Latest news with #BigLie
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Can Josh Hawley out-Trump Trump with the working person?
If you offered me half of Elon Musk's holdings to tell you what Josh Hawley truly believes, I would not be able to cash the check. But after watching our senior U.S. senator for eight years now, I can say with confidence that he likes to stand out in a crowd. By being first to object to the 2020 Electoral College results, then claiming he never tried to overturn the election that Joe Biden won, he did more harm than we'll ever be able to calculate. But there he was, leading the way, even if it was to perdition. With that infamous raised fist on Jan. 6, he tried to rally the rioters he then bolted away from. But hey, by that afternoon, many more Americans knew his name. Our man Hawley played a big role in the Big Lie: The risk that Donald Trump would not leave office after his defeat in 2020 really only became real, according to the 2021 book 'Peril,' by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, when Hawley said he would object to the Electoral College certification. In the traumatic hours after the attack on the Capitol, Hawley stood off to himself on the Senate floor, as The Star reported at the time. According to the book, 'No one spoke to Hawley, who many of them blamed for instigating the riot by announcing his opposition to the certification a week earlier.' Eventually, Sens. Ted Cruz and Roy Blunt asked him what he was going to do, and 'even with the carnage and push from some colleagues to stand down, Hawley decided he would keep his objection to both Arizona and Pennsylvania. He would remain in lockstep with Trump. When told of his decision, many of his Republican colleagues groaned. … Other Republicans would surely stick with Hawley, fearful of being seen as out of step with Trump's voters.' So what to make, then, of Hawley's recent declarations that he would never, no not ever, vote to cut Medicaid, as the Big Beautiful Bill currently does in a big, ugly way? This is quite a turnaround for someone who tried so hard to repeal Obamacare, and to fight Medicaid expansion. Lately, Hawley has started saying that cutting this precious program for the most vulnerable is one line he'd never cross, and that what's more, it's one that Trump wouldn't cross, either. This is clever, because how can Trump call him out for quoting Trump's own campaign promise to the public? Trump pushed hard for the House to pass the 'Big Beautiful Bill,' cuts and all, which it did. And when Hawley says Trump would never sign his own BBB if it included Medicaid cuts, well, sure he wouldn't. Hawley is right that cutting Medicaid would be a disaster for low-income families and the disabled and those with autism and in nursing homes. It's also incontrovertibly true that such cuts would hit Missourians particularly hard: An analysis by KFF Health News earlier this month found that Missouri was one of six states, along with Kentucky, Mississippi, New Mexico, South Carolina and West Virginia that would suffer the most. A recent front-page piece in The New York Times suggested that Hawley the culture warrior has also been 'less noisily' on the side of the little guy all along. So much less noisily that I can't say we ever noticed the effects of all those years of effort in Missouri. The graduate of Rockhurst High, Stanford and Yale Law, who clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts and spent a gap year teaching at St. Paul's in London, does, like Trump, who was a millionaire in grade school, talk an awful lot about how much the elites hate us regular folks. At Hawley's Senate campaign launch in 2018, I was still capable of disappointment at hearing him start right in with this us-versus-them golden oldie: 'The liberal elites who call themselves our leaders refer to us as flyover country,' he said. 'They deride not just our location but our whole way of living.' But, that's a song that always gets them out on the dance floor, and maybe the aggrievement was genuine. The Times piece about him said that as a longtime populist, Hawley had from his earliest days in office done things like go after opioid manufacturers as attorney general of our state. He did file lawsuits against them, it's true, and maybe he would have done so anyway. But he did that, as The Star reported, after discussion with the Washington political consultants who were involved in running his office and then his U.S. Senate campaign to get him some national buzz. And this was after his soon-to-be Senate opponent, Claire McCaskill, had already launched a Senate investigation into the opioid industry. My point is really that we have heard many words but seen few results from Josh Hawley, man of the people. If our senior senator really wants to, as a former aide to Bernie Sanders told The New York Times, break up the cozy relationship between his party and corporate America that's gone on since Reagan was president, does that mean he'll challenge Trump for selling access and demanding fealty from CEOs who then cash in? Rhetorical question. In some ways, what Hawley is doing reminds me of the recent moves from California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is breaking with his