Category: Truth

MEA CULPA, TRUTH AND AN EXTENDED BREAK

Let me come clean.  

That brief mental vacation I told you I was taking from this space nearly two months ago was a Trumpian-like figment of my imagination.  Put another way, I lied.  

Not wanting to overshare boring details of what seemed like a minor health matter, I borrowed a concept that frequently pops up on Facebook these days, something to the effect that:  “I’m sick of all the politics and will take a break for a while.”

At the time, it seemed almost noble to be temporarily hobbled by the blathering punditry class and its inane obsession with spinning every ubiquitous blip into a narrative of doom.  These political prognosticators declare the Biden presidency dead at least once week.  They saw the less-than-elegant exit from Afghanistan as a fatal flaw.  They are sure Biden’s inability to shutdown COVID in its tracks will ruin him, despite the fact that the biggest impediment to herd immunity is the MAGA crowd’s refusal to mask up and get vaccinated.   Now they are warning that Biden will tarnish his image for all time by giving up on spending programs he campaigned on, all in order to get a compromise package through one of the most closely divided and divisive Congresses in recent history.  Can you imagine what a dismal, chaotic mess the theatre world would be in if Shakespeare had treated every mundane action as an arc to the final act? 

The truth is that I am a committed political junkie. Tortured journalism is annoying, but it’s not going to push me away from my daily fix.  So I lied. My defense is one of mitigation.  I refer you to that noted tome on prevarication, The Oxford Handbook of Lying, by Simone Dietz. Although my fib would be heavily sanctioned by the “absolute-moralist” faction of serious thinkers on this subject, there is a more utilitarian caucus that would spare me the gallows.  This reformist movement notes that lies that are socially harmless or based on benevolent motives or consequences, fall short of evil.  Obviously, Donald Trump never read the memo on this subject.  

Here’s the real deal:  I’ve dealt with respiratory issues for some time, mostly the result of collateral damage to my lungs from successful cancer surgery and radiation 10 years ago.  It was all quite manageable until this summer when my symptoms worsened.  I was scheduled for a mind-boggling round of appointments within the ever-expanding universe of Johns Hopkins Medicine.  I thought it best to let the blog go dark for a bit in order to focus on my medical adventure.  I figured I’d be back on the keyboard by mid-September.

Well, the best laid plans and all of that stuff.  It turns out that I have a rare and stubborn lung infection known as Mycobacterium Avium Complex, MAC for short.  The treatment consists of four heavy duty antibiotics, one of them administered intravenously.  I’m told that it could take several months to eradicate the bacteria. Once that happens, I will continue taking at least some of the antibiotics for as long as another year, to guard against a return of the offending organisms.

I have so missed researching and writing this blog.  I didn’t realize how important it was to me until I took my so-called break.  Unlike many retirees, I neither build nor fix things.  I don’t like crossword or jigsaw puzzles.  I’ve never had much interest in sports.   But reading the news, thinking about issues, and trying to figure out what it all means has kept me fairly sane these past five years.   Unfortunately, the side effects of my antibiotics have made it far more difficult to sort it all out.  A cognitive haze has definitely settled in.  My doctors tell me that it will likely lift once my body becomes accustomed to the antibiotic regimen.

So there you have it, as the TV news folks like to say.  My story is neither compelling nor poignant; neither riveting nor amusing.  In fact, it’s not even interesting.

But I can assure you of this: It is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

You can also believe me when I say, I look forward to returning to this space as soon as the medicinal cobwebs leave my prefrontal cortex.

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THE GOP’S NEW BIG LIE: SYSTEMIC RACISM DOESN’T EXIST

Just as Republicans pulled the plug on investigating the deadly January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, many of us were learning – for the first time in 100 years – of something called the Tulsa Race Massacre. It seems that the long and winding road from 1921 to 2021 is paved with deception.

A large Black community just outside of Tulsa was decimated by white Oklahomans in 1921.  Some 300 Black men, women and children were murdered, thousands of homes were burned to the ground. Black businesses, schools and churches were destroyed. 

