How To Beat Back Donald Trump's Most Insidious Lie
Trump was actually president once and a lot of bad things happened as a result.
The debate over whether it’s wise or unwise to give Donald Trump more media exposure pits those who fear the proliferation of uncorrected lies against others who believe metering his visibility tends to sanitize him. If we establish a norm against broadcasting Trump’s rantings and ravings, in order to arrest the spread of disinformation, the bits and pieces people ultimately see will tend to make Trump seem much more ordered and honest than he really is.
I sympathize with both camps here, but in some ways I’m less worried about the spread of lies than the spread of unfalsifiable bullshit.
Consider:
One thing Trump genuinely did create as president is a high degree of tolerance among journalists for repeating unsupportable nonsense. I believe this is driven as much by resignation as by laziness—Trump will never agree to defend his assertions in a detailed and credible way, so the best news outlets can do is just regurgitate them, perhaps alongside a few delicate caveats.
And this is Trump’s favorite subgenre of bullshit: None of the bad things that have happened in the world since January 20, 2021 [inflation, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the October 7 Hamas massacre, Israel’s assault on Gaza, now Iran’s attack on Israel] would have happened if I’d been president.
Some of these are lies, more often they’re a form of deceptive self-flattery that falls just short of lying. But in a way the latter is worse. Lies can be corrected, whereas hazy, fantastical provocations can’t really. Absent a more careful approach to covering Trump, and the way he talks about himself, rote repetition of his response to developments in the world contributes to a widespread but false retrospective sense that the Trump years weren’t so bad.
Since his record doesn’t support his claims, why on Earth would anyone quote him, other than to set the record straight?
ALL THE RIGHT NOISES
To give Trump his due, there is probably a subset of Bad Things™ that might have been forestalled in their own perverse way if he’d won or stolen a second term: