F*ck Silence Read online

  But some lies are bigger than others. I’m in my mid-fifties, which means that I lived through the Bill Clinton era. Through Whitewater. Through Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky. Through perjury and impeachment. It means that I lived through the FBI catching Representative William Jefferson with $90,000 of cash stuffed in his freezer and a federal court convicting Representative James Traficant of ten felony counts of financial crimes. It means that I lived through the Department of Veterans Affairs secretary lying about wait times at VA hospitals during the Obama administration. Through the IRS scandal. Through Anthony Weiner. But to the construction worker’s point, those are just the Democrats. Newt Gingrich had to resign from office after failing to do due diligence on a book deal and giving wrong information to the House Ethics Committee. Then there was the Jack Abramoff Native American Lobbying scandal. Scooter Libby and the Valerie Plame affair. My former colleague in the House and fellow member of the Illinois delegation Aaron Schock using taxpayer money to make his office look like the set of Downton Abbey. Literally.

  Some people, once they’ve seen enough, become immune to this kind of misconduct, even the kind that ruins reputations or lands people in prison. It’s because they’re not looking to some politician to be their moral guidepost. That comes from church, from family, or from community in general. The politician is there to be a culture warrior. To stick it to the elites. To fight. So to the many cynics on Trump’s side of things, his inability to tell the truth—to a degree that is practically clinical—just blends in with the rest of those bastards in Washington who are never on the up-and-up. Occasionally, the fib is even worth it if it pisses off the right person. That in itself is an awful reflection of what the baby boomer generation of politics has done to our culture, and it should be more than enough to make people like me pause and wonder how and why we haven’t done better.

  But right now, in the year 2020, the significance of that construction worker’s burnout, shared by tens of millions of American voters, is far greater than a chance for public officials to participate in some self-reflection. Let me get something out of the way here: I am not the world’s biggest fan of the Clintons. Sure, I’ll grant the obvious: Bill and Hillary are smart people. Those who say otherwise are just kidding themselves. But far beyond my disagreements with them on domestic policy, I resent the fact that their political dynasty has created more turmoil than national unity and misled the country on too many occasions. With that said, let’s draw a line. On one end is the most honest politician the United States has ever had. An Abraham Lincoln, for example. Or a George Washington. Even a Mitt Romney, because I’m not sure that guy is capable of lying. On the other end you have Donald Trump.

  I’d plot the Clintons closer to Trump on that line. But not right next to him. The effect that Trump has had on the truth is so distorting, few people in American public life have ever gotten even 60 percent of the way to him—not even the man who said, “I did not have sex with that woman.” What politician dudn’t lie? you ask. Hardly any of them. But that doesn’t mean we should give President Trump, a person with the world’s largest megaphone, a free pass for broadcasting misinformation every. single. day—which is exactly how extreme his BS is. The general public and government bodies working from a shared set of facts—the unvarnished, independently verified truth of a matter—is absolutely essential to a democracy. As you’ll read in more detail later, one of the essential ingredients of a dictatorship is its ability to get away with totally fabricating information, over and over, about issues big and small, usually to make it look perfect and like it’s incapable of erring even just a bit. I would argue that conservatives, in particular, historically have prided themselves on rejecting this kind of behavior; just look at our country’s great conservative jurists, like the late Antonin Scalia, who was allergic to overinterpreting a statute even a smidge, and instead favored the plainest meaning possible of a law. This tradition is a chief reason why I simply can’t support Trump—he represents a severe example of what usually would be a deal-breaker for the conservative movement.

  Let’s revisit a few specific instances and tie their significance together.

  My Crowd Size Is Bigger than Your Crowd Size

  There’s always that one signature track from the greatest-hits album that sticks out, right? In retrospect, that’s what happened with former White House press secretary Sean Spicer adamantly insisting that the attendance during President Trump’s inauguration was the biggest ever. (Narrator: It wasn’t.) I want to do two things here: one, quote Spicer during the press conference in which he tells reporters that, despite their eyes, there were more people on and around the National Mall for Trump than there had been for his predecessor, Barack Obama; and two, to outline why the way Spicer did this—with over-the-top rhetoric, making him sound like an apparatchik—indicated that the United States of America was dealing with the type of person who would prefer to rule a country with exactly one broadcast tower and television station, both owned by you-know-who.

  First, here’s Spicer in his own words the evening of January 20, 2017, just hours after the inauguration at the US Capitol (I’m italicizing certain words to point them out):

  [P]hotographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way, in one particular tweet, to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall. This was the first time in our nation’s history that floor coverings have been used to protect the grass on the Mall. That had the effect of highlighting any areas where people were not standing, while in years past the grass eliminated this visual. This was also the first time that fencing and magnetometers went as far back on the Mall, preventing hundreds of thousands of people from being able to access the Mall as quickly as they had in inaugurations past.

  Inaccurate numbers involving crowd size were also tweeted. No one had numbers, because the National Park Service, which controls the National Mall, does not put any out. By the way, this applies to any attempts to try to count the number of protestors today in the same fashion.

