alterman, Eric

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/why-fact-checking-may-be-futile-against-trumps-black-hole-of-lies/

Donald Trump has publicly lied at least 20,000 times since taking office, according to the Washington Post. He does this in part because he has shown himself to be mentally unwell, if not a sociopath. But he also lies because he is a fascist authoritarian. For such leaders, lies are a way of assaulting reality and truth as a means of achieving unlimited power. These explanations are not discrete. They overlap with one another.

In a season of massive death, Donald Trump and his regime's lies about the coronavirus are a public health emergency – one which has killed at least 216,000 people in the United States.

Donald Trump and his regime's lies have also severely damaged America's prestige, alliances and global power. The country's enemies have also been emboldened by the Trump regime's lies and overall lack of consistency in foreign policy and principles.

Most important, Trump and his regime's policy of lying (in conjunction with wanton cruelty and other evil) has undermined American democracy. A common understanding of reality is the foundation of a health democracy. The Trump regime's lies and those of its agents are rotting that foundation.

In "The Death of Truth," Michiko Kakutani explains that the damage Trump has done to the country's institutions and foreign policy will take "years to repair."

"And to the degree that his election was a reflection of larger dynamics in society—from the growing partisanship in politics, to the profusion of fake stories on social media, to our isolation in filter bubbles—his departure from the scene will not restore truth to health and well-being, at least not right away," Kakutani writes.

Why is Donald Trump such a powerful and effective liar? Why has the mainstream American news media largely surrendered to his lies, and by doing so normalized them? Would more aggressive fact-checking have blunted Donald Trump and his regime's strategy of lying? What explains why the mainstream American news media as a whole refused — and for the most part, continues to refuse — to describe Donald Trump and his regime accurately as being fascist and authoritarian?

In an effort answer these questions, I recently spoke with Eric Alterman, a columnist at The Nation and the author of more than 10 books, including the bestseller "What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News." His latest book is "Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie and Why Trump is Worse."

Why are there now so many more voices in the mainstream American news media who, several weeks from Election Day, are finally using language such as "fascism" and "authoritarianism" to describe Trump and his regime? This was obvious several years ago. Why the delay? What were they waiting for?

There are many disincentives to tell the truth about Donald Trump. The most obvious one is that he's the President of the United States and people consider it disrespectful to use certain words about the president, like "liar" and "racist" and "conman" and "conspiracy nut," even when they're true. It is worse in Washington D.C. to call someone a liar than for them to actually be a liar.

In Washington, that rule is part of how a person makes a living. Therefore, people in the news media have to show respect for the office of the presidency. The second reason is that the ideology of "journalistic objectivity" does not have a framework for determining what the truth is. It has no bias for truth. "Journalistic objectivity" says on the one hand, so-and-so said this; on the other hand, his opposition said that, and you, the reader, you, the viewer, you, the listener, it is up to you to decide what's true.

Donald Trump is an idiot in many ways, but he is a genius when it comes to media manipulation.

The Washington Post has now documented at least 25,000 or so lies by Donald Trump — and nothing has changed in his behavior. If anything, he has become more brazen.

I do not find fact-checking as done in that way to be very helpful, because Donald Trump is not being fact-checked as he says the lies. If a person reads the fact-checking article, they will learn what Trump said is not true. Trump's lie still has power because it is repeated by the president and circulated. Again, Donald Trump has been winning this battle against the mainstream news media every day and they still have not really caught up to his strategy. The New York Times still does not really know what to do about Donald Trump in this regard and others.

Is the reluctance, if not fear, of calling Donald Trump a liar a function of the corporate culture of American's mainstream news media? Are reporters and journalists afraid of being punished in terms of their careers if they tell the unpolished truth about Donald Trump?

I have a different idea of lying than most of the country's journalistic institutions do because they will almost never use the words "lie" or "liar" when it comes to the president or most politicians. Instead most in the mainstream news media will say, "We can't know his intent. We can't know what's in his heart." They assume that a lying politician may believe the nonsense that they are saying. My position is if a politician should know what is true and he does not, then he is lying.

