The Authoritarian's Fortress of Lies
Facts, and fact-checkers, are the enemy of politicians such as Trump, who depend on lies for their legitimacy.
The news that former president Donald Trump backed out of his interview with the CBS flagship program "60 Minutes" because he refused to be fact-checked reminds us that the "strongman" is nothing without his fortress of lies. Falsehoods about the leader’s competence, power, and efficiency prop up personality cults, and are integral to his identity as the only man who can lead the nation to greatness.
In an extreme case, one Big Lie—for example, that you are the winner of a presidential election—may become essential for a leader’s legitimacy. Then that leader might even make recourse to violence to make reality fit his fabrications, as Trump did with the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection.
Who would Trump be if he admitted he lost the 2020 election? By democratic standards, he would be just another president who failed to convince the electorate that he was the best choice given his record. But Trump is an authoritarian: defeat is associated with weakness, and leaves him vulnerable to prosecution.
So Trump and his numerous high-level co-conspirators applied themselves assiduously to what would become one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in history: convincing tens of millions of Americans that he and not Joe Biden had won the election. He did this while operating in an open society with a pluralistic media environment, which makes this an unprecedented feat of indoctrination.
Of course, Trump could never have succeeded without his most influential partner, Fox "News." I remain haunted by the revelation that emerged during the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox that another path for our country, away from institutionalized lying by the GOP, was momentarily possible.
A memo that formed part of the lawsuit's documentation showed that Rupert Murdoch floated the idea that Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and other top hosts trusted by the Fox audience should appear together on television in Nov. 2020 and state clearly that Biden had won the election. Murdoch wrote that presenting a united front "would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election [was] stolen."
Instead, Murdoch & Company went in the opposite direction to preserve audience size and profit margins. That decision had calamitous consequences, legitimating the lie that gave rise to the "Stop the Steal" movement that provided momentum and emotional heat for the insurrection. That failed coup further radicalized the GOP, and involved it in a massive criminal coverup of the attempt to overturn the election and prevent Biden from taking office that goes on to this day.
This situation has transformed the GOP into an autocratic entity dependent on institutionalized lying, so that maintaining party falsehoods about elections, immigration, crime, and other topics becomes a political duty and a test of loyalty for political elites and their media allies. Transgressors of the party line must be publicly disciplined or expelled, and anyone who exposes the truth, informs the public about the leader's and the party's falsehoods, or reveals the mechanisms of the deception, must be intimidated with threats or lawsuits.
The reliance on lying grows as the party is emptied of any fact-based content, and the leader cult balloons further. This has been the case with Trump’s campaign, which is better understood as a disinformation and radicalization machine. This is why he and his associates view fact-checking as an act of aggression.
Authoritarian leaders believe they are above the law, and they also believe that they are above the truth in that they reserve the right to determine what is truth and what is fiction. Just as they transform the rule of law into rule by the lawless, so do they make lies into party and state doctrine.
In authoritarian states, fact-checking the leader is impossible because it holds the leader accountable to norms of honesty and accuracy—norms that run counter to the operation of propaganda. In such situations, telling the truth can become a criminal act. The prisons of authoritarian states are full of people who threaten the leader because they would not give up the idea of fact-based reality and information based on the objective evaluation of data and evidence: scientists, academics, prosecutors, lawyers, judges, researchers, journalists, and more.
Trump has a similar disposition. His aggression towards journalists who want to fact-check him comes from a place of weakness, not strength. As Elias Canetti wrote in his classic study, Crowds and Power, the leader’s attempt to suppress criticism and any discussion of the truth of his speech shows us his insecurity. Even queries are eventually seen as an attack: “Whether or not he is actually in danger from enemies, he always feels himself menaced…all questioning is a forcible intrusion...like a knife cutting into the flesh of the victim.”
For the strongman, facts are formidable adversaries, and fact-checkers are enemies out to burst his bubble of illusions and lies. That is why the prospect of being fact-checked is enough to make an authoritarian politician such as Trump withdraw from an interview.
My real disgust is for the 45% of my fellow Americans who eagerly swallow the lies not because they really believe them, but because deep down in their bigoted and misogynistic hearts they desperately want the lies to be true.
The problem now is how to successfully, albeit perhaps slowly, de-program those afflicted by the Big Lie are filtering down to local officials and races.