Yesterday opened with the news that the job report was better than expected. Trump spent the morning crowing about it.
Turns out the report was wrong. Trump knew, and lied. This is from Congressman Ted Lieu, who tells the truth:
The Trump administration tells baldfaced lies, knowing they are lying, and knowing people will find out.
This is part of what is known as the Firehose of Falsehoods propaganda method. The liar gains the advantage of offering the first impression, which is hard to overcome. Refuting the lie is never completely effective. That’s why they do it.
Precisely. If the liar keeps up a relentless stream of lies, the fact checkers can’t keep up. People give up trying to sort out what’s true. That’s when truth is obliterated. Trump’s real war is on truth itself. If he destroys truth, democracy goes with it.
This is correct. Trump would be nothing without a well-oiled propaganda loop. John Dean said that Nixon might have survived if he’d had Fox News. In fact, right wing media arose after Nixon, built by Nixon sympathizers.
Many of Trump’s followers know Trump is lying to them, and they embrace them willingly because they know the lies destroy.
I wrote about this a few years ago for Slate Magazine. You can see the article here. That they knowingly embrace the lies is mind-blowing.
Hannah Arendt, in the Origins of Totalitarianism, said this:
There are also members of Trump’s base who believe everything they’re told, but that’s because their fears are being manipulated.
I posted this ad yesterday. If you look at that ad, and consider Hofstadter’s description of the Paranoid Style in American politics, you can see that the lies in the ad are directed toward the politically “paranoid.”
Hofstadter describes what he calls an “impassioned minority on the fringes of the political spectrum who believe that unseen satanic forces are trying to destroy something larger in which they belong.” The “something larger” is usually described as the “American way of life.”
The ad plays directly to that paranoid element–that portion of Trump’s base that accept the lies as true.
