The first Trump administration began with a lie. On January 21, 2017, President Donald Trump’s then–press secretary, Sean Spicer, claimed that Trump had drawn the largest audience to ever witness a presidential inauguration. Photographs clearly showed that the assertion was false; Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, had drawn a much larger crowd at his first inauguration. But it didn’t matter.
In one sense, Spicer’s lie was trivial. But in another sense, it mattered quite a lot, because it was a lie about a demonstrable fact. Kellyanne Conway, then a counselor to Trump, memorably defended Spicer by claiming that he was offering “alternative facts,” treating observable reality like hot wax, to be molded at will.
Fast-forward eight years. Trump is once again president. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was mistakenly included on a private group chat—via Signal, a nongovernmental messaging app—in which Trump-administration officials discussed a planned bombing campaign in Yemen. Goldberg reported on the reckless and devastating breach of national security. But rather than acknowledging the mistake and promising to address it, the Trump administration reflexively followed its standard approach: attack. Smear. Prevaricate.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said on social media, “This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin.”
As The Washington Post reported, “The Yemen attack timeline that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted to a Signal chat group would have been so highly classified, under Pentagon guidelines, that the details should have been restricted to a special, compartmented channel with its own code word and with access tightly limited, according to former Defense Department officials.”
[T]he Trump administration once again wants you to believe that two and two make five.
IN THE 1944 FILM GASLIGHT, a young woman, Paula Alquist, falls in love with and marries an older man, Gregory Anton. Over the course of the film, Gregory—cunning, moody, charismatic—deceives Paula into thinking that she is losing her mind. He does so by manipulating her memory, accusing her of hiding paintings and stealing things, isolating her, diminishing her self-worth and confidence, and denying reality. The film’s title refers to Gregory’s trick of secretly dimming and brightening the indoor gas lighting while insisting that Paula is imagining the changes.
The film gave us the term gaslighting, which describes a certain type of psychological manipulation. To succeed, it requires those who are targeted to become so disoriented that they begin to doubt themselves, to become confused, and to question their own perception of reality. Clinical psychologists say that as gaslighting plays out, not only do its victims start to deny reality; they begin to accept the false reality of the person gaslighting them.
Gaslighters are manipulative and controlling, comfortable belittling and insulting others. They are accomplished at denying, lying, and projecting. And sometimes, if they’re lucky enough and skilled enough, they make it to the White House. When they do, the horrors that are usually visited on an individual are instead visited on an entire nation.
At that point, the enormous machinery of the federal government, supported by outside groups and media outlets, becomes part of a massive and relentless disinformation campaign. The aim is to provoke distrust, confusion, and disorientation, which corrodes people’s confidence in institutions and undermines their grasp of reality. The ultimate goal is to divide and weaken civil society, and to undermine its ability to mobilize and cohere.
When there is no objective truth, when everyone gets to make up their own reality, their own script, and their own facts, authoritarians thrive.
AS DISINFORMATION INCREASES, and as more and more individuals and institutions go silent, it becomes ever more important for truth tellers to speak up, if only to assure those who don’t believe the propaganda that they’re not losing their mind.
They need to do for their fellow citizens what the police inspector did for Paula Alquist.
Getting through America’s epistemic crisis—where there’s no agreed-upon reality, where there’s a breakdown of a society’s system for deciding what’s true—won’t be quick or easy, especially because the Trump administration still has more than 1,350 days to go. The task of reconstructing truth is a generational one, and a lot of pieces need to come together.
It starts by asking the right questions, such as the one recently posed by Kristin Du Mez, a history professor at Calvin University: “How do we as citizens participate in a democracy when disinformation is so prevalent, and when so many seem so willing to believe the lies and ignore the reality that is right in front of us? When so many are willing to abandon all values to choose their side, every single time?”
People who feel more and more powerless have asked me a version of this question: “What can I do practically as a citizen, apart from vote and call my representative, to help preserve American democracy against Trump’s assault against our institutions and truth itself?”
Experts in the field of misinformation say that we know a lot about different kinds of misinformation, who is targeted and why, and the means to spread it. . . . . Figuring out how to scale up trust and truth is a central challenge of our time. It will take individuals and groups working together to insist on seeing the world as it actually is. Think of it as a dissident movement, an American Solidarity movement.
I HAVE A HUNCH, OR AT LEAST A HOPE. As Donald Trump’s malevolence intertwines with his incompetence, public disenchantment will grow. We’re already seeing signs of that as public fury at Elon Musk is being directed at Tesla. We’ve also seen it in town halls in red districts, where Republican members of Congress are being met not just with anxiety but also with anger. Republicans are being told to stop holding in-person town halls with constituents. And we see it in the rising panic caused by the stock-market collapse, the result of Trump’s carelessly destructive tariff policy, which is destabilizing the world’s trading system and shattering the American-led world order.
If disenchantment with Trump and Musk and the rest of this freak show leads to mass protests, it could be an inflection point, not just against Trump’s policies but also against the vertigo-inducing disinformation he promotes during almost every one of his waking hours.
I’ve long wondered how long it will take Americans to stop tolerating the unrelenting conflict and antipathy, which divides not just citizens but also families, that is endemic to life in the Trump era. The answer may be that they will stop tolerating it at the point when the quality of their life is degraded, when preventable diseases spread, when car prices and egg prices skyrocket, when 401(k) accounts start losing significant value. At that point, Trump-style nihilism may lose its appeal; his disinformation campaign may begin to blow apart, and people may be reminded that living in truth is better than living within lies.
The drama has a long way to go, but the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.
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