Greg Sargent in The Plum Line remarks on the response of the news media of candidate and President Trump’s endless lying:
It is a great irony of the current political moment: By broadcasting forth Trump’s lies in tweets and headlines — while declining to inform readers that they are just that, and while burying the truth deep within accompanying articles — the organizations that Trump regularly derides as “fake news” are themselves spreading a species of fake news.
That is, fake news authored by Trump himself.
There is little doubt that a deceiver as prolific and innovative as Trump grasps — whether instinctively or consciously — that those getting news from social media and on mobile devices often read no further than headlines or tweets, and that the transmitting out of disinformation that gets amplified in headlines and news feeds helps him exploit this facet of the shifting information landscape.
The audience bears a responsibility as well, particularly when someone like Trump has such potential and actual influence. When it became clear to me that candidate Trump lies and lies and lies, as fact-checkers pointed out during the primaries, I no longer took anything he says straight – in fact, I always have a very large grain of metaphorical salt sitting next to me at the table, because I assume he’s lying, boasting, grasping after unearned credit, etc.[1]
And this, in my non-partisan opinion, is what every single American adult should be doing.
It occurred to me, during the final push on the Kavanaugh hearings, that the decisions of many Republican Senators, as well as a few Democratic Senators such as, in the end, Manchin of West Virginia, were made not with their solemn responsibilities in mind, but with an eye towards the mid-term elections.
Sure, there’s no real news there. because it happens all the time. I can accept it for legislation, because governing is hard and compromise is not failure, but the acceptance that maybe your side is wrong, or both sides are wrong, and the compromise is how you make progress without running into utter destruction.
But when it comes to a SCOTUS nomination, there’s little point in compromise, or deference, but to keep someone in power happy, be they elected or not. It sounds like politics, but it’s really corruption. The Senatorial duty is to ascertain whether the nominees meets the standards and has no stains on their background of a disabling or extortionate nature, and then vote him up and down.
And what of it?
Do you remember the rampant theme of the 2016 Election? Drain the swamp! the Trump partisans cried. No more Politics As Usual! because it looks so sleazy.
And here we are. The swamp is far, far worse than it was just two years ago. And the politics continue to control the decisions of our Senators.
But I’m not going to stop here, because it goes the other way as well. Long time readers may remember my remarks about the moral turpitude of the Evangelicals. They back Trump because, as a family member involved in Evangelical churches recently vented, of the abortion issue.
So long as he delivers on the abortion issue, they’ll back him. That’s corruption, folks, corruption not of the politician, but of the voter. Or, for the Evangelical reader, that’s selling your soul to the devil. You, my Evangelical Trump-supporting reader, don’t think so? Congratulations, the devil just won and is hanging your soul to dry on his clothesline. There it’ll flap in the Hellish breeze until, forgotten, it disintegrates, and the righteous Evangelical voter will be struck from the Rolls Of The Select Of God for that utter failure to understand morality.[2]
Similar remarks can be made by the anti-immigrant crowd, the pro-business crowd, and no doubt a few others.
The corruption isn’t only in Washington. It’s in Michigan and Minnesota, Iowa and Kansas, any place where Trump’s gifts of SCOTUS justices and big border walls and xenophobic Executive Orders and excessive military spending buys the favor of Trump loyalists who otherwise avert their eyes every time he lies through his teeth, claims successes he’s never had, and the balance of his mendacity. After all, they got their’s. It’s the epitome of selfishness.
The corruption isn’t just in our leaders. It’s in our fellow citizens as well. And it can apply to everyone on the spectrum if we don’t all demand the highest standards of ethics and competency.
I wanted to say one more thing, and I suppose I could have put it in another post, but it connects with this as well, and, besides, it’a from the same Sargent post. The lead-in concerns how the media is transitioning towards a more responsible, fact-checking approach to news dissemination, and how a similar transition took place during and after the Nixon Presidency.
So we may be in the midst of another transition, similar to the one that unfolded a generation ago. The news media seems to be retaining its core institutional independence and appears to be finding new ways to adapt. But as Hannah Arendt put it in a famous 1967 meditation on “Truth and Politics,” back during that previous period of serious institutional adaptation by the press, those two things — politics and factual truth — are perpetually “on rather bad terms with each other.”
Thanks to the rise of Trump, those terms are particularly bad right now. Perhaps we will get through this. But we are learning all over again, as Arendt put it, that “factual truth is fragile in politics, and its survival is never guaranteed.”
Arendt’s observation is the reason we have norms in Washington. That horrid tension or even dislike of facts, brought about by overweening ambitions of so many of those in Congress, as well as the religious fantasies with no connection to the real-world of some, ill-informed provincialism that has been the complaint of virtually every President we’ve had, the suppression of scientific information, and a few other factors, is the reason we have norms. It’s why the FBI and other intelligence agencies are explicitly non-partisan, it’s why their Directors are supposed to be non-political. Every single bloody norm has come about in reaction to some self-interested abuse which threatened the stability of our government.
And that’s why those who conserve those norms, the real conservatives, whether they’re Republican (mostly ex- at this point), Democrats, or Independents, are horrified when norms are trampled. It’s not that the dike has been shattered and now the water, black and poisoned and full of dead fish, might leak in, but the fact that all that repulsively poisoned water HAS ALREADY RUSHED IN. Flynn, Miller, Bannon, Price, Pruitt. They, and so many others, are that water that sluiced through the broken dike of norms, ravaged the government, left it open to manipulation by adversaries and the malicious.
It’s not some mythical Deep State twitching at the sword chop of the hero into its hide. It’s the real conservatives valuing some of the most important institutions of the United States, watching them being shattered.
And, when this is all over, those norms will have to be recovered and reinstalled, all to the bitter howling of those who are convinced it’s the Deep State covering its wounds. Or those realizing they are once again barred from skimming profits off the people.
Never realizing how much they’re betraying the United States.
1 His continual lying and aversion to nuance in favor of his own illusory world of racism, in fact, motivated me to label him President Irrelevant, because his tenuous connection to truth renders any opinion he wants to put forth suspect and, therefore, truly unimportant for the adults trying to find the best path forward on any issue. Any issue at all. Only the fact that he’s the President makes him worth a moment of our time.
2 Sure, I’m an agnostic. Doesn’t mean I can’t use the logic of Christian mythology against Trump-supporting Evangelicals. Consider this a full disclosure.
