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The great fascist fabulist is returning. The Fourth Estate, battered and bruised as it is, must stand guard and be prepared to fight back on behalf of the people.
“Facts don’t cease to exist because they are denied.” —Aldous Huxley
Despite all his lies, crimes, impeachments, bad polls as well as a scandal-free opponent and a strong economy, Donald Trump defeated his opponent by, among other reasons, exploiting polemical sleights-of-hand. Witnessing the legacy corporate media cling to its “both-sides” template in the face of his rhetorical war was akin to watching a video-game battle between muskets and drones.
Like Trump, cold-blooded thinkers from Catherine the Great to Machiavelli have understood how in political life the “first lie” usually wins and there’s a “liars dividend” since normal people tend to believe what they’re told by authorities, especially when it’s consistent with their “confirmation bias.” (Supporters of Mussolini's fascism had a phrase that simplified matters: “Il Duce is always right.”)
In this context, disinformation and gaslighting spread like hot embers to dry forests in 80 mph winds. Sadly, it appears to only be getting worse: next day fact-checking and letters-to-the-editor are certainly desirable but no match for invisible algorithms, A.I. content, corporate-owned media, and reactionary tech bros who can reach a billion people in an instant. Has there ever been a faster-rising or more influential press lord than Elon Musk?
Biden's farewell warning against a growing "oligarchy" of political/economic/technological power will likely endure as a benchmark to measure Trump's yearning to be a "Dictator on Day One" (as if he'd stop 24 hours later).
In this hinge of history, can the media build a new template to hold the new billionaire bullies accountable or will it merely be deja vu in Trump 2.0?
Admittedly, there’s little expectation that the emerging Trump-Musk duet and their fellow oligarchs will alter their impulse to replace facts with fiction as a way to advance their financial ends and ideological aims. As the Number One's in the world in their respective categories, the tandem of these two strongmen understandably believe that might-makes-right for them. Similarly, it’s nearly psychologically impossible to sway hard-core MAGAs who merge their identities with those two, those who would insist that D.E I. caused the Los Angeles fires of recent weeks and that reverse racism (whatever that is) is worse than the abhorrent racism they've espoused.
Still, after the two national candidates in 2024 were separated by only 1.5% of the popular vote (a “massive landslide” it was not), there are small but potentially decisive percentages of swing voters—traditional Republicans, anti-Trump independents, and non-voting Democrats and progressives—who can make tip the scales in 2026 and 2028 between an America in the grip of a new class of billionaire bullies and one that reverts to a nation governed by and for the people.
The first step is for traditional executives, editors, journalists—as well as fretful Democrats in 26 purple congressional districts—to be armed with blunt language that was largely sidelined in the 2024 general election yet could disrupt Team Trump's propaganda and put him on the political ropes. After writing three books on Trump, what follows are eight types of his “twistications” (Jefferson’s word) and how participants in this struggling democracy can decode them as we enter the next Trumplandia of media and politics.
1. Assertions & Adjectives. Just recycling battle-tested assertions and adjectives no matter how ridiculous sure beats researching the facts. His most popular lines— “The Biden Crime Family…it was a perfect phone call…’tariff’ is the most beautiful word…January 6th was a day of love” —can only work if your target audience is as credulous as the jurors in the cult classic Idiocracy.
Which Trump understands. He simply told a confidant after his political escape from the Access Hollywood tape, “You just tell them and they believe it. They just do.” And when former aide Anthony Scaramucci asked why he lied so much at a rally, he replied, “Look, a billion people now know me and half hate my guts. But the other half are a great market for my brands, properties, product, campaigns.”
Two extremely effective examples of assertions passing as evidence are “Fake Media” and “Liberal.” They have become enormously powerful epithets for those who lack the time, ability, or motive to think independently.
Whenever reports show that the GOP is doing something scandalous, Trump just utters the near-magical words “Fake Media” to erase any controversy. Trump once admitted to Leslie Stahl that he "constantly berates Fake News to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”
As for “Liberal” (aka, CRT, DEI, Deep State, Woke), it too can paralyze the cognitive abilities of MAGA audiences. Decades later, journalists—and defensive Democrats too—should no longer turn the other cheek when hearing this polemical kill shot. “So which of these ‘liberal’ policies would you reverse—Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare, the Freedom of information Act, environmental protection laws, labor laws, health safety rules and agencies—all were passed by liberals and opposed by conservatives?” It’s past time to re-focus such conversations away from abstractions like "Big Government" to specifics like "whether government should make sure that your children don’t burn to death in a low-speed rear-end collision."
