Credit where it’s due: WaPo has already published two stories this week that attempt to cover Trump like the conman he is, rather than the good faith politician he is often treated as.
Yesterday, Ashley Parker wrote about how Trump spins ridiculous lies to gin up fear against Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
It is a distorted, warped and, at times, absurdist portrait of a nation where the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to deadly effect were merely peaceful protesters, and where unlucky boaters are faced with the unappealing choice between electrocution or a shark attack. His extreme caricatures also serve as another way for Trump to traffic in lies and misinformation, using an alternate reality of his own making to create an often terrifying — and, he seems to hope — politically devastating landscape for his political opponents.
Later yesterday, Isaac Arnsdorf and Josh Dawsey described what Trump was trying to do with a statement that — among other things — said Trump wanted Florida to take the lead in investigating the Ryan Routh suspected assassination attempt: He was trying to “foment distrust of federal law enforcement.”
His statement sought to implicate President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, picking up on other recent remarks blaming them for failing to protect him. There is no evidence that Biden or Harris were involved in any security decisions leading up to the apparent assassination attempts, and Biden has since ordered the administration to provide the Secret Service with every available resource and asked Congress for more funding.
These pieces treat Trump’s language as utilitarian means to accrue power, rather than transparent statements of truth, something that — in my opinion — is necessary to reclaim truth from him. It’s a rare moment of a news outlet applying savviness to the manipulation Trump is attempting rather than how it fits into a campaign strategy.
The means of manipulation are the news, not (primarily, anyway) the measure of their success.
That said, while the Arnsdorf/Dawsey story fact checks two of Trump’s claims,
There is no evidence that Biden or Harris were involved in any security decisions leading up to the apparent assassination attempts, and Biden has since ordered the administration to provide the Secret Service with every available resource and asked Congress for more funding.
[snip]
He also complained that FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, who Trump appointed, testified to Congress in July that he was not certain what struck Trump’s ear at the July 13 rally in Butler, Pa. The FBI quickly clarified that Trump was injured by a bullet or a fragment.
They don’t fact check the lies on which Trump’s grievances are based. For example, they misstate what Trump claimed that Director Wray said:
[T]he FBI Director went before Congress and falsely said that it may not have been a bullet, “It was just glass or shrapnel — a lie condemned by even my worst enemies. What he said was disgraceful, especially since it was witnessed LIVE by millions of people, and he was forced to immediately retract.
This quotation, presented as such, completely misstates what Chris Wray said.
He said, “there’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear.” As the FBI clarified immediately, what hit Trump was, “a bullet, whether whole or fragmented into smaller pieces.” Bullet fragments are shrapnel.
Wray never raised glass (from the teleprompter).
Similarly, WaPo never debunks Trump’s false claim that the “Biden/Harris DOJ/FBI [have] control over local D.A.s and A.G.s.”
Perhaps the most curious choice, however, is how WaPo defined half a paragraph of shorthand for readers…
In the statement, Trump proceeded to recite a long list of legal problems that he attributed to his political opponents, using shorthand familiar to his fans, including:
- “Russia, Russia, Russia,” meaning special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election
- “Impeachment Hoax Number One,” again meaning the 2019 impeachment, for which the Senate acquitted him; and “Impeachment Hoax Number Two,” meaning his 2021 impeachment for inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, again resulting in acquittal
- “the Lawless Documents Hoax,” meaning the court-authorized search of his Mar-a-Lago estate as part of a federal prosecution for mishandling classified documents, which a Trump-appointed judge dismissed in July
- “the January 6th Hoax” and “the J6 Unselect Committee,” meaning the House investigation into the attack on the Capitol
- “the Manhattan D.A.’s Zombie Case,” meaning his conviction in May on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a 2016 hush money scheme
- “the New York A.G. Scam,” meaning New York Attorney General Letitia James’s lawsuit accusing Trump’s businesses of fraud, resulting in a $450 million judgment in February
… without debunking the lies.
For example, DOJ has repeatedly debunked Trump’s claim that the January 6 Committee deleted documents and Republicans haven’t been able to prove it with their majority either.
Letitia James didn’t just accuse Trump and win a judgment, she proved that Trump and his sons are fraudsters.
And the balance of that paragraph includes a set of lies implicating Hunter Biden and his father. Trump invented the quote, “Russian interference and disinformation;” the false claim that the former spooks used the word “disinformation,” rather than “information operation,” has always been central to an orchestrated campaign claiming they lied. Moreover, the letter expressed a non-falsifiable opinion; to this day many of the former spooks who signed it stand by that opinion that the laptop “has the earmarks of a Russian influence operation.” (And contrary to some WaPo reports, FBI has never claimed to have done the things it would need to do to dispute it.)
Nothing in the laptop shows evidence of Joe Biden’s grift (indeed, after six years of investigation, DOJ didn’t substantiate any unlawful grift on the part of Hunter).
In other words, it’s not just the general insinuation that the Deep State can’t be trusted. WaPo is right that Trump uses a lot of shorthand when he attacks the Deep State.
But even that shorthand is riddled with deliberate false claims. In each instance, Trump transforms something that has a perfectly understandable explanation — Chris Wray was trying hard to avoid overstating what the FBI had concluded, the spooks expressed an opinion — and by misrepresenting it, makes it appear far worse, Wray dismissing the seriousness of Trump being hit, former spooks trying to cover for the Biden family.
I don’t mean to be greedy. I’m grateful that WaPo has, at long last, started explaining how Trump exerts his power, rather than treating his false claims as if they were delivered in good faith.
But if we’re going to unpack the very cynical way Trump has deployed lie after lie to get his supporters and the Republican Party generally to hate rule of law, this cumulative process needs to be unpacked. The press has, for years, simply let Trump repeat those underlying claims without contest, as WaPo again does here. None of them are true, but his followers believe them, not least because the press disseminates them in various ways without contest.
There is no underlying basis for Trump’s grievances about the Deep State. None.
To invent that grievance, Trump has created lie after lie, and built them together into a caricature of the Deep State that his loyal followers have been trained to attack.