Trump and the Truth: The “Lying” Media
Trump nakedly wants what maybe all politicians want, but few have the temerity to ask for: plenty of attention, all of it admiring. He appears to believe in a captive press, of the kind found, for example, in Benito Mussolini’s Italy or Fidel Castro’s Cuba. And he believes in a cult of personality—his own—that should obviate the need for questions. Just acknowledge his tremendousness and shut up. “Don’t believe the biased and phony media quoting people who work for my campaign,” he tweeted in May. “The only quote that matters is a quote from me!”
.. Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, offered a unique interpretation of what journalists do. “I really don’t appreciate campaigns thinking it is the job of the media to go and be these virtual fact checkers,” she said on Sunday, on ABC’s “This Week.” Since when is it not journalists’ job to check facts?
.. after the debate was over, Trump complained that “they” had given him a “defective mic.” He added, “I wonder, was that on purpose?” (That’s a species of excuse he’s used before: in February, after he failed, in one of this phone interviews with CNN, to disavow David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, he blamed the affair on a “bad earpiece.”)
.. Trump has repeatedly made is that as President he would “loosen” or “open up” libel laws, so that, as he said at a campaign rally in Texas in February, “when the New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when the Washington Post . . . writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.” It’s not clear how he would do this as President or whether he even could, and when he’s been challenged on those points he hasn’t made it any clearer, probably because he has no idea.
.. More frightening, though, is the way that Trump has spoken about the law as an instrument of personal vengeance—his way of getting back at his critics and making them pay. “We’re going to have people sue you like you’ve never got sued before,” he said, talking about reporters, at a February rally in Texas.
.. Clinton’s falsehoods belonged more recognizably in the realm of what politicians do so often: she obfuscated, or exaggerated, or was less than transparent in defending her handling of particular matters during her career in public life. She did not tend to lie, as Trump does, about what Politico called matters of “policy substance”—what one could also call demonstrable facts about the world.
.. “A man who is unconscious of himself acts in a blind, instinctive way and is in addition fooled by all the illusions that arise when he sees everything that he is not conscious of in himself coming to meet him from outside as projections upon his neighbors,” Carl Jung wrote in his 1945