party and running to the center on trans athletes, limits on Medi-Cal for undocumented immigrants and declarations that he's going to stop 'funding failure' when it comes to curbing homelessness. Only, where Newsom is concerned, everyone and his puppy sees what he's doing as a bald political calculation in preparation for a potential '28 presidential run. He's getting nothing but noogies, both from his own party and from Republicans, for tacking to the center, while Hawley has been praised and reappraised by Democrats for simply saying he wouldn't cut Medicaid. The Wall Street Journal did disapprovingly note 'Josh Hawley's Medicaid Switcheroo.' And on X, he's being pressured to change his mind. Of course, if Missourians lost their health care, and Grandma couldn't stay in the nursing home, those giving him grief now would feel differently. And if that's what he's betting on, then he's right. Hawley's ambition is one of the only other things I know for sure about him. In his own recent essay in The Times, he made it seem that on the issue of Medicaid cuts, this is him and Trump against the bad guys. 'Mr. Trump has promised working-class tax cuts and protection for working-class social insurance, such as Medicaid,' he wrote. 'But now a noisy contingent of corporatist Republicans — call it the party's Wall Street wing — is urging Congress to ignore all that and get back to the old-time religion: corporate giveaways, preferences for capital and deep cuts to social insurance.' I can practically hear the score to 'Les Mis' in the background, calling us to the barricades, can't you? Now that the Republican House has passed the bill with those very same deep cuts — deeper, actually — it will be up to the Senate to stop the worst of it. Far less surprisingly, Sens. Jerry Moran of Kansas and Susan Collins of Maine have concerns about the bill, and Sen. Ron Johnson thinks it doesn't cut spending enough. They have until July to figure it out. Maybe Hawley won't backtrack at this point. And trying to out-Trump Trump with the working person, if that's the goal, would not actually be that hard. But if he really wants to become Trump's heir, and make that dreamed-of presidential run in the way that he hopes, he'll have to start doing more than talk.
Wall Street Journal
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
Now They Speak Up About Biden? C'mon, Man
Regarding 'A Reckoning for the Biden Coverup' (Review & Outlook, May 19). If Donald Trump's assertion without evidence that he actually won the 2020 election is known as 'the Big Lie,' what should we call the Democratic Party's assertion that its occupant of the White House was physically and mentally fit for office, 'The Great Malarkey' or 'Weekend at Biden's'? Paul E. Greenberg
Yahoo
30-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump's revenge machine is his only accomplishment — and MAGA is left out of it
Amid all the news these last few days about the first 100 days of Trump 2.0, there has been little written about one of his most important agenda items, and few questions about it by the various pollsters. We do know that he's underwater everywhere, starting with his flagship issues of the economy and immigration. He ran on those issues, so it's important to know what America thinks about his performance so far. But Trump had another flagship issue that was a big part of his appeal to his most fervent followers: The Washington Post/ABC/IPSOS poll asked what people think of Trump "taking measures against his political opponents," which doesn't exactly address the question of "retribution" (some might think it's about policy). But even then, 53% disapprove to 33% approve. The New York Times-Sienna poll asked whether Trump was exceeding his power (88% said yes), but that doesn't address this specific question either. 57% agreed that Trump shouldn't be allowed to withhold funding for universities in the Reuters Poll, which can be considered an act of political retribution, but is one that derives more from the right-wing extremists around Trump, such as the culture warriors who have been battling the allegedly liberal academy for decades. The polls have looked at Trump's gross abuse of power in some ways, such as the administration potentially ignoring court orders and congressional prerogatives, and majorities really don't like it. But as far as I can tell, there were no questions asking people if they approve of Donald Trump's vengeful actions against his political enemies. And that's strange since there have been a boatload of them. One of the first actions Trump took when he assumed office was to pardon all the Jan. 6 rioters. He considered that a priority because he saw their prosecution as a direct attack on the Big Lie that he had actually won the 2020 election. He reportedly was offered some names of violent criminals who should be kept behind bars and he said "f**k it — release 'em all," which gives us some idea of his mindset when it comes to his personal vendettas. He soon had the Justice Department fire 12 prosecutors assigned to the cases. His Acting U.S. Attorney for Washington D.C., Ed Martin (who happened to have been involved in the defense of some of the defendants), ordered an investigation into how the prosecutions