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http://time.com/magazine/south-pacific/?PageSpeed=noscriptpage%2F13page%2F7
Apr 3, 2017Vol 189 No 12
Can President Trump Handle the Truth?
Can President Trump Handle the Truth?
Mar 22, 2017
Generations
of American children have learned the apocryphal tale of young George
Washington, bravely admitting to his father that he chopped down the
cherry tree. The story sprang from a culture that wanted even its fables
to serve the ideal of truth. By that standard, the House Intelligence
Committee hearing on March 20 should have been a massive humiliation for
the President, who followed Washington 228 years later. It is rare for
such hearings to be unclassified--and thus televised--but FBI Director
James Comey found the largest possible audience for his rebuke of the
sitting President.
He
had given Donald Trump nearly three weeks to walk back his incendiary
tweets accusing President Obama of "wire tapping" Trump Tower during the
campaign. If such surveillance had been done through legal channels,
the FBI would have known; if done illegally, it was a scandal of
historic proportions and the FBI should be digging into it. Either way,
Trump's accusation implicated the integrity of Comey's bureau, which is
why the former prosecutor felt compelled to push back as the cameras
rolled. "I have no information that supports those tweets," Comey said.
"We have looked carefully inside the FBI. The Department of Justice has
asked me to share with you that the answer is the same."
The
statement was concise, direct and damning. The President of the United
States had been marked as a fabulist by one of the top officials in
government charged with finding the truth. And yet, for the man being
called out, the rebuke was nothing of the sort.
"I'm
a very instinctual person, but my instinct turns out to be right,"
Trump told TIME two days later, in a 20-minute phone interview from the
Oval Office. The testimony, in other words, had not fazed him at all. He
was still convinced he would be proved right. "I have articles saying
it happened."
That
is not exactly true. The New York Times reported on Jan. 20 that
wiretapped data had been used in an investigation of Trump's advisers,
but not that Obama had targeted Trump for wiretapping, as Trump had
claimed. But he had new ammunition: House Intelligence Committee
chairman Devin Nunes had just announced that he had seen intelligence
reports showing the President-elect and his team were "at least
monitored" as part of "legally collected" information. Nunes suggested
the monitoring was most likely the result of "incidental collection,"
which occurs when a target of an intelligence operation, like a foreign
ambassador, talks with another U.S. person. But Nunes never claimed that
Obama wiretapped Trump.
And
yet for Trump, who proceeded to read at length over the phone from a
Politico article on Nunes' statement, such distinctions did not matter.
"That means I'm right," he said. He also argued that the punctuation in
his original tweet meant he did not mean wiretapping in the literal
sense. "When I said 'wire tapping,' it was in quotes," he said.
What
did he mean? Trump argued that his claims about scandalous wiretaps by
Obama had to be viewed within the context of other assertions he had
made in the past, which had later come true. He had predicted, for
instance, that the sexting of former Representative Anthony Weiner would
become a problem for Hillary Clinton's campaign, which it did, when the
FBI found emails to Clinton on his computer. He had claimed that he
would win the White House, when few believed him, which he did. He
claimed that Britain would vote to exit the European Union--"I took a
lot of heat when I said Brexit was going to pass." He described Brussels
as a "hellhole" before a major terrorist attack there. "I happen to be a
person that knows how life works," he said.
He
also claimed credit for things he had said that were factually
incorrect at the time, but for which he later found evidence. At a
February rally, in a discussion about problems caused by new migrants in
Europe, he said, "Look at what's happening last night in Sweden."
Nothing had happened the prior night in Sweden, prompting diplomatic
protests from Stockholm. But days later, there was a riot in a
predominantly immigrant suburb in response to a local arrest. Which, to
the President's way of thinking, made him a truth-teller. "I was right
about that," he said.
ADVERTISING
Truth,
in other words, takes time to ripen: he also said his unsubstantiated
claim that at least 3 million undocumented immigrants had voted
illegally in the 2016 election would be proved right eventually, though
he hinted to TIME that he no longer stood by all parts of that claim.
"When I say that, I mean mostly they register wrong. In other words, for
the votes, they register incorrectly, and/or illegally," the President
said. "I'm forming a committee on it."