I do not care what the excuse is. I don't care if Trump or some other politician thinks God is talking to him. I don't care if Trump is too disengaged from reality. I don't care if Trump is so much of a narcissist that he makes up stuff and he believes it. If it's the president's job to know something and he misinforms the country, then he's lying. Worry about his motivation some other time.

There has never been a historical moment in this country where a president, in this case Donald Trump, could be ignored because everyone knows he's so full of lies and nonsense.

Donald Trump might get reelected and destroy our democracy because so many in the mainstream news media are treating Donald Trump's lies and delusions as though it is all somehow normal.

Why has the White House press corps been so accommodating and enabling of Trump's lies? He also uses them as props for his fascist performances. Why do the members of the White House press corps not just walk about of the briefings or stand up and turn their backs to him?

They do not know how to do their job any other way. Their job is defined as getting whatever information is available at the White House. So even if it's lies, even if it's daily humiliation, the press corps has to go back the next day. Those reporters need to be on good terms with the people who are giving out the information — even if they're not giving out real or otherwise substantive information. It would be nice if the job of the White House press corps was to actually go out and find news, but that's not what they're there for. They're there as conduits for the White House.

There are few public voices who have been consistently warning the American people and the world about the realities of Trumpism and the threat Trump represents to the country. Why have the American people, largely, been in so much denial about the horrible reality that is the Age of Trump and what it means for the present and future of the country?

There's about a third of the country that lives inside this bubble where the truth never reaches them.They watch Fox News, they listen to conservative talk radio, they read Breitbart and Daily Caller and so forth, and they are lied to, and the lies that they are told make them feel good about themselves. They blame other people, mostly Black and brown people and Muslims and immigrants and so forth, sometimes Jews, for the problems in their lives, and it works for them. Such people are unreachable. You cannot get through to them.

There is a battle over the rest of the American people. Trump and his spokespeople and others who are doing all the lying on the right have a gravitational effect on the entire public discourse.

It began initially with Ronald Reagan and then went into warp drive with Newt Gingrich. But before Ronald Reagan, and especially before Gingrich, both parties pretty much had an idea where the goalposts were on what you could get away with in terms of not telling the truth. There were a lot of problems. Nixon was a big problem, Lyndon Johnson was a big problem, but still people understood what was all right and what wasn't all right, and then Reagan and Gingrich just started making stuff up all the time. They did this with no consideration for the truth — and they discovered that the media wouldn't call them on it.

The American right-wing learned that the American people did not care enough. As long as the news media was attacked as having a "liberal bias" it did away with the problem of them being called on their lies. This dynamic expanded and grew until Donald Trump could run for president with his claims that Barack Obama was an illegitimate president because he was born in Kenya. There were 30 or 40% of Trump voters believing that Hillary Clinton ran a pedophile ring inside a pizza parlor in Washington. They actually believed that.

Now the country is facing QAnon nuttiness with millions of people believing such nonsense because as a country we have just completely lost track of the truth in our political discourse. As Hannah Arendt warned, "This is how you create a dictatorship. You destroy the idea of truth."

Why this obsessive narrative and all these expeditions out to Trumplandia to talk with "white working class" and other Trump followers by the mainstream American news media? What is there left to learn? The research shows that Trump's voters are driven by racism, white supremacy, misogyny and authoritarianism, if not outright fascism and in some cases Nazism.

They just have to be defeated. Enough is enough. We have to beat them into the ground as hard as we can and let them start over. For example, the Lincoln Project is seeking to destroy every single Republican senator because they believe that the Republican Party cannot be saved. It's been taken over by crazy people, by corrupt people, by the equivalent of a mafia gang, and they just have to be beaten. There is no sense in trying to talk sense into them anymore.