were carried out. Prosecutors were told that they had committed a "grave national injustice." Martin has also notified one of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's deputies that he is investigating the "integrity and legality" of the Russia investigation, suggesting that the Mueller team is in the crosshairs as well, which is almost certainly the case since Trump has said for years that they should all be jailed. Meanwhile, the administration has targeted one of his major antagonists, New York Attorney General Letitia James, who led the civil prosecution against Trump for which he was found liable for nearly half a billion dollars over his fraudulent valuations of Trump Organization properties. The Federal Housing Finance Agency sent a criminal referral to the Department of Justice, accusing James of mortgage fraud. The administration has pulled the security clearances of numerous lawyers and former government officials, Trump has personally called out for investigation, including some who are now unable to work in their field. For instance, a lawyer Trump wanted investigated in the first term, Mark Zaid, represented the whistleblower who raised concerns about Trump's "perfect phone call" with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. That led to Trump's first impeachment, and now Zaid is no longer able to represent anyone who might want to access the whistleblower protections. The message this sends to anyone who might represent such a client is pretty obvious. And then there are the law firms, some of which were singled out for representing people Trump doesn't like and others who may have employed attorneys he has faced in court, such as Covington & Burling, which assisted Special Counsel Jack Smith, and Perkins Coie, which represented the Dominion Voting Machine Company in its defamation suits against the right wing networks that spread Trump's Big Lie. Others have been targeted supposedly for their "DEI policies" (which the administration fatuously asserts are violations of the Civil Rights Act) and have shamefully bent the knee by agreeing to do pro bono work for the administration, which Trump seems to believe makes them his personal legal servants. What it does do is take them off the table as defenders of anything that might benefit his enemies or threaten him. Luckily, some of these law firms are suing the administration rather than capitulate to his threats, and the courts so far do not seem amused. There are also the aforementioned universities, most of which seemed poised to give Trump whatever he wanted, but after a (supposed) mistaken moment of overreach, the biggest of them all, Harvard, decided to fight back. That, too, is going to be decided in the courts. Then there is the media, which he is personally suing in a couple of cases. He has the FCC going after others and is banning other reporters from working inside federal buildings. He's pulled the security details from anyone associated with the Biden family except the former president himself because he's bound by law (and probably worries that it could blow back on him when he finally leaves office). And he's singled out several people who worked in his former administration whom he sees as disloyal, starting with the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. He had his security clearance removed, despite still being under threat, and is now under investigation by the Pentagon for "undermining the chain of command" under some kind of administrative action. Milley, for his part, was preemptively pardoned by former President Joe Biden. Perhaps most ominously, Trump recently issued orders to the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security to investigate Trump's former cybersecurity expert Chris Krebs and pulled the security clearances of everyone in the company he now works at as well. Krebs' crime was to say that the 2020 election was secure, the truth. And Miles Taylor, Trump's former Chief of Staff to the Department of Homeland Security Secretary, who later revealed himself as the author of an infamous anonymous New York Times op-ed that claimed people inside the administration were keeping Trump in check, is also the subject of a DHS investigation at the direction of the president. He's targeting specific people now for serious criminal investigation. That's just the tip of the iceberg. The entire Department of Justice, under the leadership of Attorney General Pam Bondi, is being turned into a Trump revenge machine. They're even targeting judges whom she has declared to be "low-level leftists who are trying to dictate President Trump's executive powers." If an attorney general using those words doesn't make your blood run cold, you're not paying attention. Trump promised to do this even in the face of pressure from his campaign and allies not to. He will not stop until and unless the courts tell him he has to. If they do say he's gone too far, the question then is whether he will once again abuse his power and defy them. Even a large majority of Republicans don't want him to do that. But considering all he's done already, we have to be prepared for the possibility that he may just say, "f" it as he did with the J6 pardons. His thirst for revenge is unslakable.
