CNN
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Donald Trump is executing his quintessential political move in a ferocious electoral endgame.
In an explosion of fact-altering misinformation, the former president is accusing Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden’s White House of the very transgressions he is accused of.
After Hurricane Helene, and with another storm on the way, Trump falsely claims that the White House is diverting disaster relief to unrelated migrant programs. This is false, but Trump, while president, repurposed FEMA funds to help finance his hard-line immigration policies.
The Republican candidate often insists that his legal troubles are evidence of Democratic election meddling. But he is the one who tried to subvert the will of the voters in 2020, in the most flagrant attempt to overturn an election in American history.
Trump also accuses the Biden administration of using justice as a weapon against him. But the then-president went on a late-night Twitter tirade in 2020 calling for the jailing 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 suppress democracy and steal Biden’s victory four years ago, it was a grand gesture for the former president to warn in Wisconsin on Sunday that if he doesn’t win in November, “Some people say there will never be an election Still.”
On Hugh Hewitt’s radio show Monday, the former president — whose administration was famous for “alternative facts” and who spouted thousands of documented lies while in office — made one of his most brazen complaints about his opponent Democrat, saying of Harris, “Everything she says is a lie, you know, it’s a total lie.”
It’s hardly news that Trump often has a distant relationship with the facts. And many politicians tell lies: an industry of fact checkers is proof of this. Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, for example, faced questionable claims about his military background and his presence in Hong Kong during the crackdown on China’s Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. And the governor of Minnesota made false claims just last Sunday. on 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 lies as outrageous as Trump. And the former president has never really hidden what he’s 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 crap you see from these people, the fake news,” Trump said. “What you see and what you read is not what’s happening.”
And the name of the former president’s social media network, “Truth Social,” is a conscious attempt to rebrand falsehood as fact.
As the election approaches, the Republican candidate has conjured up a torrent of misinformation remarkable 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 migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were “eating dogs. The people who came in. They’re eating the cats… they’re eating the pets of the people who live there.
Trump’s vice president, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, then appeared to justify the former president’s falsehoods, which he had previously amplified, in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” program last month. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance told Dana Bash.
During a disaster, misinformation can have dangerous consequences, a risk Trump seems willing to take.
The former president made numerous false statements about the Biden administration’s response to the hurricane, including an unsubstantiated argument that Democrats ignored victims in Republican areas of North Carolina and that Biden did not return calls from the Republican governor of Georgia.
He also said 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 explained that $750 is simply an immediate, upfront payment that survivors can get to cover basic needs such as food, water, formula and emergency supplies. People can apply for other assistance, for example, for home repairs up to $42,500.
On Monday, Harris accused the former president of spreading “a lot of misinformation” about the aid available to Helene survivors. “It’s extraordinarily irresponsible, it’s about him, not you,” he said.
So why does Trump trade in such easily debunked falsehoods?
Some of it is endemic to a character defined by bravado and disregard for the rules that apply to other people. Trump made his name as a bluffing real estate shark who traded in hyperbole and discovered, in a life lived in the New York tabloids of the 1980s, that the bigger the falsehood, the harder it is to push back.
But his manipulation of the truth took on a more sinister aspect 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 involving his first White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, was a harbinger of an administration that resisted facts as an instrument of political power. The seeds of deception sown in January 2017 flourished in a blitz of misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic, apparently designed to mask the failures of Trump’s leadership. They also predicted the outright 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 march to the left of the Democratic Party. Trump’s “America First” foreign policy is attractive to many in a nation weary of foreign wars, and his messages on undocumented immigration and the economy may shock liberals, but they convince millions of Americans.
Trump’s criticism of what the establishment sees as truth is not a bug: it is the golden key to his appeal.
But the former president also understands that his conception 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 story he told of being illegally kicked out of 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 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 outcome of the 2020 election, and former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, who endorsed Harris for president. and I campaigned with her last week.
The still-potent idea that Trump was ousted four years ago by deception has set the stage for his baseless insinuations that this election will not be free and fair, fueling fears that November could see another post-Christian constitutional crisis. electoral.
What appear to be obvious falsehoods could have a political impact at the end of a bitter election.
Both Trump and Harris, who are stalled in the polls, are chasing voters who may not routinely follow politics. It’s possible, then, that the false narrative about migrants eating pets, for example, plays into existing fears about immigrants. Likewise, Trump’s claims that Harris is a communist, Marxist and fascist – while contradictory and ridiculous by any objective historical examination – could convince some voters that she is extremist and somehow anti-American. This message coincides with Trump’s attempts to stigmatize Harris’ racial identity, following his false arguments that she “went black” for political expediency.
The former president’s falsehoods aren’t just a way to subvert checks and balances that normally limit a president’s powers. They are also corrosive to the proper functioning of the American government.
Thanks to Trump’s false accusations of fraud, many citizens now have deep doubts about the integrity of the electoral system – the foundation of democracy’s central idea that voters can choose their own leaders. His relentless attacks on the integrity of the justice system threaten the rule of law. Attempts to denigrate trust in political, scientific, judicial and media institutions are a familiar tool used by authoritarian figures Trump admires, including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who consolidated his hold on power by discrediting his country’s accountability bodies .
Shattered trust in government will make it harder for America to fix its problems, including an overwhelmed and outdated asylum system and the economy’s shortcomings that both presidential candidates have complained about. And a campaign that is ending with a barrage of false statements and nasty personal attacks suggests that if Trump regains the White House next month, his second administration will likely be even more extreme than the first.
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