Fox News really is sports talk radio for conservatives. What are the implications of how American politics is now treated like some type of sport by the right wing?

I recall an observation that Noam Chomsky made when I was writing my first book. He said, "What we need in this country is a politics where people care as much about sports as they do about politics, because if you listen to people on sports radio, they're very knowledgeable in a way that people did not have the same passion about the Democratic and Republican candidates."And then there was the rise of talk radio and the internet and it brought in all this passion — but it seems to only exist on one side. The conservative side is driven like mad to care about every little thing. By comparison liberals do not feel that way. Liberals would let the people who are in charge do the right thing.

Liberals trust scientists and want to let them be the experts. Almost every single-issue group is a conservative group. They win. 90% of the country wants stronger gun control, but we're not getting it because the 5-10% that doesn't want it has a stronger voice than the 90% because they're so dedicated. They vote only on this issue, and you can't say that about really any issue for liberals. We see this on Fox News and on right-wing talk radio.

When Trumpists say that "all politicians lie" and "Trump is no worse than Obama," and the news media is being "mean" and "unfair" to Donald Trump, how do you respond?

The New York Times tried to answer that question about Obama. Trump followers say that, "Why all the fuss about Donald Trump lying? Why don't you explain that Obama lied too?" The New York Times looked at the entire eight-year record of Obama's presidency and they found 12 false claims over eight years, none of which he repeated, all of which he then corrected when he found out that what he had said was not true. Trump can tell 12 falsehoods in 10 minutes. He does it all the time. There is no comparison between Trump and Obama. Some presidents lied a lot. Trump is in his own category. Trump lies about absolutely everything, and he gives his cabinet and his advisors permission in doing so to lie about everything as well.

Are our expectations of the American public too high or too low in terms of their understanding of politics, generally, and capacity to intervene against and reject Trump's lies, specifically?

Too many Americans have had a full meal of bullshit and now they have no way to judge good and bad, right and wrong. I'm very angry at the people who support Donald Trump because they are destroying my country. They are responsible for putting people in cages and separating families. A lot of Trump's supporters do not know any better. Some of them are just terrible people. I do not really care why people think what they think anymore, I just want to beat them. Trump's supporters are on the wrong side.

Does Donald Trump believe his lies? Or is this all some type of performance?

All that Donald Trump cares about is winning the next five minutes — and he only really cares about the next minute or so. Trump is always doing the wrong thing. Trump is a toddler and he just wants to have his belly stroked every minute or so and then he forgets that it happened.

What is your greatest hope in this moment? What is your greatest fear?

My hope is that we turn this ocean liner around in the 2020 election. I hope that the Republicans are defeated, that Trump is defeated, that the Supreme Court is made rational, and we start moving the country back in the direction of sanity and decency. My fear is that the upcoming election is the last time we actually have a chance to save the United States from an American form of fascism. I'm only 60, but I'm an American historian, and I don't think things have ever been this bad since the Civil War. I wish there was more of a sense of alarm among the institutions that really matter to this country's democracy.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/thriller-where-horror-is-combined-with-farce-tv-critic-breaks-down-the-spectacle-of-the-trump-show/

the Age of Trump is a horrible never-ending story. One page is turned, and another appears. "The End" is nowhere in sight. Although Election Day 2020 is less than a month away, the days and weeks ahead feel interminable.

As a story the Age of Trump is simultaneously drama, comedy and tragedy. In terms of genres, it is a spy thriller (Russia's control and influence over Trump), a crime story (Trump and his taxes, a political mafia family, vast corruption), dystopian speculative fiction (how could so many horrible things all happen at once?), and a political drama and documentary (how fascism came to America). Donald Trump's story, unfortunately, is also a distasteful softcore farce (considering the sordid details of his known or alleged affairs).

In the season of death caused by the coronavirus and Trump's negligent and criminal response, life in the Age of Trump is also a horror movie.