New York Post
30-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Post
Michael Goodwin: Trump's first 100 days illustrate his strengths —decisive, bold, and in a hurry
Any discussion of the opening days of Donald Trump's presidency must start at the key date — last Nov. 5, when he rose from the political dead to seize his second term in the White House. His comeback victory was decisive as he swept all seven battleground states on the way to piling up 312 electoral votes, winning the popular vote and leading the GOP to control of Congress. But first he had to survive two assassination attempts, with one in Pennsylvania a miraculous near miss, and overcome an onslaught of Democratic prosecutions and civil suits designed to defeat and imprison him. Advertisement All those cases, the first ever brought against a former president, were necessary, Americans were assured by Dems and their media mouthpieces, to protect democracy. The Big Lie — that the weaponization of the courts was anything other than a partisan power play — seems like ages ago. But recognizing the dogged determination Trump needed to survive the persecution and come out on top is key to understanding his conduct since he took the oath on Jan. 20. Advertisement He believes God spared him to save America, and so his sense of mission is infused with urgency. He savors revenge — who wouldn't? — but ultimately came to get big things done. He's in a hurry and sometimes, as with tariffs, to a fault. Record of achievement Still, the avalanche of orders, actions and proposals reveals his biggest and most important accomplishment — Trump is continually expanding the outer limits of what a president can hope to achieve. His comfort with the power and prestige of the office allows him to unmask conventional wisdom as a paper tiger. Advertisement Tell him that something can't be done, and he takes that as a challenge. That is his defining difference. 4 President Trump's 142 executive orders is the most of any president in their first 100 days. Donna Grace/NY Post Design His book 'The Art of the Deal' was a memoir about his days as a brash real estate developer, but his political autobiography should be called 'The Art of the Impossible.' Exhibit A is that he managed to do the very thing both political parties and the supposed media experts insisted couldn't be done. Advertisement Trump closed the southern border. Correction: He sealed it. Recall that former President Joe Biden said last year he had done all he could to reduce illegal immigration even as Homeland Security was reporting nearly 3 million illegal crossers. To do more, Biden claimed, would require new legislation. As Trump told me in a phone interview Monday, 'You didn't need new legislation, all you needed was a strong f–king president.' The facts bear him out: In March, the numbers of illegal border crossers encountered declined by 95% over March of last year. 'We had to seal the border,' he said. 'If we didn't do that, we wouldn't have a country. People were coming here from all over the world, literally from everywhere. It had to stop.' 'Rogue judges' His related promise — to carry out mass deportations, starting with criminal migrants, has encountered resistance from leftist activists, some of whom wear judicial robes. 'Rogue judges,' he called them Monday, while expressing confidence that 'I believe it's going to work out at the appeals levels.' Despite the resistance, border czar Tom Homan said Monday that 139,000 criminal illegals have been deported. It's an impressive down payment. Advertisement The president also has the courage to take on the explosion of antisemitism at America's top colleges and universities, and is trying to drain the ideological swamps that provide more indoctrination than education. His weapon is money — the university system feeds on billions of federal dollars for research and other uses, and he aims to withhold it if they don't shape up. He started with Columbia University, and has targeted as many as 60 schools, including Harvard and Penn. Again, the comparison with Biden is instructive. The addled former president said next to nothing and did even less during the Jew-hatred explosion after Israel responded to Hamas' Oct. 7 butchery with an invasion of Gaza. 4 U.S. President Donald Trump holds up a sword after using it to cut the cake as first lady Melania Trump smiles during the Commander-in-Chief Ball on Trump's inauguration day in Washington, Jan. 20, 2025. AP Advertisement Trump vowed to act, and has. Another promise made, promise kept involves recruiting Elon Musk and his DOGE Musketeers to cut waste and fraud from the federal budget. With outlays of nearly $7 trillion, $2 trillion of which is borrowed, pay dirt is everywhere. The only shock is that Dems and the media object, as if the world as we know it will end if America spends a single penny less. It's a case that demonstrates Trump's genius for exposing the idiocy of his opponents. Advertisement Other areas where he has broken sharply with the past involve the dreaded culture wars. It's been a leftist playground — until now. He issued an executive order that ended the government DEI programs that often morphed into racial discrimination and is putting pressure on colleges and corporations to do the same. Another executive order requires federal agencies to recognize two sexes and stop promoting 'gender ideology' of the sort that allows biological men to participate in women's sports. States that resist will lose federal