As the great white fathers of Tulsa surveyed the ashes of their destruction, the obvious question was how to weigh, measure and record this brutal massacre so that future generations could learn from it.  Their answer: Fuhgeddaboudit!  They covered it up, claimed it was just another riot by uppity Blacks. The newspapers didn’t touch the real story and neither did the history textbooks.

The Tulsa Race Massacre, it turns out, was not unique to early 20th Century America. Similar atrocities of white mobs killing hundreds of Black people played out in Atlanta; East St. Louis; Chicago; Knoxville; Omaha; Chester, Pa.; Longview, Texas; Elaine, Ark.; Wilmington, Del.; and Washington, D.C., among numerous other cities. In each case, this murderous, torturous behavior of white citizens was treated as a deep, dark family secret. It took historians almost a century to extract and piece together these long-hidden truths.  

Nearly a hundred years later, our nation’s capitol was invaded by an angry white supremacist  mob of gun-toting, confederate flag-waving rebels, hell bent on stopping Congress from certifying Joe Biden as the country’s duly elected president. Five people died and more than 100 police officers were injured. What sayeth the great white fathers of the GOP on the matter of thoroughly investigating this treasonous incursion so that we never encounter a sequel?  Their answer came directly from the script of their Tulsa forefathers: Fuhgeddaboudit!  Best to just move on and pretend it didn’t happen. Again.

Here’s a truth that passed the test of time with flying colors:  “The more things change,” wrote French author Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr in 1849, “the more they stay the same.” Our world has changed in profound ways since 1921. We have Wi-Fi, Tesla and Zoom. We use words like “ideation” and “reimagine.”  We take conference calls where we “circle back” and “unpack.”  But when it comes to the politics of race, white conservatives still bury the truth and lie through their teeth like it was 1921.

And there is no bigger lie than this one:  Systemic racism doesn’t exist.  Former Vice President Mike Pence says it’s a “left-wing myth.”  South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham says there is no systemic racism in America, only a few “bad actors.” Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton insists there is no sign of systemic racism in our country.  Then there’s the multi-tasking Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves who, on a single Fox News appearance, denied the existence of systemic racism and proclaimed April as Confederate Heritage Month. 

The same conservative crowd that pushed red states to make it harder for Black people to vote (based on the fabrication of rampant voter fraud), are now advocating legislation that would prohibit public schools from teaching about the way race influences politics, culture and the law. The bills are aimed at keeping students away from any notion of systemic racism. Such laws would forbid teaching about race, racism and white supremacy. Some measures go so far as to prohibit public universities from requiring diversity training.

Another key component of this legislative package requires teachers dealing with ugly historical episodes, or current racial controversies, to explore all sides of the issues “without giving deference to any one perspective.”  Can you imagine a lesson plan outlining the pros and cons of lynching, or the murder of hundreds of Back people?

The insipid irony in all of this is that a legislative coverup of past and present racial oppression is, in itself, a form of the very systemic racism these Republican lawmakers swear does not exist. For better or worse, laws create systems. The system these head-in-the-sand legislators want is one where we pretend there is no racism, and that Blacks are on an equal footing with whites. And that the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 never happened.

The truth is that it is hard to find a system in this country that is not racially skewed to the detriment of Black people. Take, for example, our systems of education, home ownership and its redlining roots,  employment, wealth accumulation and medical care.  Although occasionally adjusted in response to issues of racial inequity, they all retain the same DNA that created them back in the days of slavery and Jim Crow. 

Here’s where those systems have taken us:  

  • Median net wealth:  White families: $188,200. Black families: $24,100.
  • Median net wealth for people between the ages of 25 and 40: White: $41,800. Black: $3,500.
  • Home ownership: 73.7 percent of whites own homes. 56 percent of Blacks do.
  • Health insurance: Although Blacks make up 13.4 percent of the population, they account for half of the 30 million Americans who have no insurance.
  • Education:  Predominately Black public schools receive $2,226 less in per-pupil government aid than predominately white schools.  

From a purely empirical perspective, systemic racism is as real as it gets. The far tougher question is how to dismantle a malignancy on our country’s soul that has been there for . . . well, forever? The only place to start is with the truth, no easy task in an environment where disinformation reigns supreme. Folks who believe that Donald Trump will be “reinstated” as president in August, are only too willing to accept the notion that America is a racist-free country.  

