Over the last several years my online usage has moved away from complicated topic discussions and more to purely social use. The biggest reason why is time. With 4 kids and 2 jobs I just have less of it. The second biggest reason is my realization that people just don’t change their mind very much. If there is one thing people don’t change their mind about the most, it is President Donald J. Trump. Regular polls have shown that since he locked in the GOP nomination in 2015, he has had between 35% to 45% approval rating. The most consistent in modern American history. More on that later.
However, I decided to take a break from my break. Donald Trump has many many flaws, but I think his core weakness as President is that he cannot be trusted. This is not a unique or new idea, but it became extra clear to me this week as his fraught relationship with the truth was revealed in 5 separate stories that span the spectrum of his corrupting influence. The topics include 1) the current pandemic, 2) race, 3) Supreme Court, 4) obstruction of justice, and 5) Trump’s obsession and deception of his own popularity. Heads up, this is very long. I started it on Father’s Day weekend in the middle of a pandemic so I had had a little more free time than normal. Here we go.
1) As I wrote the first draft of this post, the President was holding a live rally in an indoor Tulsa arena where about 20,000 people were going to be crammed together. It’s expected another 50,000 will be gathering outside. This is in the middle of a global pandemic that has so far resulted in almost half a million deaths globally, about 122,000 of those in the United States (with over 30,000 new cases today, those numbers will obviously continue to increase).
This is just an example of one action taken by Donald Trump that encourages Americans to do the opposite of what his own CDC recommends. He was so extreme in his desire for a mass gathering, his own fans didn’t show up in the numbers they had planned. The event was half empty. Instead of discussing
all the incorrect things he’s said on the coronavirus, I’d like to focus on the theme of his comments and the impact they’ve had on the national mindset.
The tone Donald Trump has taken since he was first briefed in January has been one of uninformed optimism. He’s predicted the end of this pandemic several times and the dates have all come and gone. He’s consistently under-predicted the number of deaths, even while his own federal agencies were saying otherwise. He continues to push and apparently even took an unrecommended and potentially dangerous antimalarial drug. Even now, he’s urging the opening of the NFL against the suggestion of Dr. Fauci, a member of Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force.
This is the President’s first major crisis and to be fair, it’s a big one. It’s hard to imagine a worse response. The reason why this kind of false optimism not based in reality is dangerous is because of the impact it has on the national consciousness. The
Stockdale Paradox perfectly illustrates this. James Stockdale was a prisoner of war in Vietnam for 7 years. When asked how he lasted he said:
I never lost faith in the end of the story, I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life.
When asked who wasn’t able to last in the terrible conditions he said
Oh, that's easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, 'We're going to be out by Christmas.' And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they'd say, 'We're going to be out by Easter.' And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.
Many Americans have seemingly moved on in their attitude and behavior toward the virus because we’ve become victims of Presidential hype. We’re impatient because we were told over and over again that the car trip would take just a few weeks. Now we’re several months in and new cases in my own hometown are higher than they have ever been and many businesses that reopened are now re-closing. My own comedy theater has yet to resume in person activities. Trump’s most recent suggestion to the spike? Saturday at the Tulsa rally he said “Here’s the bad part. When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people slow the testing down, please.”
2) Another event Friday was Juneteenth, a holiday celebrating the end of slavery after the Civil War. This month is also the 99th anniversary of one of the largest race conflicts in American history. The “Black Wall Street Massacre” occurred in the same city and in the same month as Trump’s planned Tulsa rally. It’s possible he was ignorant of both of these commemorations when he planned his rally (especially since he moved the event one day in response to the backlash), but that only reveals how uniformed he and his administration is.
This is not his first debacle on race. In fact his first political lie as a rising political figure was his leading role in the birther movement. Trump was the most prominent figure calling into question the birthplace of President Barack Obama. There is no doubt this conspiracy theory was only able to take hold because he was a man of color with an usual name. It was not until Trump had already won the GOP presidential nomination in 2016, 5 years after he first promoted the lie, that he recanted.
