Another thing is Donald Trump, who was questioned during his presidency for his business with Moscow. “I have nothing to do with Russia,” he assured in 2016. That story changed when his great efforts to build a luxury apartment tower came to light. “Everyone” had been aware of the project, admitted Trump, who hinted that only an idiot would dismiss such a proposal simply because he wanted to be president of the nation.
“This is a testing time. We’ve never been in a situation like this before,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Center for Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. Jamieson argues that before Trump, it was taken for granted that certain lies — for example, those that undermine trust in democracy or justice — would disqualify an aspirant from public office. “If saying an election was rigged doesn’t fall into that category, then what?”
As a candidate, Trump used misinformation as a campaign tactic to denigrate his rivals. Thus, he maintained that the father of Senator Ted Cruz would have been implicated in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Today, however, Cruz unequivocally supports Trump.
During his presidency, Trump lied to voters on many issues: economic indicators, a hurricane, climate change, his own past and his encounters with foreign leaders. When he ruled in the midst of the pandemic, he downplayed the severity of the coronavirus and promoted fake remedies.
In the current fragmented information ecosystem, the efforts of journalists to verify the president’s data did not always reach those who believed in the veracity of his words. That could be changing, according to a Republican strategist who believes the party is becoming aware of Trump’s alternate universe.
“To me, he’s some sort of 77-year-old tragic character totally out of touch with reality, somehow creating his own reality,” says Craig Fuller, an official under both Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush. Fuller believes the large number of contenders for the Republican nomination is a sign that many voters want a more honest alternative, while also giving Trump a better chance of winning.
“I find it almost too dangerous to think about it,” Fuller adds when asked how he envisioned a second Trump presidency.
A request for comment from the Trump campaign went unanswered Friday.
During his presidency, Trump’s lies were so frequent — in person, on TV, on Twitter — that the sum of all of them quickly exceeded 100, 1,000, 10,000, 30,000. An entire Wikipedia page was created to keep track.
The most frequent target of Trump’s misrepresentations has always been the election and the vote. He won in 2016, but maintained that the election was rigged because he lost the so-called popular vote. He declared that the 2020 election was rigged even before Election Day and maintained that he could only lose if there was cheating. He never presented evidence and after the election, dozens of courts dismissed his complaints, including those presided over by judges he appointed.
The Trump lies that most worry election, political, and history experts are those about democracy and the integrity of the elections and the courts.
“They are not the first step, they are the hundredth step on the road to despotism,” Jeffrey Engel, director of the Center for the History of the Presidency at Southern Methodist University, warns of Trump’s attacks on the independence of judges. and the police. “The most scandalous thing, to me, is that he does nothing to hide them,” he adds.
Conflicts between the president, Congress, and the courts are a fundamental aspect of American governance, Engel declares, and many presidents have toyed with the truth by speaking out about their own public or private failings, but none have openly challenged another power as they have. Trump has done.
In the months leading up to the January 6, 2021 storming of the Capitol, Trump implored his supporters with an endless series of false allegations of rigged recounts, mail-in ballots and stuffed ballot boxes. He did little to disperse the violent mob that later attacked the headquarters of Congress. The legislative investigation of the attack concluded that Trump was part of a conspiracy to try to ignore and nullify the election.
For activists fighting to strengthen democracy, the insurrection demonstrates what happens when lies are allowed to displace the truth.
“On January 6, we became aware again of the fragility of our democracy,” warns Nathan Empsall, an Episcopal priest who runs Faithful America, a religious NGO that criticizes attempts to rewrite the history of that day. “If we don’t remember it, if we forget what happened, we may not be able to withstand the attack next time.”
“Trump did not create the factors that led to the current era of polarization and misinformation, but he did know how to exploit them,” says Julian E. Zelizer, a historian and political scientist at Princeton University.
“I don’t know if Donald Trump is the chicken or the egg, but I know he’s part of the mix,” Zelizer says. “He entered politics at a time of social media and growing mistrust and was the catalyst for it. He poured gasoline on the smoking flames and his statements apparently do not need to be true because his believers prefer his version.”
In April, when Trump was indicted in New York for falsifying company documents to hide bribe payments that could have affected the 2016 election, many of his online supporters compared the scandal-plagued, three-time-married tycoon with Jesus Christ, who Christians believe rose from the dead after his crucifixion.
His online supporters continued to support him after this month’s federal indictment.
You could say that Trump is the poster boy for the disinformation age, but mistrust and political polarization can’t be attributed to any one individual: They’re often the product of deep social divides and economic pressures, says Nealin Parker, executive director of Common Ground. USA, an NGO that studies how to overcome the political division of the country.
“People often look for a magic bullet: if it weren’t for this political leader, we’d be fine,” Parker adds. “But it doesn’t work that way.”
FUENTE: Associated Press
