On Trump’s Propaganda
Terry H. Schwadron
July 27, 2018
“Stick with us. Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news,” Mr. Trump said this week at the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Warsin Missouri. “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
It was a blatant, overt attempt — repeated over and over by this president — to insist that he and only he Tells the Truth, offers Straight Talk, and is the Source of All Truth. It is propaganda by any other name, and it reflects this president’s dangerous lean towards authoritarianism in the fashion of the world’s strongmen he so admires.
E. J. Dionne columnist of the Washington Post hammered awayat the significance of the quote, connecting it with a number of Trump policies, announcements and pronouncements that all lean on the same position.
“When the history of the Trump era is written, this quotation from our president will play a prominent role in explaining the distemper of our moment and the dysfunction of his administration. Trump was talking about media coverage of his trade war, but he was also describing his genuinely novel approach to governing: He believes that reality itself can be denied and that big lies can sow enough confusion to keep the truth from taking hold.
This has advantages for Trump, because it dulls the impact of any new revelation. Old falsehoods simply get buried under new ones,” said Dionne.
As he argues, whether Trump is discussing indiscretions in his personal life or the gravest aspects of foreign or national policy, this aspect is the same: The president insists that only he has the One True Way. Even if he overturns his own position hours later, the president believes in all the means that we have called political propaganda throughout history.
The Trump propaganda comes complete with policy orders and expectations that disrupt, that turn traditional alliances on their heads, that help corporations at the expense of the middle class and poor. These are policies, like health care cuts, that the Trump White House insists do one thing while, in reality, they do the opposite.
Just this week, for example, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid canceled its ordered halt on payments to insurers for offering health insurance in non-profitable regions of the country, effectively flip-flopping on its opposition to the Obamacare provision.
In an opinion piece, Harry Litman, professor of constitutional law at UC San Diego and former U.S. Attorney in Pennsylvania, argued thatin his threats to revoke the security clearances of former government officials who have criticized his policies, President Trump showed his contempt for the rule of law — this time in an area in which Supreme Court precedent shows his wrongheadedness.
In recent months, Trump or his surrogates have forcefully pushed the view that so long as he is exercising powers assigned to him by Article II of the Constitution, the president cannot act unconstitutionally. Trump’s legal team, for example, submitted a 20-page memorandum to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III arguing that since the president has the constitutional power to terminate the inquiry or pardon his way out of it, he cannot obstruct justice by exercising this authority “for any reason.”
On Wednesday, the White House barred CNN’s Kaitlan Collins was barred from a press event for reasons that don’t jibe with a free press. “I was blocked from attending an open press event here at the White House, because the White House did not like the questions I posed to President Trump earlier in the day during an event in the Oval Office with the president of the European Commission [Jean-Claude Juncker],” said Collins in discussing the situation with Blitzer on CNN’s air.
Even the head of Fox News came to the defense of the CNN reporter, and The Washington Post ran a transcript of the questionsabout former lawyer and problem-fixer Michael Cohen that Trump had refused to answer. Columnist Eric Wemple said, “our current president, as it turns out, is easily baited. It says something that Trump didn’t take Collins’s questions; it says something more that she was omitted from a subsequent event — open to media — in the Rose Garden.
In response, the White House Correspondents’ Assn. said, “We strongly condemn the White House’s misguided and inappropriate decision today to bar one of our members from an open press event after she asked questions they did not like. This type of retaliation is wholly inappropriate, wrong-headed, and weak. It cannot stand.”
Columnist Dionne: “When it comes to creating new and unhinged narratives to displace those rooted in fact, Trump has no equal. Thus did the man who stood next to Vladimir Putin when the Russian leader said he wanted Trump to win in 2016 declare this week — with no evidence whatsoever — that Russia “will be pushing very hard for the Democrats” in this fall’s elections. Contrary to liberal fears, most of the country doesn’t believe him.
Trump’s core support, measured by the proportion in Wednesday’s NPR/“PBS NewsHour”/Marist poll who strongly approve of him, is down to 25 percent. The bad news is that, among Republicans, his strong-approval number stands at 62 percent. Trump’s hope of clinging to power rests on the assumption that he can continue inventing enough false story lines to keep his party at bay. His theory seems to be that a lie is as good as the truth as long as the right people believe it.”
This is a mark of a president with a strong lean towards authoritarian rule. Where are the dissenting, rule-of-law congressional Republicans?
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