  We do know a few things, so let’s go through the facts. We know that from the platform where the President was sworn in, to 4th Street, it holds about 250,000 people. From 4th Street to the media tent is about another 220,000. And from the media tent to the Washington Monument, another 250,000 people. All of this space was full when the President took the Oath of Office. We know that 420,000 people used the D.C. Metro public transit yesterday, which actually compares to 317,000 that used it for President Obama’s last inaugural. This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration—period—both in person and around the globe. Even the New York Times printed a photograph showing a misrepresentation of the crowd in the original Tweet in their paper, which showed the full extent of the support, depth in crowd, and intensity that existed.

  These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong. The President was also at the—as you know, the President was also at the Central Intelligence Agency and greeted by a raucous overflow crowd of some 400-plus CIA employees. There were over 1,000 requests to attend, prompting the President to note that he’ll have to come back to greet the rest. The employees were ecstatic that he’s the new Commander-in-Chief, and he delivered them a powerful and important message. He told them he has their back, and they were grateful for that. They gave him a five-minute standing ovation at the end in a display of their patriotism and their enthusiasm for his presidency.1

  Where to begin? First, from that speech we knew up front that the administration would politicize nonpartisan or independent agencies, even those entrusted with protecting the United States, just to make Trump look good. CIA personnel were “ecstatic that he’s the new Commander-in-Chief”? And “they gave him a five-minute standing ovation . . . in a display of . . . their enthusiasm for his presidency”? What, did he have someone look up their voter registrations? Was this a postcampaign rally? It’s just gross. I’m going to be hammering on this idea a lot in this book:
that is how Big Brother or a king or a dictator behaves; not the president of the United States.

  But there’ll be more about that cultish behavior later, even if it’s worth highlighting whenever we come across it. On the topic of Trump and his team’s lying, did you notice the lengths to which Spicer went to prove something he himself admitted he couldn’t prove, something that wasn’t that big of a deal to begin with? As always, such a vigorous defense didn’t just come from the goodness of one of the president’s aide’s hearts. Prior to the press briefing at the CIA gathering that Spicer described, Trump said:

  [W]e had a massive field of people. You saw them. Packed. I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks, and they show an empty field. I say, wait a minute, I made a speech. I looked out, the field was—it looked like a million, million and a half people. They showed a field where there were practically nobody standing there. And they said, “Donald Trump did not draw well.” I said, “It was almost raining, the rain should have scared them away, but God looked down and he said, we’re not going to let it rain on your speech.” . . . But, you know, we have something that’s amazing because we had—it looked, honestly, it looked like a million and a half people. Whatever it was, it was. But it went all the way back to the Washington Monument. And I turn on—and by mistake I get this network, and it showed an empty field. And it said we drew 250,000 people. Now, that’s not bad, but it’s a lie. We had 250,000 people literally around—you know, in the little bowl that we constructed. That was 250,000 people. The rest of the 20-block area, all the way back to the Washington Monument, was packed. So we caught them, and we caught them in a beauty. And I think they’re going to pay a big price.2

  On and on and on the rambling went—this at Langley, Virginia, in front of the CIA Memorial Wall, which honors CIA employees who have died in the line of duty. So the water Spicer carried was handed to him by his boss. Whereas Trump mentioned TV coverage, Spicer’s particular beef was with a side-by-side photograph in the New York Times comparing the inaugural crowd in 2017 with the one in 2009,3 which he called “a misrepresentation.”4 But it wasn’t a misrepresentation, since the photographs were taken from the same vantage point (atop the Washington Monument) at roughly the same time eight years apart, and presidential inaugurations occur at the same hour every four years. There simply were more people standing on the National Mall during President Obama’s first inauguration than there were during Trump’s—a person’s eyes don’t deceive that much. Still, Spicer tried to set the straight record askew. He mentioned that “floor coverings have been used to protect the grass on the Mall,” which “had the effect of highlighting any areas where people were not standing”—as if that had anything to do with how many people had been standing in a given area. He mentioned how many people certain sections of the Mall are capable of holding, including “from the media tent to the Washington Monument, [which holds] another 250,000 people. All of this space was full when the President took the Oath of Office,” he said.5 But it wasn’t, based on bird’s-eye views and reporting from the ground at the time.6

  “We know that 420,000 people used the D.C. Metro public transit yesterday, which actually compares to 317,000 that used it for President Obama’s last inaugural,” he said—but the Metro’s own numbers, which were public, quoted 193,000, not 420,000.7 All of those falsehoods to satisfy the ego of a person who clearly has self-image problems.

  Again, anyone who doubts or wants to minimize the significance of that spat with the media could say that it distracted from the “real issues” or that it didn’t have anything to do with people losing their medical insurance or their jobs. That’s true. But those aren’t proofs that the episode wasn’t important. They’re non sequiturs. The Trump administration decided, on its first day, to launch an Orwellian attack against the media, telling the public to believe a narrative backed by lies instead of publicly available information. And the way it did that was by declaring that its competing account was just as legitimate as the factual one.