His first campaign speech was also full of racial innuendo when he claimed that Mexico was “sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” It continued as he pushed against kneeling at football games, making it a national issue. After a self proclaimed white supremacist march resulted in one of them driving a vehicle into counter protester in Charlottesville, Trump claimed they “had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
Finally, just a few weeks ago Trump used the racially charged word “thugs” to describe the overwhelmingly peaceful Black Lives Matter protests and tweeted “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”. He was trying to incorrectly paint the picture of the protests and encourage violence in response. Twitter actually took the unprecedented step to label the tweet as “violating their rules for glorifying violence”. The phrase comes from a Florida police chief in the tail end of the civil rights movement who used the phrase to threaten marchers. Infamous Segregationist George Wallace also used the phrase during his 1968 presidential campaign.
Twitter last week also labeled a
video he shared as "manipulated media". The original year old clip was an encouraging scene of a white toddler and a black toddler running to give each other a hug. The clip shared by the President of the United States edited the footage to make it seem like the black child was running from the white child and overlaid it with a CNN logos to make it seem like it was a live broadcast (which it was not). This is by no means a thorough
list of actions and words from Trump that could easily be described as racist. That would be (and probably already is) it’s own book. Again, I’m attempting to just focus on events of the last week, but there is just so much (more on that later).
3) Another series of events this week were several major decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court. In both of them, conservative justices (even one nominated by Trump himself), voted against the arguments of the Trump administration. In the first case (and another last year), the SCOTUS claimed that the Trump administration was not arguing in good faith and essentially attempting to deceive the court.
The first case is directly related to the previous topic of race. DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals received a big win against the lawyers of President Trump this weekend. For now, the “Dreamers” will be able to legally stay, something
overwhelmingly supported by Americans. Conservative John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion saying:
We address only whether the [Department of Homeland Security] complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action. Here the agency failed to consider the conspicuous issues of whether to retain forbearance and what if anything to do about the hardship to DACA recipients. That dual failure raises doubts about whether the agency appreciated the scope of its discretion or exercised that discretion in a reasonable manner.
AKA, the Trump administration did not think through their actions or give a reasonable explanation for deporting millions of people who have essentially spent their entire lives as law abiding members of our nation; starting jobs, businesses, and families who would be legal citizens at their birth.
This is a very similar decision to the Court’s decision exactly a year ago when they ruled the Trump Administration likely could, but in this instance cannot add the citizenship question to the 2020 Census. Conservative John Roberts once again spoke for the majority saying that:
here the Voting Rights Act enforcement rationale—the sole stated reason—seems to have been contrived. The reasoned explanation requirement of administrative law is meant to ensure that agencies offer genuine justifications for important decisions, reasons that can be scrutinized by courts and the interested public. The explanation provided here was more of a distraction.
The Trump Administration was lying to the Supreme Court in the actual reasons they wanted the question added. Exposed by their own records, the main goal was suppression Latino residents who might otherwise shy away from the census.
And this weekend yet another big loss for Trump’s lawyers in the highest court came in the decision whether or not to allow members of the LGBTQ community to be protected by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Like DACA, this decision is
widely popular among Americans. Yet, in response to this decision the President makes this seem like a personal attack on himself and suggests packing the court. These examples show how over emphasized the often repeated reason for my fellow evangelicals to vote for Trump: to get more conservative justices. This will only help if Trump is able to convince these judges he is dealing in good faith.
Best example of that might be in Trump’s call just a few weeks ago that states must “allow these very important, essential places of faith to open right now for this weekend [...] if they don’t do it, I will override the governors. In America, we need more prayer not less.” Yet one week later the Supreme Court ruled with Chief Justice Roberts in the majority once again saying that truth should lead the way:
while local officials are actively shaping their response to changing facts on the ground. The notion that it is ‘indisputably clear’ that the Government’s limitations are unconstitutional seems quite improbable.
