The Plot Against America

The Plot Against America

We must thwart Trump’s plan to destroy our democracy.

Copy Link
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Bluesky
Pocket
Email

A major reason Donald Trump has gotten away with all his lies and crimes as president has been the contextless coverage he receives. Some excellent investigative reporting aside, the avalanche of Trump’s outrages against law, decency, and common sense has had the paradoxical effect of burying the big picture. One reporter who manages to avoid this syndrome is CNN’s Daniel Dale, who, on the presidential lying beat, has somehow kept his cool, his sense of humor, and most crucially, his focus on what really matters. After Trump’s and Joe Biden’s dueling town hall meetings, Dale tweeted something that should underlie all election coverage: “One of the differences between Trump and Biden from a fact check perspective is that Trump regularly says or amplifies claims that are like completely bananas, entirely detached from known reality, while Biden does not.”

This column has room for about a thousand words—nowhere near long enough to list the reasons Trump belongs not in the White House but in a prison psych ward. There’s his incompetence and malevolence vis-à-vis the coronavirus; his encouragement of the unhinged, anti-Semitic, and possibly terroristic QAnon; his racism; his sexism; his history as an alleged sexual predator and likely rapist; his horrible foreign policy, especially on Israel/Palestine but, really, everywhere; his corrupt self-dealing business arrangements; his attacks on our health care system and the environment, his extremist court picks; his tax cheating; his promotion of fascist violence against peaceful protesters; his policy of child kidnapping; his paranoia; his fealty to Vladimir Putin, his nepotism; his ignorance; his vulgarity; his cruelty; his narcissism; his childishness. This list isn’t close to exhaustive. (McSweeney’s has the best catalog I’ve seen so far, enumerating 954 of “Trump’s worst cruelties, collusions, corruptions, and crimes.”) Like all decent people, I hope for a Biden landslide, but we must also grapple, sooner rather than later, with the heart of darkness in this country that has inspired tens of millions of fellow citizens to support this evil miscreant.

What’s most important right now, however, is for Trump and company to be thwarted in their plot to steal the election. He has clearly been preparing to do this since the moment the last one ended. In my new book, Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie—and Why Trump Is Worse, I focus on Trump’s November 27, 2016, tweet in which he said, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” When pressed to provide evidence, Trump answered that “the very famous golfer Bernhard Langer” was waiting to vote in Florida on Election Day and was refused but some people “who did not look as if they should be allowed to vote” had done so. In reality, Langer never spoke to Trump and did not say to anyone what Trump charged. But when a CNN reporter noted that no evidence could be found to support Trump’s ludicrous contention, the new leader of the free world responded by sharing a tweet from someone who appeared to be a 16-year-old fanboy demanding, “What PROOF do u have DonaldTrump did not suffer from millions of FRAUD votes? Journalist? Do your job!”

Trump then repeated his nonsensical claim about the allegedly illegal votes in a private meeting with congressional leaders shortly after his inauguration. Reporters wore out their thesauruses looking for a way to report this ridiculous lie without saying the word “lie”: “Trump Still Pushing Unconfirmed Claims” (New York Daily News), “Trump Repeats Unsupported Claim” (The Wall Street Journal), and “Without Evidence, Trump…” (The Washington Post). Many repeated Trump’s lie without any qualification—for example, “Trump Believes Fraud Cost Him Popular Vote” (CNN) and “Trump Continues to Insist Voter Fraud Robbed Him of Popular Vote” (The Hill). Today, however, it is the substance of the lie that matters most. On some level, Trump had to know how lucky he was to win three crucial states by a total of fewer than 80,000 votes after losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million. He had to know that he could not depend on this next time, and as an alleged money-laundering, tax-cheating, fraud-executing rapist, he must also have been aware that if he lost reelection, he could end up behind bars. So stealing the election based on phony claims of voter fraud will be his play.

Again, remember it’s not just that Trump lied about 2016 but rather that the entire notion of widespread voter fraud is itself fraudulent. And yet a recent report by eight authors associated with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard analyzed 55,000 online media stories, 5 million tweets, and 75,000 posts on public Facebook pages that attracted millions of engagements and found that “Donald Trump has perfected the art of harnessing mass media to disseminate and at times reinforce his disinformation campaign by using three core standard practices of professional journalism.” They pinned the blame on the media’s relentless “elite institutional focus (if the president says it, it’s news); headline seeking (if it bleeds, it leads); and balance, neutrality, or the avoidance of the appearance of taking a side.” Moreover, the study continued, “The efforts of the president and the Republican Party are supported by the right-wing media ecosystem, primarily Fox News and talk radio functioning in effect as a party press. These reinforce the message, provide the president a platform, and marginalize or attack” those who try to tell the story accurately.

Trump has enlisted much of his cabinet, the judiciary, the Republican Party, and the conservative media in his quest to destroy our democracy. But if he succeeds, he will also owe a considerable debt of gratitude to the so-called enemies of the people in the “fake news” media. He certainly could not have done it without them.

Support The Nation this Giving Tuesday


Today is #GivingTuesday, a global day of giving that typically kicks off the year-end fundraising season for organizations that depend on donor support to make ends meet and enable them to do their work—including
The Nation

To help us mobilize our community in this critical moment, an anonymous donor is matching every gift The Nation receives today, dollar-for-dollar, up to $25,000. That means that until midnight tonight, every gift will be doubled, and its impact will go twice as far. 

Right now, the free press is facing an uphill battle like we’ve never faced before. The incoming administration considers independent journalists “enemies of the people.” Attacks on free speech and freedom of the press, legal and physical attacks on journalists, and the ever-increasing power and spread of misinformation campaigns all threaten not just our ability to do our work but our readers’ ability to find news, reporting, and analysis they can trust. 

If we hit our goal today, that’s $50,000 in total revenue to shore up our newsroom, power our investigative reporting and deep political analysis, and ensure that we’re ready to serve as a beacon of truth, civil resistance, and progressive power in the weeks and months to come.

From our abolitionist roots to our ongoing dedication to upholding the principles of democracy and freedom, The Nation has been speaking truth to power for 160 years. In the days ahead, our work will matter more than it ever has. To stand up against political authoritarianism, white supremacy, a court system overrun by far-right appointees, and the myriad other threats looming on the horizon, we’ll need communities that are informed, connected, fearless, and empowered with the truth. 

This outcome in November is one none of us hoped to see. But for more than a century and a half, The Nation has been preparing to meet it. We’re ready for the fight ahead, and now, we need you to stand with us. Join us by making a donation to The Nation today, while every dollar goes twice as far.

Onward, in gratitude and solidarity,

Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation

Ad Policy
x