funds. Can't be intimidated Even among most Republicans, these topics were regarded as political 'no go zones' because activists would raise holy hell. Trump wasn't intimidated, and the resulting outrage was far more muted than predicted. Advertisement Similarly, his order dismantling the Department of Education has been on the GOP wish list since Jimmy Carter created it. Most of these and other changes were delivered soon after Trump took office, making the first 70 days or so a record of action that rivals FDR's fast start, which set the standard by which all subsequent presidents have been measured. But then came April 2. Trump called it 'Liberation Day' to signify the start of America being freed from what he views as extremely unfair trade practices involving countries around the world. The effort has not run its course, so the president may yet succeed in making new agreements that spark investments and millions of manufacturing jobs at home while opening more foreign markets to American products and services. In the meantime, 'Liberation Day' has come to mean the start of something quite different from what he intended. 4 US Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren attend a meeting on the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, February 4, 2025. AFP via Getty Images His actions almost single-handedly changed the view of his administration among many Americans, who started giving him poor marks on the economy just months after it was a huge advantage in the election. So much so that a full assessment of his first 100 days is best done by dividing them into two distinct ones. There is the wildly successful pre-tariff period, and the rocky, dispiriting post-tariff period. Stock markets offer a measure of the difference. Wall Street was on a joyride, with the major indexes here and in much of the world reaching new highs in February, only to plunge in April. Forecasters suddenly warned that a long standoff would crush global trade, leading to both a recession and inflation, a double whammy that could destroy Trump's presidency. As millions of Americans saw their savings and retirement funds shrink, the president's poll numbers dropped. Reports of White House infighting and corporate leaders pleading with the president to change course added to the feeling of peril. Clawing back losses Although markets stabilized and clawed back much of their losses after the president began making carve-outs for certain industries and he and aides spoke optimistically about quick deals, no deal has materialized, creating a lingering feeling of uncertainty. Yet the president remains confident in the strategy. He said Monday 'there can't be big inflation with the price of oil staying low' and that 'the tariffs are going to work out very well.' He added his common claim that the money being collected at ports of entry will be used to help fund tax cuts and pay down some of the nation's debt. His can-do optimism is infectious, but as someone once said, 'Hope makes a great breakfast but a poor dinner.' 4 U.S. President Donald Trump, accompanied by White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, speaks during a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office on February 04, 2025 in Washington, DC. Getty Images The sooner he settles the major trade deals and on favorable terms, the sooner he can reap a windfall of political and economic gains. Two other foreign policy problems also fall into the incomplete category: Russia's war in Ukraine and Iran's nuclear ambitions. Candidate Trump promised to settle both quickly, but his envoy, Steve Witkoff, has wavered on the terms, which indicates that the president has not settled on a bottom line for either. That's not surprising, given the complexity, but the deadlock is a reminder of why Harry Truman famously kept a sign on his Oval Office desk that said, 'The buck stops here.' Godspeed, Mr. President. America and the world need you to succeed.
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Short-Circuiting of the American Mind
In a 1995 episode of Seinfeld, an extremely Seinfeldian series of events leads Jerry to a problem: He has to take a lie-detector test. Specifically, he has to beat a lie-detector test. He seeks advice from his friend George Costanza, whose personal flaws render him uniquely suited to the task of polygraph cheating. George initially rejects the idea that conscience-free lying can be taught ('It's like saying to Pavarotti, 'Teach me to sing like you!''). But he relents. 'It's not a lie,' George says, with a melodramatic flourish, 'if you believe it.' The joke, in the episode, is at George's expense: Only in his upside-down world would sociopathy amount to a moral. These days, though, his advice might as well be political theory. To participate in American politics is to navigate, every day, an avalanche of falsehoods—lies issued, with Costanza-like ease, from the highest levels of power. Fact-checking was a theme of Donald Trump's first presidency. Journalists kept count of those first-term fictions—30,573 in all, per one count—guided by the optimism that checking the president's words might also serve as a check on his power. In late 2020, when Trump claimed victory in the presidential election he had lost, scholars saw in his declaration the kind of propaganda typically found only in authoritarian regimes. They gave the fiction an epithet befitting its magnitude: 'the Big Lie.' But that term, with its sense of emergency, has gone the way so