Only a powerful and aggressive countermovement – by Democrats, non-Trumpian Republicans, independents, progressives, Green Party members and socialists – can deliver us from the diabolical illusions that are now the cornerstone of conservatism. Let’s start by stopping state legislatures from banning classroom discussion about the evils of racism.

Whitewashing the ugliness – past and present – only begets more ugliness.  

GOP QUEST: TO BELIEVE IMPOSSIBLE THINGS

Truth has long been an aspirational jewel in the crown of our democracy. 

Who would have ever thought it would lose its luster? Particularly now, deep into the Information Age. We have the technology to evaluate a gazillion datapoints in a nanosecond, but without fealty to truth those results have limited meaning.  This may be the saddest paradox of our times.

To be sure, truth is often illusive. It evolves with new discoveries and thoughts.  For example, caffeine’s impact on our cardiovascular system constantly vacillates between safe and dangerous, based on the most recent medical study (here and here). Many of us thought George W. Bush was an idiot until Trump came along and made him look like a Rhodes Scholar.  Yet, our one epistemological constant has been the value we attach to truth.  It’s what distinguishes justified belief from a convenient whim.

Unfortunately, we seem to be entering a totally different dimension, a bizarre post-factual space where truth is utterly without value.   

A few signs of life untethered to reality:

  • Rep. Liz Cheney was removed from her House Republican leadership position for saying there was no rampant voter fraud in last year’s election. The facts? At least 86 judges, along with Trump’s own Justice and Homeland Security Departments, completely rejected any notion of a rigged election.
  • Several House Republicans last week described the January 6 Capitol riot as an orderly affair. One said it was a “normal tourist visit.”  The facts?  More than 2,000 criminal charges filed against 411 suspects; some 140 police officers injured, many beaten with flagpoles and baseball bats; five people died.
  • Tucker Carlson told his Fox News audience that the “death toll” from COVID-19 vaccines is “disconcertingly high.” The facts: there is absolutely no evidence to support that claim.

Sure, politicians and political influencers have always lied.  Remember Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman. . .”?  Or Richard Nixon hiding the secret bombing of Cambodia?  Or Ronald Regan denying the Iran-Contra scandal?  The difference is that back then, once the truth was known, there was no sycophantic partisan chorus perpetrating the lie. Congressional Democrats in 1998 did not flood the Sunday morning shows with testimonials about Clinton’s deep and abiding commitment to marital fidelity.   

That’s when truth had value, and untruth was best mitigated by changing the subject and moving on, without relentlessly repeating the lie.  That is decidedly not the case today for many conservatives. This putrid pack of prevaricators seems to have traveled through Lewis Carroll’s Looking Glass.  They, like Alice, were mentored by the White Queen on the art of believing “at least six impossible things before breakfast.”

It’s this obsessive drive to believe impossible things – more than the lies themselves – that is gnawing a hole in the fabric of our democracy. Congressional Republicans know full well that Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, but many of them cling to the public position of voter fraud to stay in Trump’s good graces, and help state legislatures to pass voter suppression laws. According to recent polling, however, a strong majority of Republican voters cling strongly to the belief that Trump actually won the election.  

Just a week ago, QAnon sweetheart and GOP Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene began her speech to a packed Florida ballroom of the party faithful with this question: “Who is your president?”   

“Donald Trump,” they yelled in a thunderous roar, according to NPR. 

This malignant phenomena of believing impossible things has metastasized way beyond political rallies.  Take the pandemic, for example.  Trump knew in February of 2020 that COVID-19 was destined to become the most destructive virus to hit this country in more than 100 years.  But he lied, and said it was no big deal and would soon disappear. 

Months later, as the pandemic death toll climbed into the hundreds of thousands, acolytes of Trump and Fox News continued to view this coronavirus as a hoax.  They partied like it was 2019, disavowing any need for facemasks or social distancing.  Over the past year, news outlets reported countless cases of otherwise intelligent people insisting the virus wasn’t real, even as they or a family member took their final breath in a COVID critical care unit (here, here, here, here, and here ) .

