In Trump 2.0, An Administration-Wide Embrace of Alternative Facts on Full Display
Rob Horowitz, MINDSETTER™
In Trump 2.0, An Administration-Wide Embrace of Alternative Facts on Full Display
In his first term. Mr. Trump himself employed a disinformation technique used by Russian leaders called a firehose of falsehood, as Jonathan Rauch and other knowledgeable observers pointed out. “That’s where you put out so many lies, exaggerations, half-truths, and conspiracy theories that people just throw up their hands,” Mr. Rauch explained on a recent Atlantic podcast, hosted by David Frum. “The media can’t keep up. No one knows what’s right or wrong. The fact-checkers can’t keep up. Twenty a day is how The Washington Post clocked his lies. You don’t do that by accident. You do that on purpose.”
In Trump 1.0, however, cabinet members and top White House staff did not, as a matter of course or understood obligation, echo these falsehoods. In fact, there was more than occasional pushback and some attempts to correct the record.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTThis time around, a full embrace of alternative facts has gone administration-wide. As befits an administration that weeded out job seekers by ensuring that they gave the right answer to who really won the 2020 election (hint: it’s not Joe Biden), all top officials know that amplifying Mr. Trump’s firehose of falsehood approach and even adding some of their own is part of their job description. You can see this, for instance, in Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent repeatedly twisting himself into a pretzel so as not to confirm the plain fact that tariffs are by definition, import taxes or when the White House posts on its official website a false, alternative history of Jan. 6--one that assigns blame to the Capitol police and portrays the rioters as heroes.
The motto of Trump 2.0 is apparently adopted from a John Cusack line in the movie, Being John Malkovich: “the truth is for suckers.” Unfortunately for Mr. Trump and his top officials, this insistence on creating an alternative reality when they believe it serves their interests better than the truth backfires when it is contradicted by extensive video evidence that all Americans can see on their television screens and computers.
This is playing out in real time in Minneapolis, as the administration’s reflexive dishonesty continues to make a bad situation worse. Failing to learn any lessons from their falsehood filled mishandling of the Renee Good shooting, top Homeland Security and White House officials in a coordinated smear campaign, labeled Alex Pretti, a nurse at a veteran’s hospital shot multiple times by border control agents and killed while he was down on the ground, as a “domestic terrorist” and “would be assassin.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Pretti attacked officers, and Customs and Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino said Pretti wanted to do “maximum damage and massacre law enforcement." In posts on X, President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, called Pretti “a would-be assassin,” reported MinnPost.
Once again, Kristi Noem’s description of a fatal shooting of an American citizen by officers she is ultimately in charge of had little or no relationship to reality. “This individual went and impeded their law enforcement operations, attacked those officers, had a weapon on him and multiple dozens of rounds of ammunition, wishing to inflict harm on these officers, coming, brandishing like that,” she said in the immediate aftermath. This fictional account was designed to let the border and customs agents off the hook and place all the blame on Mr. Pretti, and was developed with the White House.
Alex Pretti’s parents’ reaction to the administration’s slanderous gaslighting reflects my sentiments and what I guess are the sentiments of most Americans: “The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting,” Susan and Michael Pretti said in a publicly released statement. “Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump's murdering and cowardly ICE thugs. He has his phone in his right hand, and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman, who was just pushed down by ICE, all while being pepper-sprayed. Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man. Thank you."
As was the case in his first term, a majority of Americans believe President Trump is “not trustworthy or honest,” according to a series of national polls. In Trump 2.0, however, his credibility problem has expanded administration-wide as departments the public needs to count on, such as homeland security and justice, have joined him in spreading falsehoods.
The chickens are all coming home to roost in Minneapolis. I have no illusions that Mr. Trump and his top officials will heed Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous words. But the rest of us should find them instructive at this difficult moment: “You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.”