From Surviving Autocracy (Masha Gessen, 2022) pp114-6
What the lying president says is going on is not in fact what’s going on. But, in the sense in which Rosen uses the phrase, Trump’s saying that something is going on is “what’s going on,” because he is president and he said it, even though it’s not what’s actually going on. Reality bifurcates: “what’s going on” at any given time consists of actual events on the one hand and what Trump said on the other, and often no bridge exists between the two.
Journalists have looked for strategies for doing their job in this extraordinary situation. Several years before the 2016 election, fact-checking had advanced from backoffice operation to journalistic genre. For a minute, it seemed like a brilliant invention because it gave journalists the option of covering the statements of public figures as statements rather than as statements of fact. But then the election itself precipitated a crisis of faith within the profession. Ir wasn’t just that so much of the legacy media had failed to imagine the possibility of a Trump victory—this, after all, was a mistake, and mistakes can be corrected. Much more damning was the fact that many media outlets had delivered sterling fact-based reporting on Trump – the malfeasance of his businesses and charities, the credible allegations that he had assaulted women, his racist statements and racist behavior in the past, as a New York realestate developer, and in the present, on the campaign trail, his habitual dishonesty—and it seemed to matter not at all. One might say that Trump voters were not the audience for this reporting by The Washington Post, The New York Times, ProPublica, BuzzFeed, and others, but this could hardly be a comfort to the journalists who felt that the very meaning of their profession had been thrown into question.
On closer examination, things looked even worse. The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” column tracked Trump’s lies at the rate of nearly thirteen for every day of his presidency. With time, the lying speeded up: after Trump crossed the ten-thousand-lie mark on April 26, 2019, he was averaging twenty “fishy claims,” as the Post put it, a day. The president is in the habit of repeating his lies, some for a few days or weeks and some continuously. Some of his top counterfactual claims—ones that he has reiterated every few days throughout his presidency—are that the border wall is being built; that the U.S. economy is the best it has ever been; and that he passed the biggest tax cut in history. The reiteration highlights the problem with factchecking as an antidote to the lying: while the lying is repeated, fact-checking is administered only once. The lie dominates in the public sphere. Worse, the fact-checking articles themselves, appearing soon after the lie is uttered in public or on Twitter, serve as a gateway for the lie’s entrance into public consciousness. Worse still, this particular gateway has a way of placing the lie and the truth side by side, as though the facts were a matter of debate. Then one of the sides of the debate drops the conversation while the other continues pounding the subject. Arguments are often lost this way. .
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