Truth still matters

Voters are seeing--and experiencing--that lies have consequences

Victory in the Wisconsin state supreme court race with a record turnout gives democracy advocates plenty of reason for optimism. Money cannot buy everything. Lottery gimmicks and deceptive ads just might have less impact than Elon Musk and his deputy (Donald J. Trump) would hope. That raises the question: Are mere lies the all-powerful weapon that MAGA politicians imagine?

Some of Trump’s most egregious lies have imploded…spectacularly. During the campaign, Donald Trump and his toadies insisted that tariffs would not raise prices. Tariffs, in fact, would make inflation vanish! By December, he said he couldn’t guarantee tariffs wouldn’t raise prices. In early March, he conceded tariffs might cause some...“disturbance.”

Now he denies he “ever” said otherwise. Moreover, he doesn’t care if consumers get slammed. “I couldn’t care less. I hope they raise their prices, because if they do, people are gonna buy American-made cars. We have plenty.” (No word on how American cars, whose parts will be demolished by tariffs, are going to escape price hikes.) Mad King Donald wants more tariffs! Bigger tariffs! The Biggest!

His announcement on Wednesday, proclaimed under a “Make America Wealthy Again” banner, had the whiff of President George W. Bush’s disastrous “Mission Accomplished” speech. In Trump’s case, we will await Republicans’ explanation as to how new consumer taxes (tariffs) make us wealthier. Once upon a time, they used to ridicule such sophistry.

The damage from his lying and economic illiteracy has only begun to be felt. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Worries about tariffs and the economy sent the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite to their worst quarters since 2022, a setback that is pushing some investors overseas.” His tariffs are also decreasing, not increasing (as promised), domestic manufacturing. Bloomberg reports:

U.S. factory activity contracted in March for the first time this year and prices accelerated sharply for a second month as the drumbeat of higher tariffs reverberated through the economy.

Investors and consumers alike see a gathering storm.

“Policy uncertainty and new sweeping tariffs from the Trump administration are combining to create a stagflationary outlook for the U.S. economy,” CNBC reports. “[A]veraging forecasts from 14 economists for GDP and inflation, [we will see] first quarter growth registering an anemic 0.3% compared with the 2.3% reported in the fourth quarter of 2024. It would be the weakest growth since 2022 as the economy emerged from the pandemic.”

So, was/is Trump an economic ignoramus, or just a pathological liar? Both, most likely. It is precisely because his lies promote policies that wreak such havoc that news outlets, Democrats, and anyone who cares about truth must reject the notion that fact-checking no longer matters. Eliminating it would normalize (a.k.a. memory-hole) his lies and allow for the magnitude of the lies and their consequences to escape notice.

What we need is a different sort of fact-checking that captures the plethora and consequences of lying. Trump lies about most everything—from inventing the “invasion” by Venezuelans to blaming Ukraine for a war Russia started to insisting the timing of attack planes is not classified intel.

Only lies (e.g., President Biden left him the worst economy ever, we have been overrun by migrants, Biden killed manufacturing, Democrats—not him and Elon!—weaponized the justice system ) can justify extreme, unconstitutional and/or deeply unpopular policies (e.g., massive tax cuts for the super-rich, snatching students off the street, inflation-producing tariffs, trampling on law firms and clients’ 1^st, 5^th, and 6^th Amendment rights). Trump invents his own rationale, or the last one he heard (“Panama is doing...something unfair” or “Our national security demands we have Greenland!”) to launch another boneheaded policy that is indefensible on real-world merits.

While Trump may be unique in the annals of American presidents, lies are autocrats’ bread and butter. “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,” writes The Contrarian contributor Ruth Ben Ghiat. “Just as they transform the rule of law into rule by the lawless, so do they make lies into party and state doctrine.”

Aside from reaffirming that objective reality exists (essential in refusing to submit to authoritarianism), emphasizing the clash between Trump’s lies and reality offers three benefits.

First, it “allows” Trump voters to bail on him. To formulate an electoral majority, Democrats must welcome back (likely with gritted teeth) the “deceived” Trump voters. One need not point out that many knew they were being lied to; the point is to get people to abandon Trump and his band of sycophants. Those voters were told he’d lower prices, only deport the “bad” immigrants, and make America respected.

All lies! They now can dump the MAGA con artists.

Second, Republicans who have gone along with his lies must be held accountable. If they were fooled, then Democrats who can tell truth from fiction should replace them. If Republicans went along with the lies knowing they were lies, they are as culpable as Trump is for the pain and suffering Trump is inflicting on Americans. (And those advisers who deceived Congress under oath to secure confirmation or to defend their conduct must face legal consequences.)

Finally, pro-democracy advocates must take every opportunity to cajole and, yes, shame corporate- and billionaire-media to drop the false equivalence instinct and instead adopt truth-telling. In presenting Trump’s patently false assertions about tariffs (and then matter-of-factly transcribing his denial), they become Trump’s enablers and normalizers. They must consistently confront Trump with irrefutable facts (e.g., tariffs have slowed down the economy and raised prices), remind him of his lies, and then interrogate whether he was aware of his falsehoods, or just plain wrong. Most of all: They must call lies lies.

Most people don’t want to be lied to, at least not if the lies spawn harmful policies. Moreover, Democrats can champion truth, insisting that reality, not lies, should drive our politics. As Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said in his marathon speech:

We are a nation that is great, not because the people that are trying to whitewash our history to remove great people, Native Americans, Black people, and women from our military websites. I don’t want a Disneyfication of our history. I don’t want to whitewash history. I don’t want to homogenize history. Tell me the wretched truth about America, because that speaks to our greatness.

True democracy defenders must confront politicians, fellow Americans, and the corporate- and billionaire media outlets with reality as strenuously as Trump has propagated his lies. They can then inspire Americans by elevating truth and denouncing a MAGA movement based on deception. They can underscore that without the protective cover of lies, Trump and his MAGA minions have nothing to offer Americans. Which is precisely why they lie so much.