In fact, it is Trump's assertion he could somehow reopen them himself that would obviously be unconstitutional.
4) In yet another major story this weekend, our worst fears about the President are confirmed in the release of a book from John Bolton, Trump’s longest serving national security advisor. There is so much in the book, but I’ll highlight several of the most intense quotes from his
hour long interview with ABC News. Maybe the most relevant is Bolton’s potential role in Trump’s impeachment hearing. The President’s withheld Congressionally approved funds to U.S. ally Ukraine in order to get them to make an announcement about an investigation into Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden:
But he wanted a probe of Joe Biden in exchange for delivering the security assistance that was part of the congressional legislation that had been passed several years before. So that in his mind, he was bargaining to get the investigation, using the resources of the federal government, which I found very disturbing.
And I found it using national security to advance his own political position. Now, in the course of the impeachment affair, the defense of the president was he cares about the general corruption in the Ukraine. And that was on his mind. That's utter nonsense.
So why didn’t he testify when the House requested it (and essentially subpoenaed him)? Bolton says:
Because minds -- because minds were made up on Capitol Hill. And my feeling was in the midst of all the chaos that had been created, this would have come and gone, and nobody would have paid any attention to it.
He might be right. I have been consistently shocked at what Trump’s core ~35% base will allow. However, he did not have the right to make that call himself. Instead of being the upper level figure who could confirm Trump did make that quid pro quo, Bolton stayed silent, only offering to testify to Republicans in the Senate once it was clear they weren’t going to ask for testimony. Then Bolton took a $2 million advance to write his book, The Room Where it Happened.
Instead, Bolton insists the impeachment should have been more broad, focusing on things that we didn’t know until now, like this:
It's not a policy to say, "I want a big trade deal with China." What are the terms of the trade deal? He focused on terms like China buying more agricultural products, which he said to Xi Jinping directly would help him in the farm states
And another relating to China’s dictator Xi Jinping:
Well, again the circumstances were such: ZTE [a Chinese telecom giant] was violating American laws with respect to Iran sanctions and the disclosure that they were making. And Secretary Wilbur Ross of the Commerce Department imposed penalties on ZTE. These were not penalties that were harsher on ZTE than they would've been for an American company doing exactly the same thing.
And in the course of a conversation with Xi Jinping, the president said he'd rescind the penalties for basically in exchange for nothing. I mean, it's one thing if you had a clear foreign policy rationale to downplay a criminal or regulatory proceeding because of a larger strategic interest.
Essentially he would remove lawful penalties just to curry “a favor” with Xi. And here’s yet another example of that with another of America’s advisories:
By the time we left Singapore, he was at 2,000 [referring to the number of pressing coming along]. And I think that number went up from there. That's what he was focused on. That he had had this enormous photo opportunity -- first time an American president has met with the leader of North Korea.
And he got enormous attention from it. I thought it was a strategic mistake. The U.S. itself got nothing from that. Donald Trump got a lot. The United States gave much more legitimacy to this dictator. And didn't accomplish anything toward any meaningful discussion on the elimination of their nuclear weapons program.
And another example of what Bolton calls “obstruction of justice as a way of life”:
Well, there were any number of conversations between the president and [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan of Turkey on the subject of Halkbank. And what Erdogan wanted was basically a settlement that would take the pressure off Halkbank. And let's be clear, what Halkbank had done was violate U.S. laws respecting sanctions on Iran.
So if this had been a U.S. financial institution, we would've toasted them, and quite properly so. So it was not a case where Halkbank was being treated by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York more harshly than an American bank. It was just really looking for the same kind of treatment.
And the president said to Erdogan at one point, "Look, those prosecutors in New York are Obama people. Wait till I get my people in and then we'll take care of this." And I thought to myself -- and I'm a Department of Justice alumnus myself -- "I've never heard any president say anything like that. Ever."
And one last pair of quotes, which is essentially his call to action for Americans:
And I think the concern I have speaking as a conservative Republican is that once the election is over, if the president wins, the political constraint is gone. And because he has no philosophical grounding, there's no telling what will happen in a second term.
