Pearl River Remembering back almost a decade ago to the first Trump term seems almost nostalgic. We were so naïve about the accelerating implementation of new tactics, that then seemed absurd and were easily satirized, but have now proven to be stunningly effective.
Kellyanne Conway had her Warholian minutes of fame, introducing the concept of “alternative facts.” Back then, as Wikipedia notes,
Conway’s use of the phrase “alternative facts” for demonstrable falsehoods was widely mocked on social media and sharply criticized by journalists and media organizations, including Dan Rather, Jill Abramson, and the Public Relations Society of America. The phrase was extensively described as Orwellian, particularly in reference to the term doublethink. Within four days of the interview, sales of George Orwell‘s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four had increased 95-fold, which The New York Times and others attributed to Conway’s use of the phrase, making it the number-one bestseller on Amazon.com.[2]
That was then, when we were younger, and this was all a new world that we didn’t believe could – or should – last. Those were the good ol’ days, when Conway and anyone employing such tactics could be shamed.
No more! Trump has embraced this tactic like breath itself, and done so without restraint or burdened by any concern for facts or truth. Often, he even does so in totally fabricated statistics, as if the internet didn’t exist. As the Washington Post detailed,
President Donald Trump made a promise at a reception last week for Republican lawmakers that was as impossible as it was specific: He would drive down drug prices by as much as 1,500 percent — “numbers that are not even thought to be achievable,” he said. A price cannot drop by more than 100 percent, but Trump went on to make several other precise but clearly false numerical claims. The cost of gasoline had fallen to $1.99 a gallon in five states, he said; according to AAA, it was over $3 in every state. Businesses had invested $16 trillion in America in the past four months, he added; the entire U.S. economy last year was worth less than $30 trillion. Trump even congratulated Veterans Affairs Secretary Douglas A. Collins for having an approval rating of 92 percent. In this polarized moment, it is unlikely any U.S. political figure enjoys a figure close to that, and the White House provided no source for the claim.
For Trump, such blarney is all in a day’s work. In his first term there was a tally of 30,000 such false claims. Now in the second term with no future elections on the calendar, he’s going for a new record. Others seeing how well these works are worshiping PT Barnum and taking his maxim as gospel that, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” The popular twist in a polarized public is that they simply don’t care if all of the people aren’t fooled, as long as they have successfully fooled the people who are their adherents.
A friend passed on the story of Project Veritas, the well-known right-wing video scammer outfit. Having lost any prospects of winning a lawsuit, accusing the New York Times of defamation, they withdrew the suit, tail between their legs.
The lawsuit accused The Times of defamation for an article published in 2020 that reported that researchers from Stanford University and the University of Washington had described some videos produced by Project Veritas as probably part of a coordinated disinformation effort. The group also sued the researchers. Project Veritas lost its defamation claims against the university researchers in 2022, and was ordered to pay Stanford nearly $150,000 in legal fees. But the group had continued to pursue its claims against The Times after defeating the news organization’s motion to dismiss.
Those are the facts. There was no settlement. Just another mark for Veritas in the loss column.
But in the new political and media world where a lie frequently “travels across the world” in Mark Twain’s words, “faster than the truth can get it’s shoes on,”
Justin T. Kelton, a lawyer for Project Veritas, said in a statement that the law firm Clare Locke had achieved in the trial court “an unprecedented win against The Times, and we are disappointed that the New York court system was so woefully slow to adjudicate the merits of the case.”
A humiliating loss is now presented as an “unprecedented win against The Times.…”
This is the world we live in now. Dealing with any public information, we have to always verify now, before we trust. Doing anything else would be nothing other than a fool’s errand.