2. Playing on Fears. Trump told Bob Woodward, “Real power is—I don’t really want to use the word—fear.” Comedian Larry Elmore put it best when he joked, or appeared to joke, that “Trump is our FDR since the only thing he has is fear itself.”
This goes well beyond the normal political anxiety of, say, losing an election or a job. Chief of Staff Mark Meadows presumably now regrets going along with his boss’s orders on January 6 because “I was afraid of being yelled at.” Trump now routinely deploys fear of actual violence to get his way.
For example, when rebutting rival Hillary Clinton in 2016, he said that some of his supporters might have to use “their Second Amendment rights.” After he blamed the FBI for investigating him with a lawful warrant, one enthusiast shot up a Bureau office and was killed. And when irked in court, he personally assailed judges, their families and clerks who then invariably were subjected to scores of death threats. Hence the gag-orders imposed on Trump as if he were a vengeful mob boss.
Sen. Mitt Romney admitted as much when some fellow Republicans privately acknowledged that they voted to acquit Trump during two impeachment trials because they were afraid for themselves and their families.
3. Big Lies. What percent of sentient adults don’t think that he relentlessly lies? That even includes many followers who shrug and say, “Well, they all do it.”
But no one in American history has remotely lied so voluminously or bigly as Donald J. Trump. The Washington Post famously documented over 30,000 lies or falsehoods in only his first term, including 22 per day in his final year.
Then there are the Big Lies on the Goebbels’ scale, like repeatedly implying that Obama was a foreigner, Trump won the 2020 election because of invisible voter fraud, and Biden’s DOJ was behind multiple indictments in several jurisdictions around the country. Up to now, such falsehoods merely resulted in news stories burying the mild admonition that articles that “lacking evidence, Trump today claimed that…” Something more riveting will be needed this time around.
“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ” – George Orwell
4. False equivalence – WhatAbout-ism. Trump can turn any criticism into an attack-line if he can find some Democratic example in the past say hundred years. So when he rejected the outcome of the 2020 election and 139 House Members refused to certify the results, Trumpers indignantly replied, “neither did Hillary Clinton…and Democrats also refused certification.” Except that Clinton did concede the day after her loss. And while a few Democrats did question the results and begged questions of possible misconduct, they had no expectation of actually blocking certification.
The difference between these two examples could not be more stark.
5. Cherry-picking. When data is overwhelmingly against Trump—say the polar ice caps are melting faster than predicted and 97 percent of scientists agree that current trends could lead to ecocide—not a problem. Trump calls it a “hoax” or finds one study alleging that 300,000 years ago the climate was just as hot. That is, isolate one black swan to imply all are black.
Or if too many swastikas appear on signs at a rally where white protestors chant “Jews will not replace us,” Sean Hannity can announce that “Democrat Bob Byrd was a Klansman.” Which was true…100 years ago when he was in his twenties and before he recanted to become a renowned senator. Indeed, one party now contains not all but most American white supremacists and it’s not the Democratic Party.
6. Anti-Science. Because the U.S.S.R. believed in the perfect “Soviet Man,” Stalin embraced biologist Lysenko’s ridiculous view that learned traits can be inherited. And the Kremlin delayed responding to the lethal Chernobyl meltdown because they thought it couldn’t happen.
A president of course needn’t be a scientist—indeed we’ve never elected one. But they should ideally be open-minded and resilient when national emergencies strike. That means according to the scientific method when facts lead to conclusions rather than conclusions leading to “facts.”
With each recent year being “the hottest ever,” Team Trump’s political hostility to rapid climate change is like denying the comet in Don’t Look Up, as the calamitous Los Angels fires demonstrated. Vaccine denialism too was once a fringe view. But MAGAs resistance to vaccines during Covid-19 caused many needless deaths, with more likely to come if RFK Jr. is confirmed as HHS Secretary.
7. Projections. Trump’s greatest homage to Goebbels was embracing his own rhetorical maneuver to “accuse the other side of that which you are guilty of.” Like when Trump accused Robert Mueller of ”treason” and Democrats of ”election interference” when they brought indictments against Trump for “election interference.” And after Biden last year laid out a bill of particulars on how Trump was a dire threat to democracy, the latter claimed that “Joe’s abuses of power will go down as among the most shameful, corrupt and depraved chapters in all of American history.”
The goal here is not to actually win a policy debate but to get inattentive voters to throw up their hands.
