Alternative Truths and Consequences
Inauguration day, January 20, 2017, the crowd was huge, stretching down the National Mall in Washington DC. Donald Trump’s inauguration drew a larger crowd to the mall than Barak Obama’s inauguration eight years before. Or did it? Side-by-side photos taken from atop the Washington Monument clearly show a larger crowd in 2009. With this, and Trump’s claim to have won the popular vote, the country was introduced to the oxymoronic “alternative facts.”
In the following years, the count of Trump’s false or misleading statements exceeds 20,000. His statements use the superlative, ascribing his achievements as the highest, the biggest, the best ever. He told the Davos Forum in January 2020, “I’m proud to declare that the United States is in the midst of an economic boom, the likes of which the world has never seen before.” That was clearly not the case; GDP growth during his presidency has never exceeded 3%. When Trump claimed that the noise from windmills causes cancer, he was ridiculed by the two Republican senators from Iowa.
If alternative facts started and ended with Trump, perhaps we could brush it off as harmless self-aggrandizement. But a growing array of media outlets accept and expand his pronouncements, at times corroborating their accuracy by citing theoretical conspiracies attributed to, as an example, a “left-wing cultural revolution” bent on destroying America. Fox News, Breitbart News, Alex Jones’ Infowars, Rush Limbaugh and One America News Network are among Trump’s favorite news sources and supporters: they report his positions, and he retweets their stories.
Not least of the dangers is the threat to the very heart of democracy, the free and fair process of electing leaders. Mail-in voting is alleged by Trump to cause extensive fraud, despite the lack of supporting evidence, as well as years of successful mail-in-voting in Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and Utah.
Now add in the Covid-19 pandemic to the mix of reporting and you have a challenge to the health of U.S. residents and to best practice steps to maintain health and limit community spread of the virus. Over the pandemic’s first two months Trump claimed it was going to miraculously disappear, that “nobody would have ever thought a thing like this could have happened,” and that, on March 2, pharmaceutical companies are going “to have vaccines relatively soon.”
The daily coverage of events and trends has taken on a life-and-death dimension. It took three years and five months to go from the January 20, 2017 inauguration to the spectacle before the Palm Beach County, Florida Commission hearing on a proposed mandate for wearing face masks in public buildings. Residents at the hearing slammed the requirement as “devil’s law” because masks interfere with people’s breathing and will kill them. They claimed conspiracy theories were brain-washing people and leading to a “communist dictatorship.”
Alternative truths have consequences, including avoidable deaths.