The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

by Michiko Kakutani

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

Nationalism, tribalism, dislocation, fears of social change, and the hatred of outsiders are on the rise again as people, locked in their partisan silos and filter bubbles, are losing a sense of shared reality and the ability to communicate across social and sectarian lines.

Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs.”

The Washington Post calculated that he’d made 2,140 false or misleading claims during his first year in office—an average of nearly 5.9 a day. His lies—about everything from the investigations into Russian interference in the election, to his popularity and achievements, to how much TV he watches—are

“There is no such thing as harmless disinformation; trusting in falsehood can have dire consequences.”

If a novelist had concocted a villain like Trump—a larger-than-life, over-the-top avatar of narcissism, mendacity, ignorance, prejudice, boorishness, demagoguery, and tyrannical impulses (not to mention someone who consumes as many as a dozen Diet Cokes a day)—she or he would likely be accused of extreme contrivance and implausibility. In fact, the president of the United States often seems less like a persuasive character than some manic cartoon artist’s mashup of Ubu Roi, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, and a character discarded by Molière.

polarization has grown so extreme that voters in Red State America and Blue State America have a hard time even agreeing on the same facts. This has been going on since a solar system of right-wing news sites orbiting around Fox News and Breitbart News consolidated its gravitational hold over the Republican base, and it’s been exponentially accelerated by social media, which connects users with like-minded members and supplies them with customized news feeds that reinforce their preconceptions, allowing them to live in ever narrower, windowless silos.

Truth is a cornerstone of our democracy. As the former acting attorney general Sally Yates has observed, truth is one of the things that separates us from an autocracy: “We can debate policies and issues, and we should. But those debates must be based on common facts rather than raw appeals to emotion and fear through polarizing rhetoric and fabrications.

“Not only is there such a thing as objective truth, failing to tell the truth matters. We can’t control whether our public servants lie to us. But we can control whether we hold them accountable for those lies or whether, in either a state of exhaustion or to protect our own political objectives, we look the other way and normalize an indifference to truth.”

This is an apple. Some people might try to tell you that it’s a banana. They might scream “Banana, banana, banana” over and over and over again. They might put BANANA in all caps. You might even start to believe that this is a banana. But it’s not. This is an apple.

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

According to a 2017 survey by The Washington Post, 47 percent of Republicans erroneously believe that Trump won the popular vote, 68 percent believe that millions of illegal immigrants voted in 2016, and more than half of Republicans say they would be okay with postponing the 2020 presidential election until such problems with illegal voting can be fixed.

University of Chicago showed that 25 percent of Americans believe that the 2008 crash was secretly orchestrated by a small cabal of bankers, 19 percent believe that the U.S. government had a hand in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and 11 percent even believe a theory made up by the researchers—that compact fluorescent lightbulbs were part of a government plot to make people more passive and easy to control.

In his 2007 book, The Cult of the Amateur, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Keen warned that the internet not only had democratized information beyond people’s wildest imaginings but also was replacing genuine knowledge with “the wisdom of the crowd,” dangerously blurring the lines between fact and opinion, informed argument and blustering speculation.

“If citizens do not bother to gain basic literacy in the issues that affect their lives,” Nichols wrote, “they abdicate control over those issues whether they like it or not. And when voters lose control of these important decisions, they risk the hijacking of their democracy by ignorant demagogues, or the more quiet and gradual decay of their democratic institutions into authoritarian technocracy.”

“I liken the attacks on science to turning off the headlights,” he said. “We’re driving fast and people don’t want to see what’s coming up. Scientists—we’re the headlights.”

His memoir is an act of bearing witness to how Europe tore itself apart suicidally twice within decades—the story of the terrible “defeat of reason” and “the wildest triumph of brutality,” and a lesson, he hoped, for future generations.

Newspapers reassured readers that the Nazi movement would “collapse in no time.” And many assumed that if “an anti-semitic agitator” actually did become chancellor, he “would as a matter of course throw off such vulgarities.”

But the Nazis were careful, Zweig remembers, not to disclose the full extent of their aims right away. “They practiced their method carefully: only a small dose to begin with, then a brief pause. Only a single pill at a time and then a moment of waiting to observe the effect of its strength”—to see whether the public and the “world conscience would still digest this dose.”

The death of objectivity “relieves me of the obligation to be right.” It “demands only that I be interesting.” —STANLEY FISH

“Look, I read postmodernist theory in college. If everything is a narrative, then we need alternatives to the dominant narrative,” he said, adding, “I don’t seem like a guy who reads Lacan, do I?”

2017, Fukuyama said he was concerned about “a slow erosion of institutions” and democratic norms under President Trump; twenty-five years earlier, he said, he “didn’t have a sense or a theory about how democracies can go backward” but now realized “they clearly can.”

Trump representative telling an adviser to the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, that they didn’t “have to take each word that Mr. Trump said publicly literally”; and a former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, asserting that the problem with the media is “You guys took everything Donald Trump said so literally. The American people didn’t.”

The narcissistic patient who had become increasingly emblematic of this self-absorbed age, Lasch wrote, often experienced “intense feelings of rage,” “a sense of inner emptiness,” “fantasies of omnipotence and a strong belief in [his] right to exploit others”; such a patient may be “chaotic and impulse-ridden,” “ravenous for admiration but contemptuous of those he manipulates into providing it,” and inclined to conform “to social rules more out of fear of punishment than from a sense of guilt.”

