Trump’s Unreality Show Echoes a History of Lies
As a businessman, Donald J. Trump was a serial fabulist whose boasts that everything he touched was the “biggest” or “best” routinely crumbled under the slightest scrutiny. As a candidate, Mr. Trump was a magical realist who made fantastical claims punctuated by his favorite verbal tic: “Believe me.”
Yet presidential experts and historians were astonished by the torrent of bogus claims President Trump made during his first days in office.
“We’ve never seen anything this bizarre in our lifetimes, where up is down and down is up and everything is in question and nothing is real,” said Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity and the author of “935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America’s Moral Integrity,” a book about presidential deception.
It was not just Mr. Trump’s debunked claim about attendance at his inauguration, or his insistence (contradicted by his own Twitter posts) that he had not feuded with the intelligence community, or his evidence- free claim that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote because millions of people voted for her illegally.
PolitiFact, a website devoted to checking the veracity of claims by public officials, published 12 “of the most misleading claims” Mr. Trump made during his first White House interview. The Chicago Tribune found that Mr. Trump was incorrect when he claimed two people were shot and killed in Chicago the very hour President Barack Obama was there delivering his farewell address. The Washington Post cataloged 24 false or misleading statements made by the president during his first seven days.
But for students of Mr. Trump’s business career, his truth-mangling ways were familiar: the mystifying false statements about trivial details, the rewriting of history to remove unwanted facts, calling those who point out his untruths liars, the conversion of demonstrably false claims into a semantic mush of unverifiable “beliefs.”
Steve Schmidt, who helped manage Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, said in an interview that Mr. Trump’s cascade of falsehoods was “a direct assault on the very idea of representative democracy” in the United States. Mr. Schmidt said that when he heard Mr. Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway defend the administration’s “alternative facts” on a news show, he thought of George Or- well’s “1984,” in which the Ministry of Truth is emblazoned with three slogans: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
Mr. Lewis argued that the president’s untruths were a deliberate strategy to position the nation’s leading news organizations as the enemy of his administration. “Fact- checking becomes an act of war by the media,” he said.
Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief White House strategist, referred to the news media as “the opposition party” in an interview with The New York Times.
“It feels like this was part of the plan all along,” Mr. Lewis said.
Doris Kearns Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, said in an interview that Mr. Trump’s brazen willingness to deny “objective reality” had, if nothing else, succeeded in diverting public attention from matters of more lasting consequence, like his flurry of executive orders.
“I don’t know that he is doing it strategically,” she said, “but it certainly had the impact of a magician’s sleight of hand.”
Deception, dissembling and exaggeration have deep roots in Mr. Trump’s business career. In innumerable interviews over the years, Mr. Trump glibly inflated everything from the size of his speaking fees to the number of units he had sold in new Trump buildings. In project after project, he faced allegations of broken promises, deceit or outright fraud, from Trump University students who said they had been defrauded, to Trump condominium buyers who said they had been fleeced, to small- time contractors who said Mr. Trump had fabricated complaints about their work to avoid paying them.
For Ms. Goodwin, Mr. Trump’s reality distortions brought to mind Abraham Lincoln’s address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, on January 27, 1838. “Reason — cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason — must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense,” he said.
“He was worrying about authoritarian behavior,” Ms. Goodwin said.