On the Importance of Truth

 

On the Importance of Truth

Donald J. Trump was, tragically, inaugurated as President of the United States on January 20, 2017. It was obvious from the television coverage of the event that the crowd at his inauguration was rather small compared to other inaugurations, especially Barack Obama’s January, 2009. Immediately after the event, Trump and his people announced that the crowd had been the biggest one there had ever been for a presidential inauguration. That statement was an obvious lie, but Trump and his people kept repeating it. Trump’s flunky Kellyanne Conway told Meet the Press host Chuck Todd that the claim represented “alternative facts” and that it was not Todd’s job to question them. Those of us who saw even a little bit of the TV coverage of the inauguration were dumbfounded. We couldn’t understand why Trump and his people kept repeating a claim that was so easily disproved that no rational person would believe it.

At the time, perhaps we thought, well, it’s just about the size of a crowd at a public event. Who cares? We were hopelessly naïve in that thought. What we didn’t realize was that extremist Republicans had been insisting for years at least that facts don’t matter. What matters is what the right people say about the facts. These neoconservative, proto-fascists believed that they could create whatever reality they wanted simply by repeating lies often and vociferously enough. Joe McCarthy had done it in the early 1950s with his claim that the federal government was infiltrated by a huge number of communists, a claim for which there was no evidence whatsoever and that was demonstrably false. Ronald Reagan had done with his claim that his supply side economics, which his vice president George H. W. Bush had called “voodoo economics,” would raise the standard of living for everyone. The George W. Bush administration had done it with its unproven, and false, claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Trump had tried to do by repeating and repeating the demonstrably false claim that Barack Obama was not a native born American citizen. We didn’t realize that the neo-fascist political movement in our country that had put Trump in the White House didn’t care what the truth was. They believed that they could form the truth into what they wanted it to be. Sadly, they weren’t wrong.

I hold a PhD in history. I got it a long time ago, 1977, but the training I received is still with me. I was taught that the historian’s goal is to determine wie es eigentlich gewesen, German for how it actually was. Historical research, I was taught, is a search for the truth. The historian may interpret the facts she discovers; but she must first of all discover and present the actual relevant facts, and her interpretation must be grounded in and be true to those facts. For the professional historian facts matter. Truth matters.

After I received my PhD, I earned a law degree, a JD. I practiced law for many years. Mostly, I practiced civil litigation. A lawyer’s job is to argue a case in the way most advantageous to her client, but at trial a jury is told they must decide the case based on the facts presented at trial and the law as given by the judge. In litigation, facts matter. Some say the adversarial procedure of a trial is a search for the truth. It doesn’t necessarily feel like that to counsel in the midst of a trial. For counsel a trial is mostly a search for a victory for one’s client. Still, seen from a more objective perspective that that of a trial lawyer, a trial is in a sense a search for the truth. In litigation, truth matters; and part of the lawyer’s job is to discover what the facts of the case actually are so that she can craft a case based on those facts to her client’s advantage.

Truth matters. True facts matter. People can disagree about what the facts of a particular matter are. What they cannot legitimately do is make up facts that are in fact not facts but lies. To a considerable extent, reality is what it is. Reality may or may not be what a person wants it to be, but that doesn’t mean that a person can change reality from what it is to what the person wishes it were. Yet that is precisely what American fascists like Donald Trump are doing today. The American system of legal justice isn’t perfect, but it is the best such system there ever has been. By far the majority of people who work within it do so honestly and with integrity. The law is not, or at least ought not be, political. Prosecutors make decisions on prosecutions based on the facts and the law not on lies about the facts and the law. Yes, a particular attorney general, US attorney, or local district attorney may have an interest in prosecuting certain types of cases more than other types of cases; and that preference may be political. But politics do not make an innocent person guilty or a guilty person innocent. Politics do not justify a prosecutor in prosecuting an innocent person or not prosecuting a guilty one.

Today’s American fascist movement led by Donald Trump disagrees with everything I just said about the importance of truthful facts and the nature of legal prosecution. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that the Manhattan district attorney, the Fulton County district attorney, or the US Department of Justice is prosecuting Donald Trump with no facts and no law to support their case. The facts and the law of those cases (with the possible exception of the law in the Manhattan case) are not really in dispute. The facts of those cases are what they are. The law in those cases is what the judge presiding over the case or, later on, a court of appeals determines it to be. Politics have nothing to do with it.

Donald Trump is convinced that he can convince enough Americans of a different reality in the criminal cases against him to get him elected president again. He energetically asserts over and over again that each of those cases is a political “witch hunt,” by which he apparently means a hunt for something that doesn’t exist. Yet even if we assume that each of the prosecutors in Trump’s criminal cases is coming after him because they don’t like him or his politics, that reality would not change the facts and the laws of the cases. The facts of those cases are the facts of those cases. The truths of those cases are the truths of those cases whether the case is politically motivated or not. The evidence the prosecution can present in a trial is the evidence the prosecution can present in the trial whether the prosecutor’s motivation for bringing the case is political or not, as is the evidence the defense can present in a trial.

There isn’t a shred of evidence that the authorities who are prosecuting Trump for multiple felonies are doing so without evidence or without knowledge of the law. But Trump and his acolytes believe that they can convince a significant number of Americans otherwise just by saying over and over again that the cases are political witch hunts. They believe they can create alternate facts about the matter that Americans will accept and that will mold reality to be what they want it to be. Sadly, they are not entirely wrong about that.

Alternate facts aren’t facts, they are lies. Alternate reality is not reality, it is a lie. Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes cannot survive on actual truth. They must create a lie that people ill believe. Hitler’s lie, or one of them, was that the Jews caused all of Germany’s problems when in fact they caused none of them. Stalin’s lie, or one of them, was that the country was full of counterrevolutionaries who were out to undo the great Bolshevik victory that began in 1917 when in fact there were hardly any such people there at all. Donald Trump’s big lie, or one of them, is that the United States is a country of carnage and despair that only he can remedy. Of course this country has problems. It has serious problems that require serious solutions. It is, however, not the disaster that Trump has convinced millions of Americans that it is. More significantly, Trump’s proposed solution to those problems are not solutions to anything. His claims that they are solutions are lies. But then, Trump doesn't care about solutions. He cares only about power.

The tragedy is that Trump is making all his lies in a context that leads millions of people to believe him. Our country is changing, and it has been changing significantly at least since the 1960s. Our demographics are changing. White, Christian men are losing the positions of power and privilege that they exclusively held in the past. Millions of them feel dispossessed. Many of them feel they are losing control and being left behind. Trump plays to their fears, their angers, and their prejudices to drum up support for his authoritarian, fascist, anti-American answers to their problems.

The actual facts of America’s reality don’t matter to Trump or his followers. Those facts include that the country is changing. What they don’t include is that an authoritarian president can take America back to the 1950s, or 1920s, or 1890s the way Trump tells people he can. No authoritarian president can bring back slavery or Jim Crow, which Trump clearly would do if he could. No authoritarian president can force women out of the workplace and back into the kitchen and bedroom where Trump clearly thinks they belong. No authoritarian president can put white, Christian men back in the positions of power and privilege they exclusively held for most of our country’s history. Those are facts, and they matter. They matter a lot.

I have spent my professional life in professions in which the facts matter, in which the truth matters. Donald Trump cares not one whit about actual facts. He cares not one whit about the truth. He is gaslighting the American public into believing facts that aren’t factual and truth that isn’t true. Our great American heritage of democracy and civil rights, imperfect as it has been, may be lost as a result. Truth matters. I just pray that the actual truth will eventually prevail over Trump’s lies. I wish I had more hope that it will.