Psychologists have long noted the tendency of some folks to deny the seriousness of a pending disaster as a mechanism for reducing anxiety.  Studies on the deadly 1918 flu, for example, cite instances of people referring to it as a hoax or treating it as no big deal.  However, the research shows far fewer instances of such denial, compared to our most recent experience.  

In 1918, of course, the country was deep into a world war. The only news organizations were newspapers, and they went along with the government’s request to play down the reporting on the virus in order to protect the country’s war efforts. John M. Barry, author of the definitive history of the 1918 flu, The Great Influenza, noted in a recent interview with The New Republic that President Woodrow Wilson and other political figures remained virtually silent on the pandemic that killed 675,000 Americans.  

Now, take the prompt-free coping mechanism of denial, and mix in Trump’s goofy affirmations of the same. Then add a constant bombardment of hoax advocacy by Fox News and miscellaneous trolls. Stir well, and you have the official lethal stew of our current pandemic. 

This is what happens when millions of Americans insist on believing impossible things.  They snickered about the myth of COVID a year ago. Now, they heed the warnings of know-nothings like Tucker Carlson and popular podcaster Joe Rogan, and refuse to be vaccinated.  As a result, according to the New York Times, most infectious disease experts say we may never hit the level of herd immunity needed to eradicate the virus. 

Sadly, it will take substantially more than a shot in the arm to restore truth as the loadstar in our quest for knowledge. For that to happen, facts need to matter again. Fiction can be a wonderful escape while sitting on a couch on a rainy afternoon. 

As a governing principle, it’s a total disaster.

DEMOCRACY DESECRATED BY DONALD ALMIGHTY’S MOB

For his End of Days’ performance, Donald Trump should have just gone to the middle of New York’s 5th Avenue and shot someone. As he predicted in 2016, it probably wouldn’t have altered his standing. But no, he had to incite a riotous takeover of the Capitol that terrorized Congress, left five people dead and a nation sick to its stomach.

Many of us spent four years wondering if there is any dastardly move this guy could make that would penetrate his cloak of invincibility. At long last we have our answer, although it comes without an ounce of solace. Let the record show that Trump’s instigation of a violent attempted coup d’état was, in fact, the bridge too far that we thought would never come.

The 45th president has been excoriated by members of his own staff and Cabinet. Influential – and not exactly left leaning – groups as divergent as the National Council of Churches, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Union of Concerned Scientists have called for Trump to resign or be removed from office. The House of Representatives appears ready to impeach him for a second time. Even worse for him, he’s been kicked off of Twitter.

Yet, he persists.  Two days after the Trump-inspired assault on the Capitol, the Republican National Committee sang his praises and encouraged his continued leadership of the party. According to social media chatter reported by The Washington Post, the president’s hard core base is so pleased with last week’s riot that they are planning an encore for the inauguration of Joe Biden, the guy they believe stole their hero’s office.

How in the world did we get to this point?  In large part, through faith. It wasn’t just the Donald’s lie about a stolen election that triggered this war. It was his army’s unwavering faith in the sanctity of Donald John Trump.  After stirring up his troops last Wednesday, this false prophet sent them off to invade the Capitol with these words of inspiration: “You will never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.” 

To be sure, many in that invading mob were veteran white supremacist agitators who were symbiotically using Trump as much as he was using them.  But others were clearly on a mission of faith. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reported that a portion of the pre-riot rally consisted of prayers conflating Jesus and The Donald. Goldberg wrote that one large group formed a circle and cheered when their leader said, “Give it up if you believe in Jesus,” but were even louder in their response to, “Give it up if you believe in Donald Trump.”   

This is not, in any way, a knock on religion. Abiding faith in a power greater than ourselves, or in principles and values that guide our lives, is as essential to our existence as the air we breathe and the food we eat. Yet, the slope between a faith that nourishes and enhances, and one that diminishes and endangers, is extremely slippery.  

Most organized religions – including Christianity, Judaism and Islam – recognize this conundrum through strict prohibitions against idolatry, the worshipping of other gods.  Think of it as an exclusive jurisdiction clause: Embrace only the one true God and the religion’s articles of faith with unquestioning acceptance, but don’t do that for anyone else.