many other fact-checks have in this age of heedless lying: It lives, now, in that democratically awkward space between accuracy and irrelevance. In 2024, Trump was reelected despite the Big Lie—and perhaps because of it. His false assertions are not liabilities, it seems, but rather selling points for many of his voters. They are weapons of partisan warfare, disorienting perceived enemies (Democrats, members of the media) even as they foment broader forms of cynicism and mistrust. Though Trump's second presidency began on January 20, 2025, the start of the new Trump era effectively began on January 7, 2025. That was the day that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced it would be ending its efforts to fact-check claims made on those platforms. (It also happened to be exactly four years and one day after the attack on the Capitol that emerged from the Big Lie.) Meta's pronouncement was the company's 'Latest Bow to Trump,' as an Associated Press headline summed it up. It was also a harbinger of a wider kind of concession. Fact-checking, while increasing as a need over the first 100 days of the second Trump administration, is waning as an enterprise. The lies are winning. The president is wielding them ever more brazenly. George Costanza, for all his idiocy, may also be a savant: It's not a lie if you believe it. For decades, American politics have relied on the same logic that polygraph machines do: that liars will feel some level of shame when they tell their lies, and that the shame will manifest—the quickened heartbeat, the pang of guilt—in the body. But the body politic is cheating the test with alarming ease. Some Americans believe the lies. Others refuse to. Some Americans recognize the lies' falsity but have decided that some things—their own tribe, their vision for the country—are simply more important than truth. Regardless, the lies remain, unchecked by the old machinery. The polygraph is a measure of conscience. So, in its way, is democracy. A century ago, in his classic book Public Opinion, the journalist Walter Lippmann laid out a bleak argument: One of the threats to the American experiment was American democracy itself. The work of self-government, Lippmann thought—even back then—asked far too much of its citizens. It asked too much of our minds. Democracy is a task of data management; ours is premised on the idea that voters' political decisions will be based on reliable information. But it is also a matter of psychology, and of cognition. The atomic unit of democracy is the human brain. Everything will come down to its capabilities, its vulnerabilities, its biases—for better and, definitely, for worse. Public Opinion considers mass media and propaganda, and the role that emotion plays in political life. Lippmann observed the importance of media inputs well before media was part of the American vernacular. The information people rely on to do the work of citizenship—voting, arguing, shaping a shared future—is data. But those data are processed by notoriously fickle hardware. The data inform our brains' impressions of the world: the images that Lippmann called 'the pictures in our heads.' The pictures are subjective. They are malleable. And, perhaps most of all, they make little distinction between things that are true and things that are merely believed to be. Lippmann was writing in the 1920s, not only during the early age of radio but also during a smaller kind of communications revolution: penny presses; mass-produced illustrations and photographs; advertising. He was reckoning with the beginning stages of the information environment that humans navigate today. As people consumed these media, he discerned that they would become reliant on images of the world rather than on the evidence provided by the world itself. They would become confused, he feared, by the preponderance of competing images. And the confusion would weaken them—making them susceptible to the advertisements, to all the stories, to information overwhelm. (To describe the effect of the images, Lippmann borrowed a term from the factory floor: They functioned, he argued, as 'stereotypes'—a term he used not as an insult but as a simple description of images' heuristic powers.) In Public Opinion, Lippmann diagnosed how readily propaganda could make its way into a nation that was officially at peace. He outlined how seamlessly the false messages could mingle with, and override, true ones. He argued that Americans' unsteady relationship with information made our democracy inherently fragile. The philosopher John Dewey, alternately impressed and horrified by Public Opinion, called it 'perhaps the most effective indictment of democracy' ever written. [From the November 1919 issue: Walter Lippmann on the basic problem of democracy] Lippmann's critiques of democracy have become only more relevant with age. The media environment of the 1920s already featured elements of information overload. The first months of the second Trump presidency, having brought a 'flood the zone' approach to government, have lent new acuity to Lippmann's warnings. The number of news stories alone has made it seem almost absurd to expect citizens to attempt the basic work of democracy: staying informed. With every lie Trump has told, from the petty to the consequential, he has eroded people's ability to trust the pictures in their heads. Every time he condemns the pollsters who document his waning public approval, he further erodes that trust. The tethers that anchor people