Both
FBI Director Comey, left, and NSA chief Rogers said they could find no
evidence for Trump's claims that Obama had bugged Trump's phone calls. J. Scott Applewhite—AP
The
more the conversation continued, the more the binary distinctions
between truth and falsehood blurred, the telltale sign of a veteran and
strategic misleader who knows enough to leave himself an escape route
when he tosses a bomb. Rather than assert things outright, he often
couches provocative statements as "beliefs," or attributes them to
unnamed "very smart people." During the campaign, he claimed falsely
that Texas Senator Ted Cruz's father had consorted with the assassin who
killed John F. Kennedy. Now as President, Trump argued that he had done
nothing wrong by spreading the fiction, since it had been printed in
the National Enquirer, a tabloid famous for its unconventional editorial
standards.
"Why
do you say that I have to apologize?" he asked. "I am just quoting the
newspaper." He appeared to do it again, when he repeated the accusation
of a Fox News contributor, Andrew Napolitano, who claimed his network
was told by three former intelligence officials that Obama had asked the
British to surveil Trump's campaign. Fox News repudiated the claim, the
pundit vanished from the airwaves, the British called the accusation
"ridiculous," and the head of the U.S. National Security Agency said it
would not have happened under his watch. And yet Trump did not back
down. "I have a lot of respect for Judge Napolitano," he said. "I don't
know where he has gone with it since then."
Trump
has in this way brought to the Oval Office an entirely different set of
assumptions about the proper behavior of a public official, and
introduced to the country entirely new rules for public debate. In some
ways, it is not surprising. For years, we have known Trump colored
outside the lines of what was actually real because he told us. As a
businessman, Trump wrote in praise of strategic falsehood, or "truthful
hyperbole," as he preferred to call it. Sometimes his whoppers were
clumsy, the apparent result of being ill informed or promiscuous in his
sources. Sometimes he exaggerated to get a rise out of his audience. But
often Trump's untruths give every sign of being deliberate and thought
through. Trump recently bragged about a drop in the Labor Department
jobless rate--after calling the same statistic "phony" when it signaled
improvement under Obama. Trump explained the contradiction through his
spokesman with a quip: "They may have been phony in the past, but it's
very real now."
Through
it all, he has presented himself as the last honest man, and among his
fervent supporters, he hits notes that harmonize with the facts of their
lives as they deeply feel them. To beat a polygraph, it's said you
should make some part of your brain believe what you are saying. Friends
of Trump report that the President would pass with flying colors. He
tells them privately that he believes the things he tweets in public.
Despite the luxury and ease of his own life, he seems genuine in his
belief that the system is rigged, and that life is a zero-sum game: no
one wins without someone else losing. Reality, for the reality-show
mogul, is something to be invented episode by episode.
And
what reality is Trump creating? He entered national politics in 2011
peddling the incredible theory that Obama might have been born in
Africa--and therefore constitutionally barred from the presidency. In
those days Trump was widely dismissed as a reckless self-promoter,
though he clung to his story for five years, using it to get television
bookings and newspaper coverage, before surrendering it with a shrug.
Looking back, it's striking to see a future President testing the waters
by charging the elected incumbent with fraud and illegitimacy without
introducing a shred of evidence.
That
was a fitting warm-up for Trump's official entry into the 2016
campaign. The Mexican government, he alleged, is deliberately dumping
its hoodlums in the U.S. Later that year, he answered the Paris
terrorist attacks by claiming, without substantiation, that he had seen
"thousands and thousands of people" celebrating in New Jersey as the
Twin Towers smoldered on 9/11 on television. (No footage is known to
exist.)
Trump's
alternative reality is dark, divisive and pessimistic, and it tends to
position him and his supporters as heroic victims of injustice. Despite
this--or maybe because of it--his reckless assertions are weapons that
often work. He commandeers the traditional news cycle and makes visceral
connections with voters. By taking on Obama over his birth certificate,
Trump charmed a right-wing constituency and ratcheted himself to the
level of White House--ready. By scorning good manners to attack border
crossers and Muslims, Trump showed solidarity with the politically
incorrect and advertised his iconoclasm. By flouting fact-checkers and
making journalists his enemy, he is driving home the theme that his
turbulent presidency is a struggle to the death with a despised
Washington elite.
Trump
has discovered something about epistemology in the 21st century. The
truth may be real, but falsehood often works better. It is for this same
reason that Russia deployed paid Internet trolls in the 2016 campaign,
according to U.S. investigators, repeatedly promoting lies on U.S.
social networks to muddy the debate. In the radical democracy of social
media, even the retweets of outraged truth squadders has the effect of
rebroadcasting false messages. Controversy elevates message. And it
keeps the President on offense.
If
the fable of President Trump is ever written, young Donald might say to
his father: I'm not gonna lie to you, Dad. The tree has been
chopped--smart people say maybe by illegal immigrants or Muslims. There
are some bad hombres. Anyway, it's gone, and I'm gonna build something
truly terrific on this parcel.
