The melodramatic, self-defeating end of the Trump presidency has energized Democrats and gifted them the power to lead the United States in a different direction. The sober tone of the new administration, its quiet professionalism, underlines the sea-change in political culture that is underway. President Biden has acted quickly to re-enter or extend international treaties, to restore alliances, and to place scientists in charge of the nation’s faltering response to the pandemic. He has set ambitious targets for his first 100 days in office, and shown a willingness to negotiate with opponents. What he has not yet been able to do is convince the majority of the 74 million Americans who didn’t vote for him that he is, in fact, their duly elected president.
Mistrust is the true legacy of the Trump era. Four years of weaponized lying has bequeathed a fractured polity that has lost the habit of agreeing on basic facts. In 2018 the Rand Corporation published a study of ”the diminishing role of facts and analysis in American public life” with the catchy title “Truth Decay.” It identified four broad trends in the erosion of trust: “increasing disagreement about facts and analytical interpretation”; “a blurring of the line between opinion and fact”; “the increasing relative volume, and resulting influence, of opinion and personal experience over fact”; and, “declining trust in formerly respected sources of factual information.”
In practical terms, that meant that when the Trump campaign sought an economic adviser who shared the candidate’s idiosyncratic views, his son-in-law Jared Kushner recruited Peter Navarro after an Amazon search turned up a book by Navarro called “Death by China”. It meant that Trump got used to retelling, or retweeting, anecdotes, memes or random snippets from rightwing commentators as though they were verified facts. It also meant that the president got used to overruling experts if their views, or data, didn’t align with his – often firing them by tweet afterwards. Most consequentially, it meant that the Administration revelled in its unprecedented hostility towards the fourth estate. The Washington Post estimates that during his presidency Trump made no fewer than 30,573 false or misleading claims
This is not an American problem. Trump has emboldened liars everywhere. As recent elections, in Uganda, and elsewhere, have shown, truth has become whatever the loudest speakers in the public sphere declare it to be. This remains so even when independent institutions, such as the American courts, dismiss the welter of conspiracy theories and misinformation put forward to substantiate claims of Trump’s victory. As a result, even though no serious journalist or political commentator doubts the result, millions of citizens who are entrenched in a parallel news system that has radicalised rightwing politics under Trump remain convinced that the election was stolen.
Biden’s inaugural address urged Trump’s true believers to: “Hear me out”, to let him earn their trust. It sounded sincere, but the troops in Washington, and heavy security at state capitols told a different story. With the steep decline of local newspapers – more than 2000 have closed in the last decade – too many Americans get their information from heavily polarized outlets (MSNBC vs Fox), or from the intemperate echo chambers, replete with misinformation, which dominate social media. A terrifying fraction of these people still believe that their new president is illegitimate. There are no quick fixes for this. De-platforming Trump may have staunched the immediate flow of misinformation and propaganda but it will not be enough to overturn the myth of a stolen election.
In 1961 the philosopher Hannah Arendt asked whether “facts, independent of opinion and interpretation, exist at all?” She noted that history had repeatedly shown “the impossibility of ascertaining facts without interpretation, since they must first be picked out of a chaos of sheer happenings [and] fitted into a story that can be told only in [a] certain perspective…” Trump’s presidency has shown how quickly a canny opportunist can exploit that chaos of happenings and concoct a myth that undermines democracy.
