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<h1 class="css-19v093x">American Deceptionalism</h1>
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<div class="css-7ol5x1"><span class="css-1q5ec3n">Reed
Richardson</span></div>
<div class="css-8rl9b7">fair.org</div>
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<h3><span>Book Review</span> <br>
</h3>
<p><span>Lying in State: Why Presidents
Lie—and Why Trump Is Worse</span> <br>
</p>
<p><span>by Eric Alterman</span></p>
<p><span><b>Basic Books</b>, 2020</span></p>
<div>
<div class="RIL_IMG" id="RIL_IMG_1">
<figure> <img
src="https://pocket-image-cache.com//filters:no_upscale()/https%3A%2F%2Ffair.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F08%2FGeorge-Washington.jpg"
alt="George Washington: Turns out I
can tell a lie."> <figcaption>George
Washington: Turns out I can tell a
lie.</figcaption> </figure>
</div>
</div>
<p>It is perhaps telling that the first known
presidential lie in our nation’s history
occurred just one year into the office’s
history—and revolved around a deceptive
campaign to square the new nation’s lofty
founding principles with its ugly
accommodation of chattel slavery.</p>
<p>Recently sworn-in President George
Washington faced a dilemma in 1790 after the
US capital was moved from New York City to
Philadelphia, because Pennsylvania state law
decreed that all enslaved persons would be
automatically freed after residing in the
state for six straight months. Rather than
accept his new home’s gradual abolitionism,
our first Founding Father undertook a
particularly craven scheme to circumvent the
rule, by periodically shipping his enslaved
servants back and forth to Virginia to reset
their residency clock, and thus avoid having
to manumit a single one of them.</p>
<p>It amounted to a cruel, 18th-century
equivalent of a modern-day—and dare we say,
Trumpian—tax-avoidance scam. And Washington
all but admitted as much in a blunt letter
to his plantation manager: “I wish to have
it accomplished under pretext that may
deceive both them and the Public.”</p>
<p>With that, a long and tragically
counterproductive American political
tradition was born.</p>
<p>That’s clearly the takeaway from Eric
Alterman’s latest book, <i>Lying in State:
Why Presidents Lie—and Why Trump Is Worse</i>
(<b>Basic Books</b>), which offers up that
anecdote as but the first in a punishingly
long and maddening list of White House lies
and distortions. The book culminates,
naturally, with an entire section devoted to
the unprecedented disregard for facts and
truth shown by the 45th president.</p>
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<figure> <img
src="https://pocket-image-cache.com//filters:no_upscale()/https%3A%2F%2Ffair.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F08%2FLying-In-State.jpg"
alt=""> </figure>
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</div>
<p>Alterman’s latest book serves as an
expanded and updated version of his 2004
look at the same subject, <i>When
Presidents Lie</i>. In that book, the <b>Nation</b>
columnist and Brooklyn College journalism
professor examined several landmark moments
of presidential deception in the 20th
century, from Franklin Roosevelt
misrepresenting his concessions at the Yalta
conference, to Lyndon Johnson effectively
concocting the Gulf of Tonkin incident to
justify expanding the Vietnam War, to the
infamously chimerical weapons of mass
destruction used by George W. Bush as a
false pretext for the invasion of Iraq.</p>
<p><i>Lying in State</i> reprises some of his
previous work’s themes—foremost of which is
that presidential lies are almost guaranteed
to backfire spectacularly—but also digs
deeper into the broader causes of the
phenomenon. True to his media critic roots,
Alterman also weaves in how the country’s
corporate media often act as willing
enablers to incessant White House attempts
to deceive the polity. In fact, Alterman not
only directly implicates a complaisant press
in presidential deception, but illustrates
how “both sides,” false
equivalence–fetishizing journalism set the
conditions for the inevitable arrival of
someone like Trump to the highest elected
office in the land.</p>
<p>Alterman briefly zeroes in on the executive
editor of the <b>New York Times,</b> Dean
Baquet, at the end of the book, as an
exemplar of the timid and defensive crouch
adopted by so many mainstream editorial
mastheads. On multiple occasions in the era
of Trump, Baquet has defended his
newspaper’s stubborn refusal to use the
words “lie” or “lying” when covering this
president’s onslaught of willful
disinformation, except in the most extremely
egregious cases (<b>New York Times</b>,
6/25/18) . In an online discussion with
readers, Baquet explained his journalistic
worldview:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Most politicians obfuscate or exaggerate
at times. But I wouldn’t use the word
“lie” in a news story in cases like that.