"These
big falsehoods are different," explains Bill Adair, who created
PolitiFact, the fact-checking journalistic site that won a Pulitzer
Prize. "They are like a neutron bomb. They just take over the discussion
and obliterate a lot of other things that we should be discussing."
Since
winning the White House, Trump has employed this weapon at specific
times, often when he is losing control of the national story line. He
pulled the trigger on Nov. 27, a day after Clinton's vanquished campaign
agreed to join in a recount of votes in Wisconsin. Over the course of
that day, Trump sent out 11 tweets, averaging 18,440 retweets,
expressing his outrage over the situation. But the two most widely read
and shared, by wide margins, were the false ones.
His
incorrect claim that he had won the popular vote "if you deduct the
millions of people who voted illegally" was retweeted more than 53,000
times. His unsupported allegation of "serious voter fraud" in three
states that he lost was forwarded more than 31,000 times. The virtual
world far prefers the outrageous, the new, the controversial to the
normal routine of reason and verification. And so does the world of
news. Television and print reporters rushed to examine the
President-elect's sensational statements, thus spreading them further.
In the dog-eat-dog world of Donald Trump, Clinton had taken the first
swing, and he was justified in fighting back with the full force of the
Internet.
TIME
reviewed the 298 tweets Trump has sent since being elected President as
of March 21. Fifteen included clear falsehoods, like the wiretap
claims. The false messages were retweeted an average of 28,550 times.
Those that were not clearly false were retweeted on average 23,945
times. The viral effect of falsehood being repeated on the news was many
times more pronounced. According to a search through the Internet
Archive, a nonprofit library database, the false tweets were quoted on
television an average of 31 times, more than twice as often as other
tweets.
For
Trump's allies, this is a measure of strategic brilliance, not
defective character. "He understands how to make something an issue and
elevate the discussion by saying things that are contrary, perhaps even
unproved," explains Roger Stone, a former adviser to Trump, who has his
own penchant for spreading false conspiracy theories. "He has the
ability to change the subject to what he wants to talk about."
The
night before his wiretap maneuver had been a trying one for Trump's
young White House, according to aides. It was a Friday, and the
President was frustrated that his widely praised address to Congress on
Tuesday had been overtaken by darker news. Revelations of previously
denied contacts between Attorney General Jeff Sessions and a Russian
official had led Sessions to recuse himself from any probe of Russian
election interference. The LexisNexis database registered 509 stories or
news transcripts referring to some aspect of the story.
Aides
later said Trump latched on to an online article by a conservative
talk-show host, who assembled previously published media reports into a
speculative indictment of Obama. Whether Trump was persuaded by the
theory or simply looking for something explosive to change the story
line, he knew he had found dynamite. "There is one page in the Trump
White House crisis-management playbook," argued Obama's former White
House spokesman Josh Earnest two days later. "And that is simply to
tweet or say something outrageous to distract from a scandal." It
worked. His tweet replaced the Russian story at the top of the news,
generating 514 stories that Sunday.
Trump
is by no means the first to use diversion and distortion as a political
weapon. During the 2016 Brexit debate in Great Britain, critics of the
E.U. exaggerated the cost of E.U. membership to average Britons by
roughly 100%. The ensuing argument over the correct amount served to
focus resentment that citizens were paying anything at all.
Democrats
have been caught playing the game. Former Senate leader Harry Reid
floated the false claim that Mitt Romney did not pay taxes, without any
evidence. And in both the 2008 and 2012 campaigns, the Obama campaign
suggested that Republican nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney opposed
abortion even in cases of rape and incest. They did not, but the
misdirection tilted the abortion debate toward an issue favorable to
most Democrats.
Trump
took this occasional tool and made it a favorite weapon. "The President
has a history of being a negotiator," explains Christopher Ruddy, a
longtime friend of Trump's, who continues to meet with him in Florida.
"If I look back, I think he is always in a state of negotiation with
everybody, all the time. He takes an exaggerated position to create a
new middle ground. He moves the goalposts to force other people to
move."
And
he is able to withstand tremendous derision over his untruthfulness. A
man who has cheerfully discussed intimate details of his private life on
the air with Howard Stern, a man who mugs and poses at
professional-wrestling bouts, a man who encouraged the coverage of his
own affair in the New York tabloids is not overburdened by a sense of
shame. This has proved to be an advantage over politicians who fear the
embarrassment of being caught in a lie.
