A Distrust of the Truth
Last night’s Vice President’s candidate debate highlighted the differences between two men coming from the same Midwest. Senator JD Vance was the polished Ivy League debater, and Governor Tim Walz the earnest teacher and sportsman eager to tell the truth about himself and the country.
So what should we think of Donald Trump, Vance’s leader of MAGA Republicans, a man who claims to be the smartest person in the world, and his opponent a loser, who would not release his tax returns, and has even forbidden the release of his school grades, from prep school to college?
Maybe we have heard this so many times that we have become inured to Trump’s blatant obfuscation. But I have always thought it meant only a very stupid person would say what Donald Trump has said repeatedly as he has tried any means to cloak his repeated business failures yet was “Born to a rich father who made him the beneficiary of his own highly lucrative investments…that required no business expertise whatsoever.”
This was highlighted in Pulitzer Prize-winners Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig’s just released book, Lucky Loser that raises a bigger question in a Washington Post review by Bethany McLean about the ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ ethos of modern America. In a world that conflates the ‘trappings of wealth with expertise and ability,’ where ‘fame, detached from any other marketable talent or skill,’ is ‘a highly compensated vocation,’ does it even matter if you never actually make it?”
The outright distrust of truth is a propaganda tool used by autocrats that public media has normalized. This probably tells us best why he was able to take over the Republican Party that has drifted so far from conservative values and was once the environmental party when Republican President Nixon signed the US Environmental Protection Agency into law in 1970.
Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman cited the damage Trump and MAGA Republican propaganda policies could do to the country in a recent NYTimes Op-ed.
He cites Trump’s response to a question in Michigan on what he would do to keep auto jobs in Michigan: “So, pretty much as we’ve been saying and what I want to do and be able to do—look, your business years ago, in this area, I was honored as the man of the year. It was maybe 20 years ago. Oh, and the fake news heard about it, they said it never happened.”
In a word, the chaos in Trump’s mind has morphed into his economic policies that would cause widespread damage to the American economy. What Krugman calls Trumponomics “could create economic disruptions similar to those caused by the Covid-19 pandemic…Round up millions of foreign-born workers would cause an immediate large reduction in labor supply. Tariffs would drive up the cost of imported goods as surely as shipping costs and inadequate port capacity did in 2021-22.”
A recent report by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a serious non-partisan think tank cited by Krugman, posited that the labor shortages and higher tariffs on imports Trump proposes would return inflation to pandemic levels of 6 to 9 percent.
Republicans had learned to “fake it ‘til you make it” when the Trump administration attempted to break up the USEPA during his tenure so that Trump’s call to “Drill Baby Drill” for more fossil fuels could continue and their call to preserve tax cuts first enacted under Trump will further increase the national debt.
Buettner and Craig’s work exposes how many passes Trump has gotten over the years, how thoroughly he is a creation of the public media that has normalized his propaganda as another kind of truth, without revealing the real man behind it who has never known truth in his own world, and public media as the authors write, ‘rarely revisited his claims and afforded credibility to everything he said.”
The Vice-Presidential debate highlighted the vast gap between truth and propaganda, between substance and the lies that attempt to conceal it. Polls are showing the public can understand the difference, will our media?
Harlan Green © 2024
Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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