I don’t think we should use that word
every day in the <b>New York Times</b>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This goes beyond normalizing lies to a kind
of learned helplessness about them, and it’s
tantamount to unilateral surrender when
faced with a president who shows no
compunction about lying on a daily, hourly
or even minute-by-minute basis. (One notable
exception to Baquet’s
dare-not-call-them-lies rule came right
after the 2016 election, when Trump
repeatedly claimed to have been cheated out
of a popular vote majority by illegal
voting—<b>New York Times</b>, 1/23/17—which
foreshadowed Trump’s ongoing propaganda
campaign that the 2020 version will be rife
with electoral fraud as well.) Ironically,
this insistence on eliding or excusing lies
whenever possible, and employing tortured
euphemisms instead, is now <i>de rigueur</i>
among the very reporters and editors who are
exposed to Trump’s lies the most—among them,
the <b>Times</b>’ own White House
correspondent.</p>
<p>But before <i>Lying in State</i> begins
its deeply researched, historical review of
presidential lying (and journalistic
fecklessness) through the decades, it
establishes an instructive, if cheeky,
taxonomy of lying, borrowing from the work
of some well-known philosophers. The first
among this dubious group is Thomas Carson’s
“bald-faced lies,” statements that both the
liar and his or her intended audience
implicitly understand to be untrue: think
Trump’s transparently phony, “Mexico will
pay for the border wall” applause line.
Another subspecies: Harry Frankfurt’s
not-so-subtly named “bullshit,” which
defines anything that is obviously
unprovable or displays an utter disregard
for reality, such as Trump’s absurd,
much-evidence-to-the-contrary boast that he
is “the least racist person in the world,”
or his nonsense assertion that the noise
from windmills causes cancer.</p>
<p>The final two examples come from Jürgen
Habermas, who highlights the sins of
misinformation and disinformation, the
latter differing from the former by its
clear intent to deceive. Compare Trump’s
weeks-long touting of hydroxychloroquine as
a potential “game changer” for treating
Covid-19, which Trump quite likely might
actually believe, versus his more recent,
knowingly baseless claim that mail-in voting
is rife with fraud and yet is somehow
functionally different than absentee voting,
which he simultaneously deems perfectly
acceptable.</p>
<div class="RIL_IMG" id="RIL_IMG_3">
<figure> <img
src="https://pocket-image-cache.com//filters:no_upscale()/https%3A%2F%2Ffair.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F08%2FTrump-False-Claims.png"
alt="The Washington Post"> <figcaption>The
Washington Post</figcaption> </figure>
</div>
<p>As those easily provided examples suggest,
the current president really is <i>sui
generis</i> when it comes to the breadth
and depth of his presidential lies—having
now made more than 20,000 “false or
misleading claims” since his inauguration,
according to the <b>Washington Post</b>’s
factchecker (7/13/20). Trump’s tsunami of
lies, often in service of covering up his
thoroughly corrupt conduct, doubtless
represents a unique threat to the American
democracy—as the book’s subtitle warns. Yet
the most valuable lesson from <i>Lying in
State</i> comes from connecting Trump’s
rampant trampling of the truth to the same
patterns and motives as his many
prevaricating predecessors.</p>
<p>This corrosive through-line predates both
the presidency and the nation itself, and
traces back to the arrival of the first
slave ship to our shores in 1619, as
Alterman explains:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The racist assumptions underlying the
ideology of white supremacy have remained,
for the most part, just below the surface
of American political life. Yet these
beliefs have profoundly contradicted
Americans’ understanding of themselves and
their professed belief that “all men are
created equal.” Rather than confront this
contradiction, American presidents have
felt it necessary to elide it with lies.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As the reader proceeds through the book’s
damning history, this disconnect rides
alongside, haunting our nation’s
presidential decisions time and again. For
the first 100 years, it is the
Constitution’s “original sin” of slavery,
and its racist companion, a relentlessly
expanisionist Manifest Destiny, that are the
primary drivers of the biggest lies coming
from the White House. To preserve both of
these policies, presidents from Thomas
Jefferson to William McKinley routinely
