The President routinely describes reporting he dislikes as FAKE NEWS. The Administration calls the press “the opposition party,” ridicules news organizations it doesn’t like as business failures, and calls for journalists to be fired. Mr. Trump has called for rewriting libel laws in order to more easily sue the press.
.. Ideologically, the president is trying to depose so-called mainstream media in favor of the media he likes — Breitbart News and the rest. Another way of making this point is to say that he’s trying to substitute news for propaganda, information for boosterism.
His objection to, say, the New York Times, isn’t that there’s a liberal bias in the paper that gets in the way of its objectivity, which I think would be a fair criticism. His objection is to objectivity itself. He’s perfectly happy for the media to be disgusting and corrupt — so long as it’s on his side.
.. O’Reilly asks:
Is there any validity to the criticism of you that you say things that you can’t back up factually, and as the President you say there are three million illegal aliens who voted and you don’t have the data to back that up, some people are going to say that it’s irresponsible for the President to say that.
To which the president replies:
Many people have come out and said I’m right.
Now many people also say Jim Morrison faked his own death. Many people say Barack Obama was born in Kenya. “Many people say” is what’s known as an argumentum ad populum.
The president is responding to a claim of fact not by denying the fact, but by denying the claim that facts are supposed to have on an argument.
.. He isn’t telling O’Reilly that he’s got his facts wrong. He’s saying that, as far as he is concerned, facts, as most people understand the term, don’t matter: That they are indistinguishable from, and interchangeable with, opinion; and that statements of fact needn’t have any purchase against a man who is either sufficiently powerful to ignore them or sufficiently shameless to deny them
.. This is a version of Thrasymachus’s argument in Plato’s Republic that justice is the advantage of the stronger and that injustice “if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterly than justice.”
.. Truth is what you can get away with.
.. Today, just 17% of adults aged 18-24 read a newspaper daily, down from 42% at the turn of the century. Today there are fewer than 33,000 full-time newsroom employees, a drop from 55,000 just 20 years ago.
.. I personally think we crossed a rubicon in the Clinton years, when three things happened: we decided that some types of presidential lies didn’t matter; we concluded that “character” was an over-rated consideration when it came to judging a president; and we allowed the lines between political culture and celebrity culture to become hopelessly blurred.
.. If a public figure tells a whopping lie once in his life, it’ll haunt him into his grave. If he lies morning, noon and night, it will become almost impossible to remember any one particular lie. Outrage will fall victim to its own ubiquity. It’s the same truth contained in Stalin’s famous remark that the death of one man is a tragedy but the death of a million is a statistic.
.. Shameless rhetoric will always find a receptive audience with shameless people. Donald Trump’s was the greatest political strip-tease act in U.S. political history: the dirtier he got, the more skin he showed, the more his core supporters liked it.
.. Earlier today, at his press conference, the president claimed his administration is running like a “fine-tuned machine.” In actual fact, he just lost his Labor Secretary nominee, his National Security Adviser was forced out in disgrace, and the Intelligence Community is refusing to fully brief the president for fear he might compromise sources and methods.
.. The first is that we normalize it, simply by becoming inured to constant repetition of the same bad behavior.
The second is that at some level it excites and entertains us.
.. And the third is that we adopt new metrics of judgment, in which politics becomes more about perceptions than performance—of how a given action is perceived as being perceived. If a reporter for the New York Times says that Trump’s press conference probably plays well in Peoria, then that increases the chances that it will play well in Peoria.
Let me add a fourth point here: our tendency to rationalize.
.. And the third is that we adopt new metrics of judgment, in which politics becomes more about perceptions than performance—of how a given action is perceived as being perceived. If a reporter for the New York Times says that Trump’s press conference probably plays well in Peoria, then that increases the chances that it will play well in Peoria.
Let me add a fourth point here: our tendency to rationalize.
.. And the third is that we adopt new metrics of judgment, in which politics becomes more about perceptions than performance—of how a given action is perceived as being perceived. If a reporter for the New York Times says that Trump’s press conference probably plays well in Peoria, then that increases the chances that it will play well in Peoria.
Let me add a fourth point here: our tendency to rationalize.
.. They wanted to believe. They were willing to adapt. They thought they could do more good from the inside.
.. They convinced themselves that, brutal and capricious as Stalinism might be, it couldn’t possibly be worse than the exploitative capitalism of the West.
.. There’s the same desperate desire for political influence; the same belief that Trump represents a historical force to which they ought to belong; the same willingness to bend or discard principles they once considered sacred; the same fear of seeming out-of-touch with the mood of the public; the same tendency to look the other way at comments or actions that they cannot possibly justify; the same belief that you do more good by joining than by opposing; the same Manichean belief that, if Hillary Clinton had been elected, the United States would have all-but ended as a country.