At some point last week Donald Trump tested positive for the coronavirus. On Friday he was hospitalized at Walter Reed Medical Center. The Trump regime, of course, distorts, lies, dissembles, circulates disinformation and refuses to tell the whole truth about Trump's health and related matters — including just how many people in the White House and Trump's inner circle have contracted COVID, and how and when the infection began.

As a story, Trump's personal experience with the coronavirus, and the regime's reporting on it, resembles a North Korean and/or Russian propaganda film. After what Trump has presented as a miraculous recovery — quite likely a temporary steroid high — he was released from the hospital on Monday. For his cult members and other followers, Trump's saga of infection and "recovery" makes him even more into a type of Christ figure, or an Übermensch blessed with "good" genes.

In a Monday interview on Fox News, Trump campaign adviser Mercedes Schlapp had this to say about Trump: "He obviously has stayed in contact not only with the campaign but also talking directly to the American people in saying, 'We're going to get through this. We're going to defeat this virus. We're not going to surrender to it like Joe Biden would surrender to this virus.'" She suggested that Donald Trump is "the ultimate fighter."

Such a narrative is another example of Trump's fascist allure and power and the threat it poses to American democracy. At the Independent,**philosopher Jason Stanley**, author of "How Fascism Works," warns: "In this kind of politics the leader is the nation. The leader is supposed to be strong. They're just trying to represent that he's strong and it doesn't affect him and it won't affect the nation. [President Jair] Bolsonaro in Brazil did the same thing."

On Monday via Twitter, Stanley elaborated further:

In fascist ideology, the enemy is diseased and weak. The fascist leader is masculine and strong. As Bolsonaro said in March, if he gets Covid, because of his history as an athlete, it won't be an issue. The enemy — minority groups and political opponents — are weak and diseased.

Don't be afraid of Covid, says our leader, who has soundly defeated it. It only harms the weak. If you are harmed by it, you were already weak.

Donald Trump, a reality TV star and con man — and now a fascist, white supremacist cult leader — is an amazing story that defies almost all explanation, except in a kakistocracy and pathocracy that has amused itself to death.

Ultimately, TrumpWorld is very real. Unfortunately, the American people are trapped in it, with no obvious way to escape. Perhaps even more worrisome, many of them do not want to.

In this story, what type of character is Donald Trump? How does he imagine his role? How did Donald Trump master the new rules of television and the media in the 21st century to gain so much power? As Election Day finally approaches — with an unknown outcome and the real possibility that Trump will use legal and illegal means to steal the election — what would be the perfect ending for Donald Trump the character, and his bizarre epic story?

In an effort to answer these questions I spoke with James Poniewozik. Once a writer for Salon, he is now chief television critic at the New York Times and author of the new book "Audience of One:Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America."

Does Donald Trump really exist?

Part of my premise is that Donald Trump is not a person. Donald Trump as we know him and as he matters to us is really more a mediated character and performance. The performance has evolved over time in response to the rewards he has received being a celebrity. If the real Donald Trump does exist, I am not sure that he even knows who he is anymore.

What happens when the person playing the character is lost in their performance?

There is a danger for someone with power and responsibility over others — in this case a whole country — that once you reach that point a person can lose their core self. A person is just a persona and they know what to do in response to certain expectations and stimulation. Your behavior is dictated by how you have been received by others and the reactions that your behavior engenders in others. Certainly, that performance can be brilliant in show business. In a way, it can be very effective in politics. But governing a country involves making decisions that have to do with much more serious matters than how you are perceived and the impressions you are making on other people.

For better or for worse, Donald Trump was the most entertaining thing on television during the 2016 campaign. In many ways, that remains true even at the end of his first term. Trump is a product of an American culture of spectacle and distraction. That is the foundation of his power.

The metaphor that I like to use for Trump running for president in this media era was like Julius Caesar taking power in Rome. Trump spent his entire career mastering the weapons which are used for combat in the television era. Trump did this as a tabloid figure. He's done it as a reality TV figure. He has done it across various arenas, and so much of it was directly translatable to politics. Trump's skill in the arena of this media age goes beyond his message to any particular segment of the electorate.