Unfortunately, many in Trump’s base never got the false prophet  memo.  More than any other political figure in our lifetime, he has been worshiped by supporters who follow him on total faith, without doubt or question. His former press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump was called by God. Conservative radio host Wayne Allyn Root called him the “second coming of God,” and the “King of Israel.” Evangelical leaders Paula White, Robert Jeffress and Franklin Graham have repeatedly asserted that Trump’s presidency is divinely inspired and mandated.

Then there is the QAnon phenomenon. This growing contingent of hard core Trumpians believe the president has been divinely anointed to defend the world against a massive network of Satanic pedophiles in the Democratic party and the deep state. Many of the Capitol rioters were QAnon followers, including a woman who was killed in the melee.  

In his book, The Cult of Trump, cult expert Steven Hassan says Trump checks every box on the list of what it takes to have an effective cult.  “It’s a black-and-white, all-or-nothing, good-versus-evil, authoritarian view of reality,” he said in an interview with Vox. “And there’s a deliberate focus on denying facts in order to protect the leader.” One of the chapters in Hassan’s book is on malignant narcissism as a characteristic of destructive cult leaders.

To have faith is to accept without doubt, without question. In a religious context, faith has brought peace and comfort to millions of believers. It removes the angst of uncertainty over deeply profound questions about existence, including the ultimate: What happens when we die?”  

In the political context, however, doubt is an essential intellectual tool for drafting, synthesizing and reviewing ideas, policies, legislation and candidates. Truth and knowledge come from exploring doubts. Doubt begs the question, “Are you sure?” Doubt seeks more data, more opinions, more input. Used in moderation, it is also a healthy introspective tool. Who, besides our 45th president, has not indulged in self-doubt to become a better person?  

These past four years have taught us that the deity delusion is the of bane of democracy. Donald (“I alone can fix it”) Trump worships himself and believes in nothing outside of his own infallibility. Worse than that, he has an enormous contingent of venerating followers who accept his every word as gospel, and are willing to desecrate and destroy the citadel of our government along with the democracy that drives it.

As we evaluate the damage and devastation inflicted by the outgoing administration, as we make our list of needed repairs, let’s put this one at or near the top: Truth matters. 

And the road to truth is paved with doubt. 

TRUMP OUTSHINES RUSSIAN TROLLS AT DECEIVING AND DIVIDING

Russia’s byzantine efforts to infect American politics with chronic misinformation and rampant discord may be about to end. And we have none other than Donald J. Trump to thank. With a president so deeply skilled at dividing people and turning truth on its head, there is no need to subcontract that work to the Russians. Who needs an elaborate Russian troll farm to crank out social media posts about the evil of black protesters and invading brown immigrants, when Trump can do it himself with the flick of his Twitter finger or the roar of his bully pulpit?

Remember those 13 Russians charged with clandestinely promoting Trump’s 2016 candidacy? They were accused of stirring the social media pot with totally fabricated posts touching on racist and xenophobic fears. The February indictment says their goal was to “sow discord in the U.S. political system. . .through information warfare (designed) to spread distrust towards the other candidates and the political system in general.” Well, the Donald has shown he can do all of that on his own. He was an excellent student of his Russian mentors, so much so that he no longer needs foreign aid.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder has written extensively about how the Russians pioneered the whole concept of “fake news” in the 1990s and 2000s. In his book, The Road to Unfreedom, Snyder explains that Vladimir Putin’s post-Cold War strategy was to make up for the regime’s lack of economic and technological power by flooding the Internet and television with misinformation and demonizing the institutions charged with uncovering facts, “and then exploit the confusion that results.” Wrote Snyder: “They cultivate enough chaos so people become cynical about public life and, eventually, about truth itself.” Then, in the 2010s, Snyder notes, Putin took that successful formula on the road in an effort to destabilize Western democracies. Low and behold, there was Donald Trump, ascending the golden escalator to launch a presidential campaign based on division and fabrication. It was a marriage made in Moscow.