Quote: On Telling the Truth
Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires some sense to know how to lie well
- Samuel Butler
Richard Rohr: The Broken Truth
One night, in a far-away land that “is somehow not so far away,” a truth falls from the stars. As it falls, it breaks into two pieces; one piece blazes off through the sky and the other falls straight to the ground. One day, a man stumbles upon the gravity-drawn truth and finds carved on it the words, “You are loved.” It makes him feel good, so he keeps it and shares it with the people in his tribe. The thing sparkles and makes the people who have it feel warm and happy. It becomes their most prized possession, and they call it “The Truth.” Those who have the truth grow afraid of those who don’t have it, who are different. And those who don’t have it covet it. Soon people are fighting wars over the small truth, trying to capture it for themselves.
.. Finally, a raven flies the broken truth to the top of a tower, where the other piece has been ensconced for safety, and the rejoined pieces shine their full message: “You are loved / and so are they.”
Trump likes to be ‘unpredictable.’ That won’t work so well in diplomacy.
And the ambiguity of a president who contradicts himself frequently could sow confusion among rivals of the United States. The problem is that it will also sow confusion among key allies and partners. Ultimately, Trump’s bluster and impulsiveness will hurt our national interest. If allies — or enemies — stop believing what they hear from the White House, Trump is likely to blunder into conflicts that are not of his own choosing.
.. His rise to political prominence came from lying about President Obama’s citizenship status. During his presidential campaign, Trump and his aides gaslighted on a regular basis: In one debate, Trump flatly denied that he had called global warming a Chinese hoax — when he very clearly had . According to every reputable fact-checker, Trump lied far more frequently than Hillary Clinton.
.. As Salena Zito put it in the Atlantic in September, Trump’s voters took his rhetoric seriously but not literally; the press, meanwhile, took it literally but not seriously.
.. But after a campaign in which he faced almost no consequences for lying or exaggerating, Trump will be moving to a far different arena. Getting caught bluffing in international politics is embarrassing. Getting caught in an outright lie is more dangerous.
.. John F. Kennedy lied to hide the fact that Soviet removal of nuclear weapons from Cuba in 1962 was contingent on the United States withdrawing Jupiter missiles from Turkey. But that was a lie to the American people.
In his book “Why Leaders Lie,” political scientist John Mearsheimer came to the surprising conclusion that foreign policy leaders rarely lie to other governments.
.. On the other hand, it’s not always clear that Trump knows when he’s lying. He simply doesn’t care at times whether he’s telling the truth or not. But even if he’s just winging it rather than lying, that will be a marked change from past commanders in chief.
.. As the Atlantic’s David Frum noted this week, “It’s really a terrible thing that the word of the president-elect of the United States cannot be believed or trusted.”
.. Trump’s impulsiveness alone won’t pose as much of a problem as it will in conjunction with his inability to tell the truth.
.. Furthermore, for all Trump’s fits of pique, it is worth remembering that he also reverses course frequently. Trump raged against Kelly but eventually sat down for a one-on-one interview with her.
.. According to “Frontline,” Obama’s 2011 roasting of Trump inspired his presidential run, but since winning the election, the president-elect has been nothing but complimentary toward his predecessor. Just this past week, Trump tweeted that he had canceled a scheduled meeting with the New York Times, only to reverse course later in the morning and show up for an on-the-record interview . In that interview, he backed away from some of his core campaign promises, which only underscores how hard it is to know when Trump means what he says.
.. Trump and his brain trust clearly believe that candor is a sign of weakness.
.. His preference was for a “sneak attack ” (despite doubts among military experts that such an operation would be possible).
.. This sentiment echoes what Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, told the Wall Street Journal this week: “Politics is war. General Sherman would never have gone on TV to tell everyone his plans. I’d never tip my hand to the other side.”
.. But most presidents have been slow to anger and reluctant to lie in world politics. And there are pretty good reasons for that.
.. When foreign policy leaders get angry as a theatrical tactic, the idea is to get more in negotiations. What happens the first time the president loses his cool — and then just plain loses? Then the anger will be seen as a bluff.
.. leaders don’t bluff much in world politics because they want their promises to be believed by other countries. That is the nature of deterrence.
.. Trump pilloried Obama during a debate for not following through in August 2013 on his declaration that using chemical weapons would be a “red line” for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (though Trump supported Obama’s decision at the time ). To many in the foreign policy establishment, that decision signaled American weakness in the Middle East. The more the Trump administration makes threats it doesn’t carry out, the more other countries will not take subsequent promises seriously. They will be perceived, as Trump put it, as “just words.”
.. Being hot-headed as a tactic only works if other leaders are not hot-headed in response. The very leaders most like Trump — Putin, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan — are the ones most likely to respond to anger with anger, escalating any dispute.
.. however, the president-elect doesn’t seem to have thought about what will happen after other countries adjust to his bluffing and dissembling.