That
fear has been documented by political scientists. During the 2012
election season, two researchers randomly divided 1,169 state
legislators from nine states into three groups. One group received
letters warning that they were being monitored for falsehood by
PolitiFact, and that any false statements would soil their reputations
and risk defeat. The second group was sent letters saying their
statements were being monitored--but with no explicit warning of
consequences. The third group wasn't contacted at all.
Group
A--the ones who were warned of consequences--proved to be more cautious
about the truth. They had their accuracy questioned at less than half
the rate of the other groups. "Politicians typically care not just how
the public cares about them but about how elites care about them,"
explained Dartmouth's Brendan Nyhan, one of the authors of the study.
"Trump doesn't care." Indeed, even exit polls on Election Day found that
65% of voters--including 28% of his own voters--said that he isn't
"honest and trustworthy." Yet that hasn't stopped his rise.
The
question now is this: Can this same strategy work for a President of
the United States? The credibility Trump toys with is no longer just his
own. For generations, the world has looked to American leadership in
times of crises, one grounded in an historic fidelity to basic facts and
a sobriety of rhetoric. What does it mean if the President now needs to
use that credibility to rally support in a new confrontation with North
Korea? Will the world have time or patience to consider which words he
has put air quotes around?
The
conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal had raised the
question on the same morning Trump called TIME, with a biting
condemnation of Trump's falsehoods. The article compared the President
to a drunk, clinging "to an empty gin bottle" of fabrication. Trump had
read the piece, and he did not approve. "The country's not buying it. It
is fake media," he said of the Journal. "The country believes me. Hey, I
went to Kentucky two nights ago. We had 25,000 people."
Trump
leaves a “Repeal Obamacare” rally in Louisville, Ky., on March 20, the
same day top U.S. officials refuted his claim that he was wiretapped. John Minchillo—AP
It
is true that Trump has many supporters. One possibility is that this
shift in behavior at the top will lead to an increased skepticism among
the voters and politicians on whom Trump depends. Reams of social
science long ago established that partisans tend to unconsciously
overlook falsehoods that come from their own team, while being outraged
by the errors of their enemies. But Trump's excesses are exasperating
even his fellow Republicans. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has
stepped up his warnings about Trump's tweeting, telling one conservative
outlet that it "takes attention away" from his party's accomplishments.
Trump isn't moved. "Mitch is a wonderful man," the President told TIME.
"Mitch will speak for himself."
But
other Republican members of Congress have become more bold in voicing
their concerns. "There's a lot of distractions," agrees Senator Jerry
Moran of Kansas, whose state gave Trump 56% of its votes. "I just would
say that truth is foundational. It's important in public life, and all
of us need to do what we can to tell it the way the facts are."
Representative Carlos Curbelo of Florida agrees: "The White House and
the President have to understand that there's a cost to all of this.
This country needs a government that it can trust."
Ultimately,
democracy needs facts to allow for public debate and provide a check on
abuses of power. "Truth has a despotic character," philosopher Hannah
Arendt wrote in a 1968 essay on the subject. "It is therefore hated by
tyrants who rightly fear the competition of a coercive force they cannot
monopolize." Although Trump is a tyrant only in the minds of his most
fevered critics, he often talks like one. "Any negative polls are fake
news," he tweeted in his third week on the job. The Gallup daily
tracking poll of Trump's approval fell below 40% after the release of
his Obamacare replacement bill.
With
time, Trump may find he has committed himself to a strategy that will
deteriorate with reuse, because with each passing month the American
people will be gathering their own data on his habits and tactics, and
what they yield. They will decide whether it's true, as Trump has
promised, that health care costs are lower and everyone has wonderful
insurance. They will fact-check his pledge of millions of new
manufacturing jobs. They will see whether their incomes rise and their
taxes fall, whether Mexico pays for a giant wall. "In the end,
Presidents aren't allowed to get away with excuses," explains Bill
Galston, a presidential scholar who worked in the Clinton White House.
"They pay a price for the promises they make." This is a truth that no
one yet has been able to tweet away.
Before
he got off the phone, I tried one more time to get Trump to answer a
question about the risk to his reputation caused by false and ever
changing utterances. Once again, he would not accept the premise. "Hey,
look," he said. "I can't be doing so badly, because I'm President and
you're not." As a factual matter, the last part of this statement is
indisputably true. And with that, he graciously said goodbye and went
back to running the affairs of the most powerful country in the world.
--With reporting by SAM FRIZELL, ZEKE J. MILLER, PRATHEEK REBALA and CHRIS WILSON/WASHINGTON
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