How Do You Debate a Serial Liar?
And what is it doing to American democracy?
--
I won’t go through a fact check of the second and last presidential debate. You can see for yourself here if you haven’t already.
Now political debates often include some exaggeration and misleading information, sometimes a misstep or error. It’s why the media has fact-checkers after every debate. And there were a few missteps or exaggerations from Joe Biden last night.
But President Trump has painted a picture of a world that is so vividly inaccurate, so outside of any reality, that our very democracy is at risk.
You can’t have a debate with someone who won’t tell the truth.
Immediately following the debate, Jack Tapper of CNN had this to say, “I mean, he did lie like Pinocchio.”
And CNN fact checker, Daniel Dale, told Wolf Blitzer the following.
“Biden was imperfect. There were at least a few false, misleading, or lacking-in-context claims from him. But for a fact-checker, you’re kind of sitting there with Biden occasionally you’re like, ‘Oh that’s wrong.’”
“With Trump, you’re like that ‘I Love Lucy’ episode in the chocolate factory, you don’t know which one to pick up because there’s so much. And so again with this president, we just see a constant barrage, incessantly, of false or misleading stuff.”
Undecided Americans looking for clarity on differences in policy issues would not have found any help last night.
You would think that the American people would hold such a liar accountable, but Trump has adeptly spun a web of falsehoods around the media itself.
His followers don’t believe the fact-checkers and they don’t believe journalists. He has taught them, anytime you see a piece of news that doesn’t fit your narrative, or makes you uncomfortable, you can safely declare, “Fake News” and move on.
And this strikes at the very heart of democracy itself. You can’t argue the difference in policies if you can’t agree on objective facts. When you’ve lost this, you’re now in the realm of propaganda.
This is how dictators do it. The people of North Korea have been told former dictator, Kim Jong-Il was born under a double rainbow, learned to walk at three weeks of age, and was a global fashion icon.
If this sounds outlandish and far from anything Americans are dealing with, think again. Our president tells us we are “rounding the corner on coronavirus” as we are recording record high levels of cases. How many times have we heard Dr. Anthony Fauci tell us, “the numbers don’t lie.”
No, the numbers don’t lie. And you can’t say the virus is going away when the evidence is screaming in our faces. Unless you paint your own reality and your followers buy it.
Trump also said during the debate that he was the “least racist person in the room.” Now I don’t know who all was in that room, but I’m not touching this one. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions here.
And this is the slippery slope we find ourselves on when a president routinely deals in lies.
Other presidents have been accused of lying, but once the accusations were proven false, they stopped the assertions. They were held accountable to the truth, and they accepted it. But Trump will tell the same falsehood over and over as if repeating it enough times will make it manifest into reality.
Watching the debate last night, I had a weird flash go through my head of Humpty Dumpty. Several times while Biden was speaking, Trump had a wide, closed mouth smile on his face. It brought to my mind an illustration of Humpty Dumpty from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a book I’ve read to my daughter many times.
It wasn’t just the grin that made me think of Humpty Dumpty. It’s Humpty Dumpty’s philosophy on life.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.” ― Lewis Carroll
I’m not the first person to think of Humpty Dumpty in relation to Trump. I googled it and found that Professor James P. Pfiffner, presidential and government expert, had the same thought in this article where he stated, “If there are no agreed upon facts, then it becomes impossible for people to make judgments about their government or hold it accountable.”
And there we are. We have no agreed upon facts. We had a debate where one person did not defend his policies but lied repeatedly throughout the night, creating his own fantasy world. It’s the same routine he has done the for past four years. The same routine he has done his entire life. It’s worked well for him in the past and he isn’t stopping now.
If his followers stumble across a fact-checking article that disproves his outlandish claims, they can cry, “Fake News” and continue with their day without any moral qualms.
We’re entering new territory here. And much like Alice, we are left to wonder how we ended up in a place where reality has become whatever you want it to be and words mean something different based on who is speaking them.