[...]
I hope it will remember him as a one-term president who didn't plunge the country irretrievably into a downward spiral we can't recall from.
Now Bolton, a lifelong Republican hawk is not planning on voting for Joe Biden. He said he’ll be writing a different name in. That and voting 3rd party (something I’ve done more than not for the presidency) is also a reasonable option for any disaffected voter. I'll end the obstruction of justice section with the most recent story on this front. Last week it was announced that Trump approved US Attorney the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman, who had been leading several investigations into Mr. Trump and his associates (including Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen and his current personal attorney Rudy Giuliani) was “stepping down”.
However, after Attorney General Barr made that announcement, Berman made a statement that he had no plans to step down and that he had learned about Barr’s announcement from watching news reports of it. The next day Barr clarified that "Because you have declared that you have no intention of resigning, I have asked the President to remove you as of today, and he has done so." Soon after that, Trump claimed he had no role in the firing saying "That's his [Barr’s] department, not my department. I'm not involved." It’s unclear exactly what happened, but it is clear that the Trump administration no longer had confidence in him and did not want to be explicit about why. And this does not happen in a vacuum. Since the impeachment trial ended, Trump has removed witnesses Lt Col Alexander Vindman (and his twin brother) from their post along with Gordon Sondland, former ambassador to the E.U. (and
several others whose firings were unclear). It’s obvious the President, who blocked all subpoenas to the White House, does not appreciate their candor.
5) The final topic from this week is possibly the core of Donald Trump’s self-absorption. He is obsessed with his popularity. Not to be mistaken by the common trait of most modern politicians who closely watch the polls to see where the path of least resistance would be. Instead, Trump seems to only be obsessed with the core who are obsessed with him. He seems to ignore the majority of Americans who do not approve. In fact, his first lie as president was over the crowd size at his inauguration. He pulled out his first (of four) Press Secretary Sean Spicer to make a surprise late night press conference defending Trump’s claim that 1.5 million people attended the inauguration (estimates put it closer to 200,000). It was a surreal moment that such efforts were made to lie about something so unimportant and easily measured.
Even before his inauguration, Trump was saying his election was a “massive landslide victory”. My initial reaction to Trump’s unexpected win was to blame the polling, which consistently showed Hillary Clinton in the lead. But instead I should have blamed myself for not having a better understanding of what polls are. In reality, the 2016 polls were
as accurate as polling usually is. Which is to say, they were pretty accurate. The night before the 2016 presidential election Clinton was
up by about 3%. Comparably Obama was up by more than double that,
7% in 2008 the night before he won. It’s also worth noting that Clinton’s lead narrowed in the weeks before election for at least two reasons: 1) Trump got unusually more popular among his own party in the final weeks and 2) 10 days before the election James Comey announced the FBI investigation Clinton campaign was reopened. So things were in flux.
This is not to take away from the incredible surprise I felt the night he won. I have no doubt it will go down as one of biggest political upsets in modern history. But a huge part of the reason it was surprising and the reason it was hard to predict is that it was so close. By any measure it was not a landslide victory. Putting aside the obvious fact that Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million people, the largest ever (and yet still winning the election). His electoral victory was actually well below average. In fact, if you
rank all electoral victories his ranks in the bottom 20%.
Since his election, he has actually gotten less popular. He received 46% of the popular vote (and this was also the percentage of people who approved of him on his inauguration day). Today, and every single day after his inauguration, he has been below that number. Trump loves to criticize the polls that don’t favor him. In fact, he did it again this week saying “@FoxNews
is out with another of their phony polls, done by the same group of haters that got it even more wrong in 2016. Watch what happens in November. Fox is terrible!” But the reality is that President Donald Trump is consistently the least popular sitting President in my lifetime. Here’s a neat visual of him
compared to previous presidents (Trump is the green line):
Conclusion
Politicians and especially presidents regularly use their own version of the truth to meet their policy ends. Bush was overconfident about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and used that to follow a strong policy preference. Obama overplayed the success of Obamacare and underplayed its impact on Americans who did not want to participate. But I do not believe these two Presidents regularly and intentionally attempted to undermine the concept of truth to further their own celebrity.