How do you assess Trump as a performer?

He's not a good actor in the sense that a film actor is. There's an essential difference between what a film actor does and what a reality TV performer does. When you play yourself as a character in reality TV what you are doing is being yourself but louder, presenting an exaggerated version of yourself. As far as acting — a skill that requires empathy and basically imagining that other people are real — you can see Trump's shortcomings whenever he has to visit the site of a tragedy or read off a teleprompter.

What Donald Trump does works pretty well for his particular style of political performance. For him, much of his message is about life as a zero-sum competition, conflict, winning and the idea that for you to get something, somebody else has to lose something. Trump's brand is based on those values.

Trump also has a great off-the-cuff, pugilistic sense of verbal combat. He is very good at throwing up a lot of dust and keeping people off balance. That has worked very well with the kind of persona that Trump was presenting as candidate and then as president. It is not necessarily a kind of performance that might have worked well for another person or a politician with a different message.

What is beguiling or compelling about Trump as a character for his supporters? I find him to be a repugnant human being, but he is infinitely watchable. I also believe he is a more sophisticated performer than people give him credit for.

For those who love him as president, he is someone who fights.That goes beyond policy. Trump seeks to inflame conflict rather than smooth it over. In a political debate there are always at least two messages going on: One is the text of what you're saying and one is this meta-narrative of, "In the way that I debate, here's how I'm going to champion you as president."

Among people who hate Donald Trump — and obviously there are myriad political reasons that people hate him — I think part of the heart of it is that he is a culture warrior instinctually. Beyond the strategic embrace of certain public policy issues, he has a sense for locating exposed nerves and jabbing at them, inciting conflict in a way in which it will leave the most bad feelings after it's finished.

What happens to truth and people's understanding of reality when they have to confront a person such as Trump, who is so skilled in terms of being a performer and a professional liar?

All the places where Trump has thrived have been fields where there is a thin boundary between fact and fiction. This is true of the New York tabloids, professional wrestling, reality TV and now being president of the United States. Trump has created a type of permission structure which dispenses with the idea of verifiable, objective reality and just takes cues from the people that you have loyalty to. Authoritarian leaders like Trump cultivate a following by nurturing the idea that everyone is lying and the truth is always fuzzy.

What fantasies does Trump represent for the viewer, his public?

The fantasy of Trump has evolved from the 1980s to Trump as a presidential candidate.

The proto-Trump of the Reagan era was the fantasy of the lottery winner. He was somebody who intuited very early on that it was more important to look like a very successful businessman than to actually be the most successful businessman. Trump understood how to leverage appearance, which in turn allowed him to build a brand. The easiest way to accomplish that is withcartoon symbolism, a tower with your name on it in three-foot tall golden letters or a helicopter with your name on the side.

It's a combination of that cartoonish fantasy of prosperity combined with the notion that — this is where thelottery-winner aspect enters in — that you don't need to change to be this way. This is part of what allows him to cultivate the blue-collar [eats McD? garish taste?] billionaire notion, and for Sean Hannity to push it later. Because this lottery-winner performance also allows people to imagine themselves as a rich person, not beholden to the proprieties of gatekeepers, not having to change yourself or your tastes or your likes.

Every iteration of Trump as a pop-culture character involves a notion of fighting and conflict and grievance. Those two elements were the form of Trump that ran for president and won.

How would you explain or track Donald Trump's career, relative to broader changes in the terrain of the American news media?

My book is basically a parallel story about the character of Donald Trump over the decades and the media that he evolved in sync with. The journey of the American media from when Trump was beginning his public career, basically around 1980, until he ran for president is also the journey from the mass media of the mid-20th century to the fragmented media of the 21st century.