chose to deceive the public about their true
intentions—and their consequences—while
subjugating and killing untold numbers of
peoples in forced migrations, and conducting
wars of conquest across the continent and
then further overseas.</p>
<p>After the turn of the 20th century, these
two motivations to lie metastasized into
protecting both the Jim Crow laws that were
the systemically racist progeny of slavery,
and the enormous fig leaf of “national
security” necessitated by a now openly
zealous imperialism. Ironically, though
President Woodrow Wilson was instrumental in
this pivot, Alterman doesn’t spot any
specific examples of Wilson personally lying
to the American public. (The same cannot be
said for his wife, however, who, in a
shockingly bold deception, covered up a
massive stroke that completely incapacitated
Wilson, while she effectively ran the
country and most likely forged his signature
on Prohibition legislation.)</p>
<div class="RIL_IMG" id="RIL_IMG_4">
<figure> <img
src="https://pocket-image-cache.com//filters:no_upscale()/https%3A%2F%2Ffair.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F08%2FMaddox.jpg"
alt="The USS Maddox, which Lyndon
Johnson lied about being attacked by
North Vietname in the Gulf of Tonkin.">
<figcaption>The USS Maddox, which Lyndon
Johnson lied about being attacked by
North Vietname in the Gulf of Tonkin.</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p>With World War II and the sprawling
national security apparatus that followed it
in the Cold War era, presidential lies
jumped by orders of magnitude. Korea, the
Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, Watergate,
Iran/Contra: All of these major historical
events were accompanied by, if not actually
founded upon, a raft of official lies of
commission and omission. And for every
well-known example, the book dredges up just
as many sordid White House lies about more
obscure US foreign policy abuses, in places
like Guatemala, El Salvador, Iran, Angola
and Chile.</p>
<p>All of this past was prologue, then, to
bring us to the White House doorstep of the
45th president. When Donald Trump re-appears
in the book, after a grim 250 pages of
presidential deceit, his willingness to
distort reality to advance his racism,
xenophobia, corruption, militarism and gross
personal misconduct seems less of a shock to
the political system and more like a natural
evolution. Trump, in other words, is the
toxic by-product of 400 years of corrosive
American self-deception, helped along by a
sclerotic press corps that meekly absorbs
lies rather than challenges them.</p>
<p>Our already frail democracy, beset by what
the book’s final chapter rightly sums up as
“System Overload,” faces a momentous turning
point in 2020. And we can’t say we haven’t
been warned. Yale history professor Timothy
Snyder, in a <b>Vox</b> discussion (5/22/17)
of his powerfully prescient 2017 book, <i>On
Tyranny</i>, limned how a relentless
assault on the truth creates a slippery
slope that can threaten the very foundations
of a nation and the freedom of its people:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The way it works is that you first just
lie a lot. You fill up the public space
with things that aren’t true, as Trump has
obviously done. Next you say, “It’s not me
who lies; it’s the crooked journalists.
They’re the ones who spread the fake
news.” Then the third step, if this works,
is that everybody shrugs their shoulders
and says, “Well, we don’t really know who
to trust; therefore, we’ll trust whoever
we feel like trusting.” In that situation…
authoritarianism wins.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But even if the country expels Trump from
the White House this November, the dangerous
precedents he has set and the distortion
field of dishonesty he has created may well
remain. It will not be enough to simply
return to “normal”; the boundaries of where
official deception can travel have now been
pushed too far for that, Alterman notes.</p>
<p>Like the virus that is currently ravaging
our republic, Trump is not something that we
must aspire to merely survive. Not if our
democracy is to be truly restored to health.
Instead, both the American people and the
press will have to confront some hard,
uncomfortable truths about our past and the
lies we have told ourselves. Only then will
we have begun to inoculate ourselves against
the next president’s lies.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Featured image: An audioanimatronic
Donald Trump with previous presidents at
Disney’s Hall of Presidents.</em></p>
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