Following the 2024 U.S. presidential election results, it would appear that truth is on life support.
For the voters who are devasted by a return of Donald Trump to the White House, the mourning includes not just an electoral loss, but also the disillusionment that his ugly and deceitful campaign tactics worked on their fellow Americans. In this moment, it is tempting to disengage from politics, and crawl under a blanket.
But defending democracy—and the truth, for that matter—requires action.
For months, Trump has fed the electorate disinformation to stoke fear and division in society. Trump has falsely claimed that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating cats and dogs, that the Biden Administration has “weaponized” the Justice Department against him, and that his opponent, Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, is a “communist” and a “Marxist.”
Billionaire Elon Musk helped amplify these claims with a $120 million investment in Trump’s campaign and removal of content moderation on his social media platform X, a move that enabled falsehoods to flow freely, with corrections only from other users to rebut the lies. Among the false posts was a video purporting to show Trump ballots being destroyed in Pennsylvania, and another claiming to show non-citizens bragging about voting in Georgia. Posts claiming to be from the FBI communicated false claims about threats at polling places and malfunctioning voting machines.
While some Americans likely believed these false claims, others, no doubt, simply go along with the con to advance their political agenda or their own careers. Like a child who no longer believes in Santa Claus, best to pretend and keep the gifts coming.
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The real danger when a leader traffics in half-truths and conflicting claims is that people don’t know what to believe. Political scientist Thomas Rid writes in his book on information warfare, Active Measures, that the goal of disinformation is “to exacerbate existing tensions and contradictions within the adversary’s body politic, by leveraging facts, fakes, and ideally, a disorienting mix of both.” In this case, however, the adversary is us. In 2021, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon put it more bluntly when he explained that their messaging strategy to the media was to “flood the zone with shit.” Peter Pomerantsev, a researcher who studies media in Putin’s Russia, calls the result of this tactic “the fog of unknowability.”
By creating chaos and confusion, people become skeptical of everything, and believe in nothing. According to Pomerantsev, “The overall sense that you have when you watch it is that you live in a world that is frightening that you don’t really understand. But you can’t ever change anything.” As a result, the natural response to a cascade of lies is to become cynical and to disengage from politics altogether.
Read More: How Autocrats Weaponize Chaos
But now is not the time to cede our power as a democracy. In the first Trump Administration, the president was checked by aides who upheld democratic norms and the possibility of criminal prosecution. This time around, we can expect Trump to appoint loyalists over experts, who won’t just fail to push back against his worst instincts, but will enable them.
Trump is also liberated from any concerns about criminal prosecution for his conduct while in office. The Supreme Court’s July decision, giving a president immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts, means that Trump will be unencumbered by any special counsel investigations, as he was during his first term. He has promised to fire special counsel Jack Smith in “two seconds.” He will no doubt order his attorney general to dismiss the indictment in the Jan. 6 election interference case, and dismiss the appeal in the government documents case. Trump has also indicated that he will pardon and free the criminal defendants who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and used brute force to disrupt the peaceful transfer of presidential power. All of this would count as official conduct, which leaves him untouchable from prosecutors.
We are already seeing powerful people shrink from speaking truth to power. The billionaires who own Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, perhaps fearing the consequences of a president who promises to seek revenge from his enemies, declined to endorse a candidate in this election. Some members of the Republican Party have been doing for this for years now— appeasing Trump rather than challenging him, lest they lose their seats in office like Liz Cheney, who was voted out for standing up to Trump during the congressional hearings on the Jan. 6 attack.
But history will not look kindly upon them.
Many people who love America have worked hard on the recent campaign only to see their hopes crushed. For us to give up now would be to pull the plug on truth, which would lead to a death spiral for democracy.
