisted about possible links between Russia and the Trump Campaign, the President-Elect continued to deny any connections to Russia and privately expressed concerns that reports of Russian election interference might lead the public to question the legitimacy of his election.[104]
A month after the 2016 election, Trump tweeted: “Unless you catch ‘hackers’ in the act, it is very hard to determine who was doing the hacking. Why wasn’t this brought up before election?”[105] It was. Weeks before the election, Representative Michael McCaul (R-TX), then chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security said: “I have personally briefed him on that and told him that in my opinion . . . this was in fact a nation-state attack by Russia.”[106]
At a 2017 rally in Alabama, he said: “No, Russia did not help me, that I can tell you, okay? Any Russians in the audience? [Laughter] Are there any Russians in the audience, please? I don’t see too many Russians. I didn’t see too many Russians in Pennsylvania.”[107] For years, he kept repeating variations of that line. In 2019, he told the New York Times: “All I did was be a good candidate. Russia didn’t help me. Russia did not help me.”[108]
Wrong. Although the Mueller report did not find prosecutable evidence of a direct conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence, there is no doubt that Russia did help him. A few weeks before he took office, the intelligence community published its assessment that Putin had ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. “Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”[109]
As usual, Trump lied about what he had done. At the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), he complained: “If you tell a joke, if you’re sarcastic, if you’re having fun with the audience, if you’re on live television with millions of people and 25,000 people in an arena, and if you say something like, ‘Russia, please, if you can, get us Hillary Clinton’s emails.’ . . . And then that fake CNN and others say, ‘He asked Russia to go get the emails. Horrible.’”[110] As noted in the last chapter, he made the remark at a press conference (not a rally) and told a reporter at the time that the invitation gave him no pause. He meant what he said.
“Honesty is of pervasive human importance,” wrote William Bennett in The Book of Virtues. “‘I hate that man like the very Gates of Death who says one thing but hides another in his heart,’ cries the anguished Achilles in Homer’s Iliad. Every social activity, every human enterprise requiring people to act in concert, is impeded when people aren’t honest with one another.”[111] The effect of dishonesty is especially severe in the case of politics. The practitioners of whataboutism can find plenty of past political falsehoods but it is impossible to think of a president who has lied so blatantly about so many things. Instead of fostering healthy skepticism about political arguments, he is encouraging his followers to believe absurd claims and to reject any information that clashes with his interests and opinions.
People are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. Political conflict can be healthy, provided that it involves debate over commonly accepted information and premises. Strenuous disagreements, even when they get rude at times, can lead to some kind of resolution. Without a shared understanding of reality, however, genuine deliberation is impossible. Instead of talking to each other, opposing sides shout about each other. The great danger is that the losing side will not accept defeat as legitimate. That is what happened when Southern states seceded in reaction to Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860.
Rex Tillerson, who served as secretary of state and observed Trump’s lies up close, spoke in May 2018 about the effects of dishonesty in high places. His words are worth quoting at length:
It is only by a fierce defense of the truth and a common set of facts that we create the conditions for a democratic free society, comprised of richly diverse peoples that those free people can explore and find solutions to the very challenges confronting a complex society of free people. If our leaders seek to conceal the truth or we as people become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom.[112]
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Peter Baker, Maggie Haberman, and A. G. Sulzberger, “Excerpts from Trump’s Interview with the New York Times,” New York Times, February 1, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/us/politics/trump-interview-transcripts.html.
Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,” January 6, 2017, https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf.
Remarks by President Trump at the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference, March 3, 2019, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-2019-conservative-political-action-conference.
William J. Bennett, ed., The Book of Virtues (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 599.
David Wright, “Tillerson Points to U.S. ‘Crisis of Ethics and Integrity,’” WBUR, May 17, 2018, https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2018/05/17/tillerson-vmi-commencement-speech.