With this embrace of subjectivity came the diminution of objective truth: the celebration of opinion over knowledge, feelings over facts—a development that both reflected and helped foster the rise of Trump.

GINGRICH: No, but what I said is equally true. People feel it. CAMEROTA: They feel it, yes, but the facts don’t support it. GINGRICH: As a political candidate, I’ll go with how people feel and I’ll let you go with the theoreticians.

Climate deniers, anti-vaxxers, and other groups who don’t have science on their side bandy about phrases that wouldn’t be out of place in a college class on deconstruction—phrases like “many sides,” “different perspectives,” “uncertainties,” “multiple ways of knowing.”

I believe in being truthful, not neutral. And I believe we must stop banalizing the truth.

Do I want to interfere with the reality tape? And if so, why? Because, he thought, if I control that, I control reality.

it’s getting more and more difficult to tell the difference between headlines from The Onion and headlines from CNN.

Depicting America as a country reeling from crime (when, in fact, the crime rate was experiencing historic lows—less than half what it was at its peak in 1991).

A country beset by waves of violent immigrants (when, in fact, studies show that immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than U.S.-born citizens). Immigrants who are a burden to the country and who should be vetted more carefully (when, in fact, thirty-one of seventy-eight American Nobel Prizes since 2000 were won by immigrants, and immigrants and their kids have helped found an estimated 60 percent of the top U.S. tech companies, worth nearly four trillion dollars).

“we are long past merely partisan filter bubbles and well into the realm of siloed communities that experience their own reality and operate with their own facts.” At this point, she concludes, “the Internet doesn’t just reflect reality anymore; it shapes it.”

Without clear language, there is no standard of truth. —JOHN LE CARRÉ

With other phrases, Trump has performed the disturbing Orwellian trick (“WAR IS PEACE,” “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,” “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”) of using words to mean the exact opposite of what they really mean.

Consider this: within days of Trump’s inauguration, changes were being made to the climate change pages on the White House website. Meanwhile, environmentalists were frantically trying to download and archive government climate data—worried that it might be destroyed or lost or hidden by a hostile administration. Some of their fears were realized later in 2017, when the EPA announced that its website was “undergoing changes that reflect the agency’s new direction,” including this Orwellian phrase: “updating language to reflect the approach of new leadership.”

Harmless enough glitches, perhaps, but indicative of the administration’s larger carelessness and dysfunction—its cavalier disregard for accuracy, details, and precision.

drawn parallels between Trump’s rise and that of Mussolini, argues that authoritarians typically test “the limits of what the public, press, and political class will tolerate” and that Trump’s incendiary tweets and remarks are efforts “to see how much Americans and the GOP will let him get away with—and when, if ever, they will say ‘enough.’ ”

A 2016 Pew survey showed that 45 percent of Republicans view Democratic policies as a threat to the nation’s well-being, and 41 percent of Democrats say the same about GOP policies.

Seventy percent of Democrats in that Pew survey said that Republicans are more close-minded than other Americans; meanwhile, 47 percent of Republicans said Democrats are more immoral than other Americans, and 46 percent said they are lazier.

It’s telling that the old national motto E pluribus unum (Out of many, one) has been removed from Trump’s commemorative presidential coins and replaced with his own slogan “Make America Great Again.”

A 2017 Pew survey showed that Americans don’t even agree about the value of a college education: while 72 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said colleges and universities have a positive effect on the country, a majority of Republicans and Republican leaners (58 percent) have a negative view of those institutions of higher learning.

For many of these committed partisans, supporting their party was like being a rabid, die-hard fan of a favorite NBA, MLB, or NFL team; it was part of their own identity, and their team could do no wrong. They might hate a particular policy or a particular candidate—much the way they might blame their team’s coach for a bad play, or loathe an overpaid, underperforming player received in a trade—but short of the apocalypse they were going to remain loyal fans while wishing pain and humiliation upon their opponents.

In one diatribe, Limbaugh asserted that “the Four Corners of Deceit are government, academia, science, and the media.” He also declared that “scientists wear white lab coats and they look really official” but “they’re frauds. They’re bought and paid for by the left.”

“Terrorists are made, not born,” Sunstein observed, “and terrorist networks often operate in just this way. As a result, they can move otherwise ordinary people to violent acts.”

What his listeners wouldn’t tolerate was his criticism of Trump or his objections that crazy conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were demonstrably false. His listeners had become accustomed to rejecting mainstream sources of news and, for that matter, simple facts. “In the new Right media culture,” he wrote in his 2017 book, How the Right Lost Its Mind, “negative information simply no longer penetrates; gaffes and scandals can be snuffed out, ignored, or spun; counternarratives can be launched. Trump has proven that a candidate can be immune to the narratives, criticism, and fact-checking of the mainstream media.”

As for news, an increasingly fragmented media environment offers sites and publications targeted at niche audiences from the reddest red to the bluest blue. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and many other sites use algorithms to personalize the information you see—information customized on the basis of earlier data they’ve collected about you.

“the query ‘stem cells’ might produce diametrically opposed results for scientists who support stem cell research and activists who oppose it. ‘Proof of climate change’ might turn up different results for an environmental activist and an oil company executive.

“If algorithms are going to curate the world for us,” Pariser warned in a 2011 TED talk, “if they’re going to decide what we get to see and what we don’t get to see, then we need to make sure that they’re not just keyed to relevance but that they also show us things that are uncomfortable or challenging or important, other points of view.”

When you want to know how things really work, study them when they’re coming apart. —WILLIAM GIBSON, ZERO HISTORY