8. Rhetorical Questions. Few politicians under fire can resist the age-old device of planting a false premise in the form of a rhetorical question in order to mislead audiences to a wrong conclusion.
So candidate Trump urged Black voters to support him in 2016 because “what could go wrong?” Or Tucker Carlson wondered “why should I not side with Putin” during his genocidal invasion of Ukraine? Donald Jr. asked after January 6th: “Do we really want to pretend it’s not a false flag?” Vivek Ramaswamy questioned whether “there were any federal agents on those planes on 9/11…I’m not saying there were but it’s a fair question.”
No it’s not.
Historically, bi-partisan debates saw exaggerations but rarely blatant falsehoods…until Reagan’s “Reign of Error” came along in 1981 (that being the title of a book on the subject by this author.)
Today, however, we’re in a different dimension as Trump normalizes disinformation and falsehoods. Like the difference between comfortably warm and life-threatening boiling water, it’s a difference not merely in degree but kind. A functioning Democracy can survive a leader and party that occasionally deploys hyperbole, tells “stretchers” (Twain), or even lies. (Ike certainly lied over the U-2 incident, which was an exception then justified by the stakes.)
But since legislation often requires compromises between two major parties, a democracy cannot survive when one side believes that it can get away with creating a fabulous alternate universe that infected some recent confirmation hearings chaired by Senate Republicans.
The American media understands this when it applies to, say, an authoritarian like Putin but has, with exceptions, refused to assume the same about Trump despite all the supporting evidence. Yet in the insight of Yale language professor David Bromwich, “the presentation of factual truth matters because we have no substitute world to live in when this world is gone.”
How can the Fourth Estate adjust to another post-truth era—one even more vicious and sophisticated that the first? Will they even attempt a new playbook? Already, MSNBC is strengthening its prime-time lineup for Trump Redux. The Washington Post, meanwhile, seems ready to embrace anticipatory genuflection due to the business conflicts of owner Jeff Bezos. At "The "Paper of Record," New York Times publisher and executive editor, A.G. Sultzburger and Joseph Kahn, have given no indication of changing their model of merely being a conveyor belt of Trumpian disinformation in the face of the most radical revanchists in American history.
For now, independent news outlets, podcasts, and writers at some platforms are objecting to giving a standard “benefit of the doubt” to government officials who don’t deserve it. And new models of non-profit news and tax-supported platforms—we subsidize farmers because making food is urgent even if not always profitable—so why not 'food for thought' as we enter this unprecedented four year stress test?
Are our major civic institutions ready to acquiesce to Trump and his band of oligarchs who blithely claim that disinformation is "mere speech," that 1,400 people convicted of a violent riot on January 6 are now "hostages" and that the catastrophic L.A. fires were the result of D.E.I. and Mayor Karen Bass' trip to Ghana?
January 20th is a good time for our major media to understand how a fascist oligarchy—of the kind we now see in Russia and Hungary, and in Italy and Germany in the early Thirties—could allow neoliberal capitalism to purchase democracy to write the next (if not the last) chapter of our nearly 250-year experiment in majority rule.
Surely smart publishers have learned lessons from their failure to hold Trump accountable in the nine years since he came down that elevator, and understand the insane irony that a small country born in reaction to a powerful monarchy would voluntarily accept a home-grown version 248 years later.
Who will emerge as the Keynes of journalism to explain that, when it comes to truth, might can’t make right?
It’s time for someone to write the final scene and tell us how this story ends.
Joe Biden may no longer be running for president by the time you read these words. Or he may be clinging to his diminishing hopes of victory. Either way, we’ve seen this movie before. It’s the one where an aging, punch-drunk fighter stays in the ring for too long, suffering humiliation after humiliation on his journey from the top to the bottom. Rod Serling’s teleplay Requiem for a Heavyweight is a classic example of this vintage storyline of battered boxers and their cynical managers.
I should add that I don’t dislike Joe Biden. I’ve always had a soft spot for old-school Irish politicos, having covered a couple in my day (see here). I was always somewhat fond of Joe, despite our ideological differences—at least until the genocide in Gaza. But today, I feel something politicians should fear even more than hostility: I feel sorry for him.
I do dislike being gaslit. Most people do. Biden’s allies have been gaslighting voters for too long, creating distrust that could doom Democratic candidates up and down the ballot. And they’re not the only ones being gaslit. So is Biden himself. Like an aging pugilist in an old movie, he’s being manipulated by people who have put their own interests above his. They’ve let Biden think he can still win. That’s cruel. It’s even crueler to keep pushing him into appearances where he says things like, “By the way, I’m proud to be, as I said, the first vice president, first black woman, to serve with a black president.”
