For Trump World, It's All About Lies and Deception

Saddled with a candidate who by numerous reports cannot stay on topic and continually meanders into crazy talk - which seemingly delights his cultist base - not to mention who is a convicted felon, Trump world is desperately trying to depict Joe Biden as old and senile so as to minimize their own candidate's true mental instability. The result is endless lies - not something new with Trump - and doctored videos to misrepresent Biden and draw attention from the reality that it is their man who needs the mental health intervention.  Sadly, too many mainstream "news" outlets continue to be afraid to immediately expose Trump's/Trump world's lies and to call Trump what he is: a convicted felon who is a pathological liar with seeming rapidly declining mental acuity.  Indeed, many in the media have learned nothing from their mistakes in 2016 and 2020 and aid the Trump propaganda rather than inform the public about the truth and the clear and present danger that Trump constitutes to both American democracy and national security.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the frustrating situation.  Here are highlights:

Republicans and their media ecosystem seem to be in a panic about their candidate.

As the presidential candidates head into their first debate next week, Trump’s people should be happy. Their candidate, of course, is dragging around a sled loaded with politically toxic baggage: He’s a convicted felon; he was found liable for sexual abuse; he tried to incite an insurrection; his speeches include gibberish about sharks and a movie cannibal. He multiplies his own troubles at every turn, even undermining surrogates who keep trying to explain away his darker or weirder statements. And yet, against every rule of political physics, Trump is running even or perhaps pulling ahead of a reasonably successful incumbent.

But if Trump is doing so well, why is his campaign and its support system in right-wing media resorting to easily disproved lies?

Last week, for example, Biden was at the G7 meeting in Italy. The Republican National Committee released a video of him apparently wandering off from a group at a skydiving exhibition, like a confused grandpa looking for the van back to the senior-citizens home. The New York Post dutifully ran with the video. It looked bad—but as presented, it was a lie. Biden was turning to talk to a paratrooper just a few yards to his left.

The RNC video and the Post’s obedient amplification weren’t based on spin or interpretation. Someone had to have looked at that video of Biden in Europe and made the conscious decision to create a lie. Let’s just cut the frame right there so that Biden looks like he wandered off. By the time anyone figures it out, it won’t matter.

The video made the rounds, and maybe that’s all the RNC wanted. A lie, as the saying goes, gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. . . . . if your candidate is doing well, why take the risk? A party that thinks its candidate is in control doesn’t take the chance of pulling the spotlight away from the opponent, which is exactly what happens when campaign operatives get caught in a lie.

The campaign engaged in a similarly baffling move this past weekend, when Trump went to Detroit. The Trump courtier Kellyanne Conway went on Fox News to congratulate him for speaking to 8,000 people at a Black church. Trump did, in fact, speak at a Black church—but to a crowd of perhaps 100 or so mostly white people in a half-empty space that couldn’t hold 8,000 people even if seats were installed in the rafters and on the roof. . . . . So why not take the win, run the video of Trump with a Black pastor, and leave it at that? Why go for the big lie and then look foolish?

One possibility is that the Trump campaign is worried. Maybe Conway was just gilding the Trump lily, but MAGA world appears to be working overtime to make Trump and Biden seem indistinguishable and thus equivalently awful. Last week, Andrew Ross Sorkin reported on CNBC that top U.S. business leaders were concerned about Trump’s mental fitness after a meeting on June 13 with the former president. Several CEOs, according to Sorkin, said that Trump “was remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought,” and “was all over the map.”

Deceptively edited videos, nonexistent crowds, and No, your man is more senile than ours counterprogramming is not the sign of a confident campaign. But Trump’s team might also be doing these things because they work. . . . .t he media response to the Trump event was all the campaign could ask for. Instead of publishing a headline like “Trump Speaks to a Small, Mostly White Audience of Loyalists in Black Church as His Campaign Lies About Crowd Size,” the Associated Press rolled out an article titled “Trump Blasts Immigrants for Taking Jobs as He Courts Voters at a Black Church, MAGA Event in Detroit.”

If nonevents bolstered by outrageous falsehoods generate coverage like this, who could blame the Trump campaign for thinking that lying is merely a small frictional cost of getting great headlines? Trump’s people understand the power of the fast lie and slow correction, and they know, too, that the media are reflexively averse to reporting on one of the major candidates as an unstable felon who is flatly lying to the public.

The Trump campaign has seized on the essential truth that this election is about images and feelings rather than facts or policies. It is working to squeeze every vote it can out of its most extreme supporters by providing them with the high-octane Trumpiness they crave. But the campaign is also resorting to sometimes-desperate ploys in order to cover both candidates in a carefully formulated smog, hoping to obscure the differences between an old man who occasionally stumbles over his words and a nearly-as-old criminal who regularly wanders out of the gates of Fort Reality to go on a walkabout in the wilds of his unstable mind.

In the end, the Trump campaign has chosen the path of deception both because the weaknesses of its candidate demand it and because it’s a more reliable path to better media coverage and to winning over credulous and inattentive voters. Why bother telling the truth if lying works so well?