One of the many examples of Russian skullduggery cited by the Mueller investigation involved an authentic photo of a Latino woman and her child holding a sign that said, “No Human Being is Illegal”. According to the indictment, the Russians digitally altered the sign to read, “GIVE ME MORE FREE SHIT” and plastered it on social media. Flash forward to the recent release by the White House of a doctored video that made it falsely appear that CNN’s Jim Acosta had aggressively grabbed the arm of a press aide. No need for foreign subterfuge when you can do it yourself.

In that same Russian indictment, a Kremlin operative was accused of circulating a fake news item under the heading of, “Hillary Clinton has Already Committed Voter Fraud during the Democrat Iowa Caucus.” As Snyder noted, the heart of the Russian game plan is not about ideology, it’s about getting people to accept that “there’s no reason to believe in anything. There is no truth. Your institutions are bogus.” But you hardly need a Russian troll farm to sow those seeds, when the president of the United States accuses the Democrats of voter fraud in Florida, Georgia and Arizona, the second he realizes his candidates might not win.

Most of the fabricated posts cited in the Russian indictment involved race, immigration and religion, obviously visceral hot-button issues that trigger deep divisions. They contained outrageous lies and threats about Black Lives Matter taking over major cities, Muslim terrorists hiding behind burkas and illegal immigrants destroying American communities. In other words, pretty much the same game plan Trump trotted out for the midterms. The only difference is that presidential pronouncements enjoy a wider circulation and carry more weight than Facebook posts. Based on Trump’s campaign rally speeches and his Twitter feed, Americans were alerted daily to the presidential fiction of a pending invasion of killer immigrants and middle east terrorists approaching the U.S. border. He totally outdid his Russian counterparts on this one by ordering the military to protect us from the fabricated attack.

For a president who celebrated his inauguration by lying about the size of the crowd, it’s hardly news that Donald Trump enjoys a perverse relationship with the truth. But he’s really outdone himself lately. He told one campaign rally that Democrats will give illegal immigrants free cars just for sneaking into the country. At another one, he berated Democrats for ignoring the health needs of veterans and boasted about how he got Congress to pass a bill allowing vets to use their own doctors if the VA wait time was too long. Only problem was that the bill he was talking about was passed in 2014 and signed by Obama. On the night that Democrats won a majority in the House, flipped seven governorships and eight state legislative chambers, Trump called the results “close to complete victory”. When his latest choice for attorney general drew fire, Trump absurdly insisted that he doesn’t even know the guy.

This behavior would be amusing if it came from a crazy oddball uncle, something to chuckle about on the way home from family gatherings. But this crazy uncle is our president, and he is using the Russian playbook to, as Snyder, the historian, calls it, “create chaos from inside” by making a mockery of truth and denigrating the instruments of democracy. For the Russians, such an outcome weakens their main adversary. For Trump, it’s just a way to get through another day. For the rest of us, it’s another reason to keep searching for an exit from this nightmare. Without truth, without faith in our democratic institutions, America’s greatness is as phony as Trump’s invasion from Central America.

NOT REPORTING TRUMP’S LIES IS ONE MORE ASSAULT ON TRUTH

Donald Trump’s daily diatribes about “fake news” are drawing support from an unlikely source: academicians and others on the left who insist that the news is, indeed, fake because it distributes the president’s lies. They want journalists to stop reporting Trump’s false statements, arguing that merely labeling them as incorrect fails to mitigate their propaganda value.

Renowned linguist George Lakoff says the news media has “become complicit with Trump by allowing itself to be used as an amplifier for his falsehoods and frames.” New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen claims journalists “haven’t been able to assimilate the fact that. . .the president of the United States is a troll”. For that reason, the professor believes reporters should ignore Trump’s inaccurate tweets.

Another journalism professor, Arizona State University’s Dan Gillmor wrote an “open letter to newsrooms everywhere” with the salutation of “Dear Journalists, Stop Being Loudspeakers for Liars.” He begged reporters and editors to “stop publishing their lies”, referring to Trump and members of his administration. He also insisted that White House briefings not be given air time, and that Trump never be allowed on live television because he lies. Instead, Gillmor suggested that the president be “put on a short delay” so his statements could be fact-checked and not aired if found to be incorrect.