Listen, I don’t care if he says he was the star of Medea’s Family Reunion—if he does it in private. Sentences like that are common for people with neurological problems, as anyone who’s cared for a declining loved one knows. They should be met with compassion and patience. But it’s heartless to let them be said on a global stage.
Biden’s supporters are starting to embarrass themselves, too. Operatives who promoted Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama in 2008 by summoning the specter of a “3 am phone call” now back a president who reportedly told a group of governors that, as the New York Times puts it, “he needs to get more sleep and work fewer hours, including curtailing events after 8 pm.” (The White House did not directly deny these second-hand reports but said that such limits are typical of recent presidents.)
MSNBC’s assertions have further degraded its credibility with all but the most avowedly partisan Democrats, as when Rachel Maddow praised Biden’s NATO press conference. The president demonstrated “a startlingly impressive command of the issues” and was “a master of the field of foreign policy,” Maddow said, despite Biden’s lack of coherent plans for Ukraine, Gaza, or the accelerating Cold War with China.
What about the press conference’s syntax, you ask? The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner writes, “I encourage you to read the White House’s transcript of the event and try to follow the train of thought in almost any of Biden’s answers.”
Lawrence O’Donnell blended his trademark pomposity and condescension with a profound—and profoundly partisan—misreading of history. “Pundits suggest replacing President Biden as the Democratic nominee,” said O’Donnell, “because they don’t understand the job of the presidency or how conventions work.”
That’s flim-flam. Party rules allow Biden to step aside. And while O’Donnell gamely attempted to equate Biden’s condition with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s physical impairment, FDR’s health did not affect his cognition or his ability to communicate with the public—both of which are presidential job requirements.
“It's not the time for someone to decide that the pilot who has flown this plane before successfully should be pulled out of the cockpit because he's too old,” says O’Donnell. But what if the pilot becomes ill and can’t do his job? We’ve seen that movie, too.
I have now heard confidential comments from multiple doctors—including a neurologist, neuropsychiatrist, and geriatrician—who say they believe the president has a progressive brain disease. Each said that his outward appearance suggested Parkinsonism, which is described in the National Library of Medicine as “a broad term referring to various neurodegenerative diseases that manifest with motor symptoms such as rigidity, tremors, and bradykinesia” (a movement disorder).
There are several diseases associated with Parkinsonism, of which Parkinson’s Disease is the most common. I am told that signs of these diseases can be seen in a person’s gait, facial expressions, speech, and other outward indicators.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has been vague, evasive, and self-contradictory about Biden’s health. (Read this briefing transcript and see for yourself.) Then there are those eight visits from a Parkinson’s specialist, followed by a doctor’s letter with an oddly worded sentence that, upon careful reading, excluded several conditions but not Parkinsonism.
Jean-Pierre made another heavily parsed statement: “Has the president been treated for Parkinson’s? No. Is he being treated for Parkinson’s? No, he’s not. Is he taking medication for Parkinson’s? No.” “Parkinson’s” refers to Parkinson’s disease. It does not exclude other forms of Parkinsonism or other neurological disorders.
The doctors could be wrong, of course. We can’t be certain because Biden won’t undergo an independent medical examination. Maybe the White House’s word pretzels created a false impression of secrecy. But the fact remains that Biden could allay these fears overnight with a medical exam and refuses.
Still, it doesn’t take an MD to know that Biden is unfit to run for president for one simple reason: he can’t convince voters he’s healthy enough to be president. Ergo, he probably can’t win. (And, no, voters don’t doubt Biden’s health because of biased media coverage. Polls show that they’ve been concerned for years.)
To be clear, the president doesn’t suffer from the syndrome that afflicts boxers. The phrase “punch-drunk” describes a condition now called Dementia pugilistica, caused by repeated blows to the head. It’s another form of Parkinsonism, with symptoms that include slowed movement, speech and memory problems, unsteady gait, and paranoia.
Which brings us back to Requiem for a Heavyweight, a drama with two different endings. In the 1956 TV play, the boxer quits fighting. He’s last seen coaching a child, hinting at a kinder future for the battered veteran. But in the 1962 movie his self-serving manager frustrates his attempt to leave the ring. This description of the film’s final scene says it all: “As his saddened [trainer] watches, [the boxer] dons his humiliating outfit, then faces the crude, bloodthirsty crowd.”
The public has waited long enough. It’s time for someone to write the final scene and tell us how this story ends.