I’ve tried to focus on just news stories that have come out in the last week and yet it feels like I had to write my own book just to get my head around it. This has just reminded me why I haven’t tried to tackle any major topics on the blog in the last several years. Luckily this week has given me some extra time and writing this has helped me pull together a lot of my own thoughts over the last 3 years.
By the typing of this sentence, President Trump made
19,128 false or misleading claims in 1,226 days (it will likely be higher before anyone is able to read this). That’s an average of 15 a day! I mentioned the writing of this to a friend who also used to blog back when blogging was cool (or at least we hoped so). Justin suggested I read this research from the RAND Corporation on the idea of “firehosing” as a way of government propaganda.
Here’s their definition:
model for propaganda as “the firehose of falsehood” because of two of its distinctive features: high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions.
Lie a lot and with abandon. Firehosing is a power move. You say so many outrageous things so many times that your opponents look like fools just for engaging. And as we have all felt, it’s exhausting. It took me much longer to write this than it took for Trump to say the things I’m fact checking (and I’m just citing those who have already done the hard fact checking work) . The craziest part about this RAND article is that it wasn't about Donald Trump. It was about Russian President Vladimir Putin. This is a strategy of dictators, not democracies. Yet, this is exactly what Donald Trump does on Twitter, in interviews, and especially with his campaigning team on 24 hour news citing “alternative facts”. I think this helps explain while even though Donald Trump has the lowest rating, he also has the most consistent. There is not very much room for dissenting voices. The propaganda is “Rapid, Continuous, and Repetitive”. Or what Trump’s former White House Chief Strategist Steven Bannon called it in 2018, “flood the zone with shit.”
So how can you counter this? How can you “expect to counter the firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth”? You can’t. “Instead, put raincoats on those at whom the firehose is aimed.” The research on Firehosing suggests one main strategy, “Forewarning”:
Propagandists gain advantage by offering the first impression, which is hard to overcome. If, however, potential audiences have already been primed with correct information, the disinformation finds itself in the same role as a retraction or refutation: disadvantaged relative to what is already known.
When people resist persuasion or influence, that act reinforces their preexisting beliefs. It may be more productive to highlight the ways in which Russian propagandists attempt to manipulate audiences, rather than fighting the specific manipulations.
My hope for myself and anyone willing to read this far is that by seeing just a single week of Trump’s Russian style propaganda, we have protected ourselves just a little. The final suggestion for dealing with Firehosing is the “turn down the flow”. In my case, that means removing myself from the dopamine addiction of righteous outrage about Trump’s most recent attempt to bait me. I remind myself though our country is more divided politically than any other time in my life, we are
not more divided on most other topics (see graph).
It’s for that reason I’m encouraged by a nation that has made hard sacrifices to protect the most vulnerable during the Covid-19 pandemic (despite how quickly the nation was burned out by it, for reasons discussed earlier). I’m encouraged by the outpouring of support nationwide to say that Black Lives Matter (despite Trump’s own inability to comfort a nation mourning). I’m encouraged by the schools in Greenville (including the one where I teach) and improv theater communities throughout the country (including the one where I perform) as we have all worked together through an incredibly challenging time.
The word I’ve come back to over the last few months is TRUST. In a time of crisis, people flock to it. I know I’ve tried very hard to earn the trust of my family, friends, school, and theater in my words and actions. The opposite is also true. When we cannot trust someone in power, it only causes more anxiety. Richard Neustadt, a political scientist specializing in the American presidency once highlighted that because the role of the President does not have the actual power to pass laws or change the constitution, real “Presidential power is the power to persuade”. President Donald Trump cannot persuade anyone who does not already agree with him, because he cannot be trusted.
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