With all due respect to these learned thinkers, I say hogwash. When the president of the United States lies, even at the current rate of 8.3 times a day, that’s news we need to know. I’m not unsympathetic with the concerns of Lakoff and others that reporting Trump’s falsehoods and correcting them may keep the lie alive with some news consumers. Lakoff compares that cognitive process to the outcome of telling someone not to think about an elephant. Call me old fashioned, but good journalism is not about trying to get people to think a certain way. It’s about giving them the information they need to make decisions. Besides, in a world where most Trump supporters get their news from Fox and a handful of conservative websites – not to mention @realDonaldTrump and his 53 million followers – it is hard to imagine the efficacy of withholding information in order to combat presidential lies.

The one thing in this angry, bitter, tribalized moment that we all agree on is that we have never had a president like Donald J. Trump. Yes, every president bent the truth a bit, and some told downright whoppers. But the news media and the nation could handle the situation in the normal course of business. Journalists simply told the public what a president said. If subsequent fact-checking or other events cast doubt on his veracity, then that became a new story.

In 1986, every news outlet in the country quoted President Ronald Reagan’s firm and absolute denial that the government had covertly sold weapons to Iran in order to secure the release of American hostages. It later turned out that was exactly what happened. After those facts were reported, Reagan had these words: “A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”

Sadly, the current occupant of the White House indulges in neither facts nor evidence, choosing instead to make it up as he goes, with the flight of fancy of a five-year-old. So, yes, it took news reporters and editors a while to adjust to this wild aberration in presidential coverage. While the result is a work in progress, it represents a profound – and needed – change in presidential coverage.

Some recent examples:

CNN: “Trump falsely claims nearly 3,000 Americans in Puerto Rico ‘did not die.’”

Wall Street Journal: “Trump wrongly blames California’s worsening wildfires on water diversions.”

The Hill: “Trump denies offering $1 million for Warren DNA test, even though he did.”

Seattle Times: “Trump says crime in Germany is ‘way up’. German statistics show the opposite.”

The Washington Post ran a front page story this week by its fact checker, Glenn Kessler, detailing how Trump “bobb(ed) and weav(ed) through a litany of false claims, misleading assertions and exaggerated facts” on his Sunday night 60 Minutes appearance.

The trend, although not universal, is clearly one of labeling Trump’s statements as false in a first-day story, with later follow-up on the specifics of his misrepresentation. Indeed, it is difficult to find a news story quoting Trump that does not identify at least a portion of his utterances as false. There are exceptions. USA Today recently ran a Trump op-ed that was filled with blatantly false statements. Although the publication later noted the inaccuracies – and included some fact-checking links in the online version – allowing the piece to run with those falsehoods was a gross breach of basic journalistic ethics.

The gold standard for good reporting is truth. Donald Trump announced a few months ago that U.S. Steel was opening six new mills in the U.S. It was completely untrue. The company is not opening any new domestic steel plants, as media reports explained. But here’s the rub: If the edict of those imploring journalists not to report Trump’s false statements had been followed, then the truth that the president lied about the new steel plants would never have been told.

These are depressing and deeply frustrating times for those of us consumed with the nightmare that is our out-of-control and unhinged president. He continues to commit more atrocities in a single day than any of his predecessors did in an entire term. Yet, he is wildly popular with his fanbase, and resoundingly supported by the Republican Party. Those urging the news media to ignore Trump’s deceitful tweets and comments see the strategy as a way of toppling, or at least weakening, the president’s propaganda machine. I believe they are wrong. Truth is a powerful force and it has crushed many authoritarian regimes. The truth right now is that our president lies, every day, in every way. That’s a story no reporter should ever sit on.

TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES? TRUMP DODGES BOTH

Washington is once again awash with talk of presidential falsehoods. One Republican senator decried Donald Trump’s “flagrant disregard for the truth.” Another said the president is “utterly untruthful”. A neutral fact-checking service says close to 70 percent of Trump’s statements it examined were false.