to their president—and to the ground truths of their politics—fray just a bit more. The people closest to Trump weaken those tethers as well. See, for example, the White House's changing story about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whom the administration forcibly deported to El Salvador in March. Administration officials initially called his deportation—effected without due process—an 'administrative error.' Soon, though, and without providing credible evidence, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was accusing Abrego Garcia of being a gang member, a human trafficker, and a 'foreign terrorist.' Earlier this month, after the Supreme Court ordered the administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador, the White House adviser Stephen Miller insisted that the administration had 'won' the case, 'clearly.' It had not. The Court had rebuked the White House, unanimously. But political power can be narrative power as well. Falsehoods, issued repeatedly from the bully pulpit, threaten to become conventional wisdom, then clichés, then foregone conclusions. Attempts to challenge them, as crucial as those efforts are as matters of historical recordkeeping, take on a certain listlessness. For others to point out the truth is to do the right thing. It is also to bring paper straws to a gunfight. In February, responding to Trump's ask-neither-permission-nor-forgiveness approach to presidential power, the New York Times journalist Ezra Klein published an essay titled, simply, 'Don't Believe Him.' The president's strategy, Klein argued, is to perform a level of power he doesn't have in the hopes that the performance might become, eventually, reality. Trump 'has always wanted to be king,' Klein wrote. 'His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.' [From the June 2025 issue: 'I run the country and the world'] This is absolutely correct. It is also an encapsulation of the problem that Lippmann foresaw. The president, a creature—and in some sense a creation—of television, is keenly aware of the power of images. He avails himself of the insight that Lippmann had years before the TV would become a fact of many people's lives. And Trump knows how much is at stake. The pictures we carry around with us, in our mind's ever-revolving camera rolls, are much more than representations of the world as we understand it. The pictures are biases, too. They are assumptions and expectations. They are like brands, in their way: ever expandable, ever expendable. They can be shaped by lies as well as truths. Human brains have a hard time telling the difference. Lippmann was a contemporary of Freud, whose nascent insights in psychology informed Lippmann's theories of politics. Our minds make us what we are; they also make us, collectively, vulnerable to deceit. They are biased toward emotion over information. They tend to prefer the easy stories over the complicated ones. The pictures they hold might be informed by our interactions with physical reality, or by fantasy. Humans can try to separate the two—reality here, irreality there, stored in separate files—and can do so successfully. But the separation itself is work. And it is work made ever more taxing in a media environment where the human-generated lies mingle with the AI-generated ones, and where even the fact-checked news comes at people in endless feeds and floods. In the flurry, people can lose control of the pictures in their heads. They can lose control of themselves. 'For it is clear enough,' Lippmann wrote, 'that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond.' Public Opinion—written not long after a once-in-a-century pandemic, and after the urgencies and contingencies of war had changed the way that Americans thought about truth itself—also contains insights from Lippmann's experience with public relations. He had worked in the field, on behalf of the United States and its allies, during World War I. He had seen firsthand how easily information could be spun and edited and, all too often, simply manufactured out of thin air. Modern advertising works, generally speaking, by creating problems rather than solving them. It manufactures desires among the public; it also manufactures, in the process, discontent. Our politics are doing the same work as they sell our nation back to us. Trump is, too. He manufactures problems—the 'rigged' elections, the invasion of 'illegals,' the 'woke mob,' the horrors of 'American carnage'—to sell us the solution: Trump himself. [Read: The 21st century's greatest, ghastliest showman] The word propaganda, in Lippmann's era, had not adopted the negative connotations it carries today. It was a term of politics borrowed from Catholic practice: Propaganda shared a root with propagation and suggested the straightforward act of sharing and spreading the faith. In the 1920s, it meant something akin to what today we might call straightforward 'publicity.' But Lippmann's studies of psychology had chastened him. Our minds, for all their attunement to the nuances of the physical world—the subtle shifts in light, the micro-expressions that move on the faces of other people—are not terribly adept at perceiving those distinctions through the filters of airwaves and screens. On the contrary, all the inputs people encounter, by choice or by circumstance—the news reports, the novels, the films, the celebrities, the radio shows, the billboards, the histories, the satires, the amusements, the truths, the lies—tend to end up in the same place. The inputs influence, then continually edit, the pictures in our heads. Those pictures might be accurate appraisals. They might be delusions. They are nearly impossible to categorize. They are also totalizing. 