Time Magazine asked a pressing and disturbing question on its cover Thursday morning: “Is truth dead?”.
I thought long and hard about the unfortunate situation we’ve found ourselves in — Trump’s false claims on Twitter have seamlessly eradicated the border that previously existed between liars and truth-tellers.
Truth and trust go hand in hand. Regardless of whether you believe what Trump says, one must admit that after he assumed office, the country has revolved around him.
The wiretap claims, the staff shakeups, the size of his inauguration crowd, the ongoing war with the press, the golfing trips to Florida, the dwindling performance of his daughter’s clothing line — it’s all about Trump with a capital T. Truth has gone out the window.
He is a 70-year-old with a 14-year-old’s ego, he acts as if he knows everything, and, as Nancy Gibbs stated in her article ”When a President Can’t be Taken at his Word,” in Time Magazine, “shamelessness is not just a strength, it’s a strategy.”
To Trump, an apology is as fictional as a unicorn.
The worst part is that social and political scientists have proven that correcting incorrect information can prove to be detrimental. “The repetition of a false statement, even in the course of disputing it, often increases the number of people who believe it,” wrote Gibbs.
Take this article that ran on Politico in November: ”Trump’s baseless assertions of voter fraud called ‘stunning.’” The effect of this headline should be that people realize his voter fraud allegations are wrong, but people that always agree with Trump will simply see these three words: Trump. Voter fraud. It simply reinforces people’s existing beliefs.
The heart of the problem lies with the fact that his false claims are the ones that are being talked about the most. When Trump tweets a falsehood, TIME reported it was retweeted on average 28,550 times, as opposed to his other tweets, which average 23,945 times.
Those tweets that were the most false were quoted on television more than twice as often as Trump’s truthful tweets.
It all comes down to controversy. If a tweet isn’t controversial, people are more likely to glaze over it and consider it old news. But when Trump makes a claim out of left field, people are going to be talking about it. A lot.
The same thing can be said about the wiretapping claims among many other statements Trump has made, absent of truth.
To Trump, being proven false is just a precursor to being proved right. When a steadfast liar begins to honestly believe his own falsehoods, there’s no convincing him otherwise.
If truth is in fact dead, we better start working on a speedy resurrection because there’s no way this country can survive on such shaky grounds.
jlkarl@umail.iu.edu
