() – Donald Trump is deploying his quintessential political move in a ruthless election finale.
In a flurry of misinformation that distorts facts, the former president is accusing Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden’s White House of the same transgressions of which he is accused.
In the wake of Hurricane Helene, and with another hurricane on the way, Trump falsely claims that the White House is diverting humanitarian aid to programs unrelated to migrants. This is false, but Trump, while he was president, repurposed FEMA funds to help finance their hardline immigration policies.
The Republican candidate often insists that his legal problems are proof of Democratic election interference. But he is the one who attempted to subvert the will of the voters in 2020 in the most blatant attempt to overturn an election in American history.
Trump also accuses the Biden Government of using justice as a weapon against him. But in 2020, the then-president went on a late-night Twitter tirade demanding the imprisonment of his political enemies, warning that Biden should not be allowed to run for president and asking: “Where are all the arrests?”.
Given his attempt to stifle democracy and steal victory from Biden four years ago, it was welcome news when the former president warned Sunday in Wisconsin that if he doesn’t win in November, “some people say they’ll never have an election again.”
This Monday, in Hugh Hewitt radio showthe former president – whose administration was famous for its “alternative facts” and who uttered thousands of documented lies while in office – made one of his most blatant complaints yet about his Democratic opponent, saying of Harris: “Everything that She says it’s a lie, you know, it’s a total lie.”
It’s not exactly news that Trump often has a distant relationship with facts. And many politicians lie: an industry of fact-checkers is proof of that. Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, for example, has had to answer for questionable statements about his military record and whether he was in Hong Kong during the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests in China in 1989. And the governor of Minnesota made tofake signatures as recently as sunday about the former president’s stance on abortion and the state of the economy when he left office in January 2021.
But no modern politician has built a presidency on such outrageous falsehoods as Trump. And the former president has never really hidden what he is doing. In one of the most revealing moments of his political career, before the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City in 2018, the 45th president told his supporters that he was their only reliable source of reality. “Stay with us. “Don’t believe the garbage you see from these people, the fake news.”Trump said. “What you are seeing and what you are reading is not what is happening.”
And the name of the former president’s social network, Truth Social, is a deliberate attempt to rebrand falsehood as fact.
As the election approaches, the Republican candidate has conjured up a torrent of misinformation that is notable even by his own standards.
In one of the most extraordinary moments in the history of presidential debates, for example, he insisted, falsely, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were “eating the dogs.” The people who arrived. “They are eating the cats… they are eating the pets of the people who live there.”
Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, later appeared to justify the former president’s falsehoods, which he had already amplified, in an appearance on ‘s “State of the Union” last month. “If I have to create stories to get the American media to really pay attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance told Dana Bash.
Donald Trump’s false comments: Analyst says they will not change any votes
During a disaster, misinformation can have dangerous consequences, a risk Trump appears willing to take.
The former president made multiple false statements about the Biden administration’s response to the hurricane, including an unfounded claim that Democrats ignored victims in Republican areas of North Carolina and that Biden had not responded to calls from Georgia’s Republican governor. .
He has also been claiming that while the federal government sends billions of dollars overseas, it is only offering $750 to Americans who lost their homes in Hurricane Helene. FEMA has explained that $750 is simply an immediate, up-front payment that survivors can receive to cover basic needs such as food, water, baby formula and emergency supplies. People can apply for other assistance, such as for home repairs of up to $42,500.
Harris on Monday accused the former president of spreading “a lot of misinformation” about the help available to Helene survivors. “It’s extraordinarily irresponsible, it’s about him, it’s not about you,” he said.
So why does Trump trade in such easy-to-debunk falsehoods?
In part, this is endemic to a character defined by braggadocio and defiance of the rules that apply to other people. Trump became famous as a real estate braggart who traded on hyperbole and discovered in a life spent in the New York tabloids of the 1980s that the bigger the falsehood, the harder it is to dismiss it.
But his manipulation of the truth took on a more sinister quality when he entered politics. In the first hours of his administration, Trump’s absurd claims about the size of the crowd at his inauguration were widely ridiculed. But in retrospect, the farce with his first White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, was a harbinger of a Government that opposed facts as an instrument of political power. The seeds of deception sown in January 2017 blossomed into a disinformation offensive during the Covid-19 pandemic seemingly designed to cover up Trump’s leadership failures. They also anticipated the blatant lies he would spread after losing the 2020 election to Biden.
Trump voters respond to his populism and his evisceration of elites, and many sincerely believe it is a response to a leftward drift in the Democratic Party. Trump’s “America First” foreign policy appeals to many in a nation weary of foreign wars, and his messages on undocumented migration and the economy may surprise liberals, but they resonate with millions of Americans.
Trump’s punishment of what the establishment sees as truth is not a mistake: it is the golden key to his appeal.
But the former president also understands that his manipulation of an alternative reality can act as a multiplier of his power and, with the help of the conservative media machine, he can create articles of faith that deepen his bond with his supporters.
An example is the narrative he has spread about how he was illegally ousted from power after the last election. Republican politicians must accept this new orthodoxy to save their careers. In last week’s vice presidential debate, for example, Vance refused to say that his boss lost in 2020.
Republicans who dissent from this false reality are ostracized, such as former Vice President Mike Pence, who repudiated Trump’s false claims that he had the constitutional authority to overturn the result of the 2020 election, and former Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney, who endorsed Harris for president and campaigned with her last week.
The still-potent idea that Trump was deceived and lost power four years ago has set the stage for his baseless insinuations that this election will not be free or fair, fueling fears that November could see another post-election constitutional crisis. .
What appear to be obvious falsehoods can have a political impact at the end of a bitter election.
Trump and Harris, who are tied in the polls, are courting voters who may not typically follow politics. Therefore, it is possible that a false narrative about immigrants eating pets, for example, serves to fuel already existing fears about immigrants. Likewise, Trump’s claims that Harris is a communist, a Marxist, and a fascist—though contradictory and laughable by any objective historical examination—may convince some voters that he is an extremist and somehow un-American. This message coincides with Trump’s attempts to stigmatize Harris’ racial identity, following his false arguments that she “turned black” for political convenience.
The former president’s falsehoods are not just a way to subvert the checks and balances that normally limit a president’s powers. They are also corrosive to the proper functioning of the United States Government.
Thanks to Trump’s false claims of fraud, many citizens now have deep doubts about the integrity of the electoral system, the cornerstone of democracy’s central idea that voters can choose their leaders. Their relentless attacks on the probity of the justice system threaten the rule of law. Attempts to denigrate faith in political, scientific, judicial and media institutions are a common tool employed by authoritarian figures Trump admires, including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who consolidated power by discrediting the accountability bodies of their country.
Shattered trust in the government will make it harder for the United States to solve its problems, including an overwhelmed and outdated asylum system and shortcomings in the economy that both presidential candidates have lamented. And a campaign that is ending in a flurry of false statements and nasty personal attacks suggests that if Trump takes back the White House next month, his second administration will likely be even more extreme than his first.
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