'Whatever we believe to be a true picture, we treat it as if it were the environment itself,' Lippmann observed. The insight might seem simple: Of course we believe what we see. But the opposite is true as well: We see what we believe. For Lippmann, that meant that the information people rely on to form their mental images would be the lifeblood, or the death, of American democracy. Lippmann was a celebrated columnist, and he wrote Public Opinion as American newspapers were in the process of reforming. This was the era when objectivity, as a standard, was born. It was the age when reporters instituted standards of sourcing and validation. They were responding to the proliferation of information and misinformation, the advent of advertising, the establishment of public relations as a field and a career choice. The papers were reacting to market pressures, essentially, by creating a new kind of commodity: information that had been collected, vetted, verified. This information would go out of its way to clarify what had been reported and what had been merely opined. The lines were not always entirely clear—but they were efforts to impose new modes of order. Now, though, the lies are imposing the order. TV-news organizations, hosting candidate debates during the presidential election last year, deliberated over whether moderators should correct inaccuracies uttered on their air. Confusion on the matter led J. D. Vance, facing Tim Walz in a vice-presidential debate, to make his infamous complaint: 'The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact-check.' (He was reacting to CBS moderators' efforts to clarify that many of the Haitian immigrants of Springfield, Ohio, whom Vance had previously referred to as 'illegal,' indeed had legal status in the United States.) [From the March 2023 issue: We've lost the plot] Challenges to the rules have expanded far beyond the format of the televised debate. In early April, President Trump issued an executive order condemning Chris Krebs—who in Trump's first term headed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency—on the grounds that Krebs had said that the 2020 presidential election was free and fair. The order is so blatant in its attempt to rewrite history that to call it Orwellian would be something of an insult to Big Brother. But it is Costanzan. It is authoritarian. What Donald Trump believes, the order suggests, becomes the truth. 'When the president does it … that means that it is not illegal,' Richard Nixon claimed, a few years after his association with illegal activity ended his presidency. That tautology, in the age of Trump, is now a matter of judicial precedent. It is also the defining logic of Trump's attempts to expand executive authority. 'I'm a very honest person, and I believe it with all my heart,' Trump said recently in an interview with my colleagues Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, and Jeffrey Goldberg. He was responding to their questions about why Trump continues to insist, falsely, that he won the 2020 election. 'I believe it with fact—you know, more important than heart,' Trump said. 'I believe it with fact.' This is the Costanza principle at work. 'Because I believe it' is neither a factual argument nor a legal one. But Trump is treating it as both. He is treating his preferred reality as the only one that can exist. He is behaving, in that respect, less like a president than like a king. He is acting as the kind of demagogue whom James Madison and other Founders feared when they warned about 'the passions' and their corrosive effect on politics. Passions, for those men of the Enlightenment, fought against reason. They weakened people's defenses against the seductions of emotional appeals. They could make people unable to tell the difference between the convenient story and the true one. 'Facts don't care about your feelings,' as the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro put it, is a good slogan, but it gets things wrong: The guiding principle of Trumpism is 'Feelings don't care about your facts.' And once facts are discarded, anything can come in their place. Trump's lack of accountability for his lies has expanded, in these early days of his second term, into a more comprehensive form of unchecked power. 'The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive,' he told Parker and Scherer. 'The second time, I run the country and the world.' If Can he say that? was a broad theme of Trump's first term, Can he do that? is the even graver theme of his second. The deportations. The tariffs. The dismantling of the civil service, of scientific research, of government records, of civil rights, of voting rights, of basic standards of due process: The president's efforts to destabilize his own government from within—to defund agencies, to 'purge' the civil service of people he views as insufficiently loyal—have not merely been escalations of the attempted power grabs he made in his first term. They have been direct assaults on the delicate balance of power: an executive laying siege to the legislative and judicial branches. Lippmann did not predict this turn of events, but he understood their consequences. Democracy, under the sway of lies, becomes a form of anarchy. Article originally published at The Atlantic
