Post Truth

The Trump Transition is continuing a PR strategy that works.  The media is discredited. There are no actual facts, just points of view.   Look the camera in the eye and assert your truth.

This blog is returning to the subject of well-constructed deceit because it has become a regular pattern and it is useful to look closely at how it is done so we understand what is happening right in front of us.

The format of television news allows a form of overt public dishonesty to flourish.   Trump used it in the campaign and has continued into the transition.  A casual TV viewer could miss it.  Worse, partisans who are predisposed to support Trump seem fully to accept the technique and consider the lies to be true and dispositive.

It works by ignoring inconvenient facts (including the presence of ones own statements) and attacking the motives of the fact-offerer while maintaining a firm tone of conviction.   It works because the news media have no particular credibility advantage over a polished liar and because the liar claims that the very fact of being fact checked means that there is controversy.  It is heads-I-win, tails-you-lose.  When challenged on the hypocrisy or lie, the very fact of the challenge justifies the lie.  There are two sides and I have my side, and you can't be trusted.

This worked a long long time for the tobacco companies as information came out about the health effects of tobacco.  Look the camera in the eye and say there is a lot of questions that are unanswered and they just don’t believe all this mixed evidence on smoking.   Cite the example of a 100 year old smoker somewhere, then say that the anti-tobacco people are motivated by some selfish purpose, e.g. government grants or they are busy bodies who want to destroy the freedoms of regular Americans making their free choice to smoke.  It worked for decades.

The "birther controversy" worked that way.   No fact or document asserted by Obama mattered.   It could be fake.   Obama could be Kenyan, there is controversy, lots of people believe it, so it must be legitimate.

Kellyanne Conway is the best practitioner of the ignore-delegitimize-deny approach, of but the recent controversy over Russian hacking shows that the entire Trump team has learned to do this in the Age of Trump.  

In a response to CIA reports that Russia hacked both the Democratic and Republican campaigns Trump said, “I don’t believe they interfered.  Could be Russia.  And it could be China.  And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”   Deny and doubt, then de-legitimize.

The transition team put out a statement attacking the CIA’s credibility and motives.  It isn’t about foreign attack on our democracy, it is about sore losers. “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.  The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history.  It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.’"

Meanwhile at Fox I heard Tucker Carlson take the position that our intelligence people don't know for complete certainty that it was the Russians.   There can always be doubt.  Alex Jones, the AM Talk radio host with a nationwide audience open to his conspiracy theories, echoed Carlson's view.   Below are comments from the Fox News website

Comment:

And:

Trump and the transition team filed legal briefs arguing that “All available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake,” yet simultaneously they asserted that there was widespread fraud that denied Trump the popular majority.    Paul Ryan said the contradiction "doesn’t matter to me.  He won the election.  He is basically giving voice to a lot of people who feel they are voiceless.”  

What is happening here is so smooth one could fail to notice it.  Ignore the contradiction.  Assert the new facts. Deny the relevancy of the contradiction. De-legitimize the fact checker.

Click Here for the 8 minute interview

Trump had changed the focus of the campaign in the final two weeks away from white resentment and toward governmental reform to end crony capitalism, influence peddling, the power of lobbyists and special interests under the rubric "drain the swamp."   Trump is filling the top positions with political and business insiders, something which should not surprise us: they are, after all, the people who have experience with the issues they will be handling. (Wilbur Ross at Commerce; Betsy DeVos at Education, Steve Mnuchin at Treasury, Linda McMahon at the SBA)  Conway's technique is to deny the obvious, assert the contrary, and forthrightly asserting that what is happening is in fact not happening, calling his picks “a refreshing departure from rewarding donors or personal friends with Cabinet positions."   

Politicians change their minds from time to time, as they should in the face of new facts and new political realities.  They risk being accused of "flip-flopping" or "waffling", which has the stigma of that person being unreliable or dishonest or unprincipled.  Trump and his campaign have perfected a way to be popular and untouchable: simply ignore inconvenient information, deny its legitimacy, attack the motives of the source of the inconvenient information, and stick to the story.