  “Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts,” was how White House counselor Kellyanne Conway put it.8 And that is how the term “alternative facts” was born.

  Lying About Policy

  So you’re “the state”—the big, all-powerful government that steers the country one way or another on issues foreign and domestic. Less than twenty-four hours after taking charge of it, you’ve established that you will support your arguments with “alternative facts”: information that you say is factual instead of information that is factual. You’ve said, “There’s been a lot of talk in the media about the responsibility to hold Donald Trump accountable. . . . it goes two ways. We’re going to hold the press accountable, as well.”9 You have placed yourself on an equal footing with mainstream journalism in terms of the ability to discern fact from fiction. You have implied that you are similarly qualified, and similarly credible, to do the job.

  Boys and girls, there’s no gentle way to say this: That’s what dictators do. Full stop. It’s not an exaggeration, it’s not fearmongering, it’s just the way that dictatorial regimes have operated throughout all of human history. You know who peddled “alternative facts”? Josef Stalin did. Mao Zedong did. Guys who weren’t in love with the idea of being held accountable for what they said and did by forces outside the control of the state. To avoid that accountability, a dictator has to prevent, eliminate, or at the very least delegitimize anything that could cast doubt on the trustworthiness of his message. And so Sean Spicer was out there on day one saying that “as long as [Trump] serves as the messenger for this incredible movement, he will take his message directly to the American people,”10 implying that whatever his “message” is, it would be perfect and therefore could be sent straight to the people, bypassing anyone who would check it for accuracy and sanity. Who needs fact checks? (I mean, Trump has tweeted the term “fake news” more than six hundred times as president.11) That’s a license to lie.

  So what do you think Trump does? He lies. Brazenly. He lies about seemingly trivial things, as in his assessment of Hurricane Dorian’s threat to Alabama. He lies about things to boost his image, as in saying he won the Electoral College in 2016 in a “landslide”12 or saying without proof that he “went down to Ground Zero” after 9/11 to help, a claim that he has repeated over the years and no one has ever verified.13 Because Trump believes he is beyond reproach, of course in his mind Alabama really was under serious threat from that storm, and he really did wipe out Hillary Clinton in the election, and he really was his own kind of hero amid the rubble of the Twin Towers lending a hand to the real heroes who have fucking died from breathing poison after trying to save their fellow Americans.

  Yeah, some of it is just downright offensive. And yeah, some of it is goofy. Saying that the noise from windmills causes cancer, which he did during a Republican fund-raising dinner last April,14 may be an absurdity you just can’t take literally or seriously or whatever, because this is Donald Trump we’re talking about. But just as with the Dorian story, think for a minute what a president could do if he truly believed he had the right to spread untruths with impunity and had convinced the people who worked for him or profited from his presence in office of the same thing.

  Seriously, take a few moments to wonder what the “leader of the free world” could do with that kind of authority, that complete lack of restraint.

  He could create whatever fictional world he wanted. Not just by taking something or someone maliciously out of context or fabricating something outright—but by doing it over and over and over again until it sounded as though this alternative reality, built on “alternative facts,” was the world he truly believed he inhabited. It’s the repetition of the lie—the persistent delusion—that makes Trump’s behavior unprecedented. As far as the things the media get wrong are concerned, no one can call BS on a fact-checker if the fact-checker is documenting the same example of mendacity for the one hundredth time. That may seem like hyperbole, but it’s exactl
y what the Washington Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler has dealt with since day one of the Trump administration. You may have heard of his “Pinocchio” system: a public figure gets one to four “Pinocchios” depending on the severity of a misleading or wrong remark. The subjectivity of a rating system like that aside, for this president, Kessler began to document “bottomless Pinocchios” for “claims . . . [Trump] has repeated 20 times and were rated as Three or Four Pinocchios by the Fact Checker.”15 Of those statements, Trump has said five of them more than a hundred times.

  For example, he has said about two hundred times that the administration is “building the wall,” when in fact it’s only been able to get money and authority from Congress to put up a bit of new fencing and some replacement barrier for old and obsolete fencing. He’s said a similar number of times that the United States “loses” hundreds of billions of dollars via its trade deficits with China and other countries, and it’s total BS: saying that one country “loses” money to another in private transactions between their peoples is like saying I “lose” money to Walmart because I buy groceries from it. Is either of these examples particularly pernicious, or are they just the garden-variety overstatements that the construction worker would roll his eyes at? I argue that it’s the first one—because Trump’s persona is all about misrepresenting facts, and when you couple that with a misunderstanding of a big issue such as trade, you get a person who lies about important things he doesn’t even understand. And he happens to be in such an important job that when he lies because he’s out of his depth, he comforts or roils markets, shocks other nations, and affects essentially the entire globe in some measurable way.