When Trump started, if you put something on television it had to appeal to tens of millions of people. There was a big-tent strategyof programming. You had to tailor things to a broader audience. As cable developed, as the internet developed, the outcome was more outlets and more targeted programming. There were increasing rewards for more polarizing programming, whether it's entertainment or news, fiction or nonfiction. And that produces all sorts of things, be it provocative sensationalistic reality TV or be it Fox News and political talk radio.

This is a story of the media becoming a space where somebody as belligerent and pugnacious and outrageous as Donald Trump can successfully build a career and then become a political leader and run for president and win.

Would Donald Trump even be president if there had been a Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow who successfully confronted him during his first campaign? A public figure in the news media who was viewed with respect and trusted by the American public?

I do not believe so. It's not just that we no longer have a Murrow, it is that we no longer have Murrow's audience. There is no collective audience in America that is willing to accept that there are agreed-on facts and arbiters of truth. I do not believe that one could have someone go directly from hosting a TV program, like Trump did, to then becoming president of the United States until you had a media environment where politics was basically a form of entertainment combat that was carried out through the media.

Somebody like Trump, with his sense of showmanship and flimflam and exaggeration, could have had a successful business career in another era. P.T. Barnum existed long before television. But something significant had to change in media, and therefore in American political culture, before somebody like Donald Trump has got a serious shot at the presidency.

The Age of Trump is a perpetual cliffhanger. There is never any closure to the story, just one scandal and crisis after another. There is no emotional release and closure. The story never ends. What does that do to the American people?

It is exhausting. People are frazzled. It is not just all the horrible things that are happening, but that everything keeps accelerating without any release. There is nothing but a buildup of tension. This moment with Trump as president is like the difference between watching a blockbuster movie and watching a trailer for a movie. Trailers are not necessarily narrative — they just need to communicate that if you go to this movie you will be excited all the time.

Living in a movie trailer constantly, for the length of a movie, is really exhausting for most people. That may not be true for Donald Trump, however, which may be one reason that he is so well-suited for this era. I honestly believe that there is something about Donald Trump where he feels that conflict and agitation are the best and most productive state of mankind.

What genre is the Age of Trump? Is it comedy, tragedy, drama or something else?

A kind of thriller where horror is combined with farce.

How would you write the end of the Age of Trump? If you were crafting the story, what would the resolution to the story and the main character be?

I feel like the truest story for the character Donald Trump is for him never to be defeated in his mind. That is Trump's narrative. As a character in the story, he will never acknowledge getting his comeuppance, disgrace, failure or punishment. He is not capable of acknowledging it. The end of the story that is the Age of Trump, whether it is Donald Trump actually victorious or Donald Trump utterly disgraced and a disparaged figure in history, is him with his arms raised in victory — because that is the way he sees himself.

I keep thinking about "The Sopranos," and Tony Soprano tripping on peyote during the final season. Tony has killed his nephew, Christopher, and he is saying, "I get it! I get it!" In Tony's mind he is at one with the universe and doing the right thing. Tony Soprano, like Donald Trump, is not capable of seeing himself otherwise.

Will the end of the Age of Trump be as subjective as the end of "The Sopranos"?

I do not think the screen will cut to black. There is not going to be a question of what ultimately happens with Donald Trump. But no matter what, there is not going to be consensus on whether Trump was victorious or defeated, whether he got his just deserts or whether he was robbed, whether he was a hero or a villain.No amount of evidence is going to create consensus on anything about Donald Trump. With "The Sopranos," people are still arguing about what happened to Tony at the end of the series. It doesn't matter what the definitive explanation is. For Donald Trump and Tony Soprano, there is going to be an argument no matter what happens at the end.

leading media expert tells Bill Moyers why presidents lie — and breaks down the biggest offenders

Bill Moyers  September 17, 2020

ANNOUNCER: Welcome to Moyers on Democracy. Want to know why presidents lie – and which one is the worst? You’ve come to the right place. The prolific Eric Alterman is…