Trump is still fighting for the truth and is still bad for democracy

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Supporters of former President Trump attended a rally on June 26 at the Lorain County Fairgrounds in Wellington, Ohio. (Scott Olson / Getty Images)

Last month, as thousands of former loyal supporters of President Trump awaited him at a rally in Ohio, an adoration rose from the crowd.

Trump won! they roared. Trump won!

The former president agreed. “We’ve won the election twice, he said, and it’s possible we’ll win it for the third time.

Eight months after he lost the credibility of President Biden, Trump and his followers are keen to maintain an alternate reality and have the remarkable success of keeping the fiction alive.

Nearly two-thirds of GOP voters told pollsters in a recent survey that they are still convinced the election was stolen by a number that has not changed since November.

This is not a harmless exercise in political puffery; it deepens the polarization of American politics and weakens democracy.

The charge that the election was stolen is not just Trump’s flattery; it was also an attempt to assign Biden.

This makes it politically dangerous for Republicans in Congress to work with the administration why would anyone loyal to Trump negotiate with an usurper?

The lie persisted even as Republican administrators ran investigations exposing it.

Last month, a GOP -led probe in Michigan found that Trump camps charged with voting irregularities there were none other than blatherskite.

The former Atty. Si Gen. William Barr, a Trump nominee, gave ABC News his small judgment on the presidents ’charges: It’s all bullshit.

But many of the GOP’s loyalists appear to be barely supported by the evidence.

Fantasy has not survived on its own; Trump has spent most of his time since leaving office discussing his claims and warning Republican politicians that he will end their careers if they don’t support him.

Without them, I have no doubt they would be primaried and quickly lose office, he said in a written statement last month.

GOP politicians, fearful of Trumps anger, either tiptoe around fantasy or join in promoting it.

The story continues

Arizona lawmakers have been reviewing election results for more than two months; last week a GOP leader called for another recount after the current audit was completed. Lawmakers in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, who have bowed to pressure from Trump, said they are also looking for audits or recounts as well. The Washington Post reported last week that hundreds of Republican candidates are campaigning on promises to faithfully pursue Trump’s claims.

It’s no mystery why Trump wants to keep his unspoken narrative alive. The fiction changed him from a loser to, if not a winner, at least one victim.

It keeps his presumptuous claim on his partys 2024 presidential nomination if he decides to seek it out and give him a reason where he can raise money.

The consequences outweigh the future in Trump’s politics. As Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution wrote in his important new book, “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth”: When compromise fails, anarchy sinks.

Rauch argues that a root of our current political crisis is an epistemic war, a battle over whether there is something intentional truth to exist or whether politicians should be free, as a Trump aide said, to create alternate realities.

Epistemic warfare is now the modus operandi of the Republican Party, Rauch told me last week. It became a substitute for ideology or policy.

He said he considers Trump to be the greatest disinformation innovator since the 1930s. (And yes, he means since Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin.)

Rauchs ’title, The Constitution of Knowledge, refers to his argument that Americans with different beliefs need to agree on basic principles about reality, just as politicians with different views follow the same Constitution. .

People don’t need to and not everyone will agree that the same things are true, but a critical mass needs to support standards such as freedom of expression, intellectual pluralism, commitment to learning and respect for truth. and truth, he wrote.

Is there a way out of this crisis?

There is, Rauch argued but it will take time and effort from a lot of people.

Media organizations have stopped Trumps vainly spreading the most serious lies, as some of his first presidential campaign did in 2016. Now they need to reinvest in truth-based journalism and more. and better fact analysis.

Social media networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are still struggling to find workable rules to prevent disinformation but somehow they know most recognize that spreading lies is a bug, not a feature.

And individual citizens need to join the fight by finding better sources of information than their Facebook feeds and rewarding politicians who stand up for the truth.

It will take the whole society, Rauch said. That’s scary, but history offers grounds for hope, he added again remembering the 1930s. The truth -based community has endured even worse.

This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

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