It's still anniversary time, as we take stock of Donald Trump's election and all that's happened in the year since. President Bill Clinton, whom Trump denied the chance of becoming America's first First Man, is doing his own reflecting—some of it on Conan Wednesday night. Clinton ticked through a number of factors fueling Trump's rise and the deep divisions in the country, including the economic stagnancy of the nation's rural areas and the urge to blame immigrants for the results of macroeconomic developments on a massive scale. But he also tackled perhaps the most basic threat of Trumpism: the War on Truth.
Clinton referenced "The Dictators' Club" of autocratic world leaders, and explained how each and every one of them is invested in one thing: "They want to abolish the line between fact and fiction and truth and lie," Clinton explained, as the Putins and Erdogans came to mind, "because they figure if you don't know what's true, and you don't think you can ever know, that pretty soon everybody will accept that democracy is no longer possible."
By the end, Conan, sharp as ever, asked if he was still just talking about other countries:
It's hard not to immediately think of Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts," or what Dan Rather and others call the "post-truth" politics of the present. The president, certainly, has almost no regard for whether or not something is true. It is largely irrelevant, in his view, what actually happened, so long as enough people will believe his version of events. His blow-up with a Gold Star family over a condolence call last month actually began when he made the wild claim out of thin air that previous presidents did not make condolence calls. That was completely untrue, but this is basically routine at this point. Fact-checking services like Politifact have scored as much as 69 percent of what the president says as some degree of false.
His forays into history are frequently disastrous, because he knows nothing of what actually happened and, rather than learn before speaking, simply makes something up. That's how he got the River of Blood on his golf course, and how he described Frederick Douglass—an African-American icon who died in 1895—as "someone who has done a terrific job that is being recognized by more and more people."
But the rhetoric can also be more sinister. Trump once rewrote the history of the FBI to lay the groundwork for an argument that the FBI director should report to him directly, at a time when the FBI is integral to a Justice Department investigation into whether members of his campaign colluded with Russia. Making up history to justify exerting more control over the federal law enforcement apparatus, contrary to the rule of law? Now we're talking "Dictator's Club."
Clinton expanded on the threat posed by the spread of misinformation and fake news, saying, "We need to tell all these people that just make stuff up on the Internet to knock it off." But that just isn't ever likely to happen. We must demand Facebook and Google implement better controls to prevent, as best they can, the spread of propaganda. But more than that, we need political leaders who believe in the concept of objective reality, and have respect for the truth and the scientific method we use to find it. We will not tackle the fundamental challenges of our time by indulging in wild fantasies about our world. The president can tweet away about Chinese hoaxes, but the water is still rising.