Trump calls his tax plan a “middle class miracle” that will be “fantastic” for workers and make the rich pay more, when it actually does just the opposite. He says former president Obama never phoned families of fallen soldiers, when the record is replete with such calls. Major media organizations have kept a running catalog of the president’s false statements, now deep into four figures (here, here, here and here). Evidence of the president’s estrangement from the truth is so overwhelming, that a substantial majority of Republicans think he is a prolific liar, but still support him.

Yet, the Donald’s problem is not that he lies a lot. It’s that truth is utterly without value or meaning to him. The president is simply agnostic on the subject. Truth and falsity are equally irrelevant in his world. The words that flow from his mouth and Twitter app, are visceral, not factual. They are servants to his limited, binary emotional wiring: they either heap grandiose praise on himself or viciously attack others. It matters not one iota to him whether those words are true or false.

In fact, many of Trump’s falsehoods are not lies. Lying is a conscious act of deception. That means a liar must know the truth in order to deceive an audience with the lie. Think about some of the president’s classic claims: Mexico will pay for it; the New York Times is failing; Obamacare is dead. This is not a guy who methodically determines the truth and then disguises it with a lie. He simply goes with whatever jumps into his head, with whatever sounds good to him, with zero regard for the truth of the matter.

When, in 1972, Richard Nixon said he had no knowledge of the Watergate burglary, he was lying. When, in 1986, Ronald Reagan said he did not trade arms for hostages, he was lying. When, in 1998, Bill Clinton said he did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky, he was lying. These men knew the truth and strategically replaced it with a lie. They were not the only presidents to have done so. But Trump is in a league of his own. Truth does not matter to him. He doesn’t know what it is, and has no desire to learn. This makes him, as noted philosopher Harry Frankfurt observed, a “greater enemy of truth” than a mere liar.

Trump’s former butler, Anthony Senecal, read a published claim by his boss that some of the tiles in the Mar-a-Largo beach club had been personally designed by Walt Disney. Surprised by that revelation, Senecal asked Trump if that was really true. His response: “Who cares?” That pretty much captures this post-truth presidency. The leader of the free world, our commander in chief, the keeper of the nuclear codes, cares not one whit about truth.

Let me introduce you to someone who does care. Her name is Shannon Mulcahy. She is a 43-year-old single mother trying to support herself, two kids, a disabled grandchild, and two dogs in a small town near Indianapolis. Until a few months ago, Shannon worked at the Rexnord factory in Indy helping produce the Cadillac of steel bearings. She’d been there for 18 years. In an interview with the New York Times and the newspaper’s Daily podcast, Shannon said she loved the work as much as she did the good pay and benefits provided by her union contract. Last October, Rexnord announced that it was closing the plant, laying off its 300 employees and moving the work to Mexico. Shannon rushed to her car in the employee lot and started crying. Just like that, her middle class life began to crumble and she had no idea how she was going to support her family. Then came the tweets from candidate Trump, blasting Rexnord by name for “viciously firing all of its workers” and moving to Mexico. “No more,” tweeted the candidate.

Shannon never paid much attention to politics but had voted for Obama. Donald Trump and his tweets captured her attention like no politician ever had. He gave her and her coworkers hope at a time they needed it the most. “All of us were hopeful,” she told the Daily. “A lot of us there at Rexnord was thinking that he could actually step in and stop what was going on there. (If) he’s the president, he can do whatever he wants, right? I mean he’s kind of like a cowboy. He says things that a lot of past presidents wouldn’t say. The way he talked about American jobs and all that, I was thinking this could be the opportunity where . . . you know, a lot of our jobs come back from overseas. That would be awesome.”

So Shannon went political. Trump was her lifeline to a job that put meaning in her life and food on her family’s table. She conducted her own social media campaign on his behalf. She was thrilled when he won and then waited for him to come riding into town on his white horse to save the factory. It was like waiting for Godot. The cowboy never came. The plant closed. In a year filled with disillusion, Trump was just one more hard knock for Shannon. “After he got in there,” she said, “he done forgot about us and we don’t matter anymore.”

Sadly, Shannon, you never mattered to him. Nothing matters to this man except himself. Certainly not truth. His words have no shelf life. They exist only in the impulse of the moment. He makes us all long for the good old days when presidents only lied every once in a while.