Surviving Autocracy

by Masha Gessen

Both ways of framing the policy—whether by stressing that calling something a lie goes beyond fact and becomes opinion, or by focusing on internal, unknowable intent—place artificial limits on a journalist’s ability to observe reality. In order to assume that Trump was not aware that he was lying when he said that millions of immigrants had voted illegally, or that Obama had him wiretapped, or that his tax cut was the biggest in history, or that the economy was better than ever, or that he was building a wall and this wall would keep out drugs and crime, one had to ignore the very act of repetition. Trump repeats his false statements after they have been fact-checked by the media and, in many cases, contradicted by officials in his own administration—and it is this repetition that gives Trumpian lies much of their power. A journalist who assumes that Trump’s intention is unknowable, that repeated false statements—when the truth is indeed knowable—do not, factually, constitute lying, is abdicating the responsibility to tell the story, to provide the context of what happened a year ago, yesterday, or even in parallel with the lying. The journalist becomes complicit in creating the bizarre sense of ahistoricism of the Trump era, which seems to exist only, ever, in the current moment. NPR and many other media outlets practice the same self-enforced amnesia in a recurrent argument about whether to call Trump a racist—or even whether to call his statements racist. It took NPR un...