When Steve Benen’s new book on Republican disinformation was published in August, it quickly shot to the number 10 spot on The New York Times Best Sellers list. It remains on the list for a second week, although the Gray Lady has yet to review it, nor has The Washington Post, which denies it some of the elite conversational buzz it richly deserves despite its brisk sales.
That’s too bad. Benen, a producer of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, pays homage to George Orwell in Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past. (The protagonist of the famed novel 1984, Winston Smith, a drone worker in the dystopian and totalitarian Ministry of Truth, is part of the legions erasing the past just as Josef Stalin’s propagandists airbrushed Leon Trotsky’s image from Politboro photos. A contributing editor of the Washington Monthly, where he was the principal contributor to the “Political Animal” blog for four years, 2008-12, Benen brings the erudition and breeziness of his mentor, Maddow, to this slender but richly informed volume—less than 200 pages before copious footnotes.
The author’s main point is that all politicians try to frame historical events in a flattering or damning light, especially bygone eras. Hence, we’re treated to fights over the long ago, whether America indeed originated in 1619 versus 1776 or if the 1960s were ultimately good or bad for the nation.
The Donald Trump era is different than these battles over the past because it represents an assault on recent history. “Rewriting events from the recent past requires a different kind of audacity and ambition,” Benen wisely notes, “At issue are events most Americans saw and remember… events from the last few years that people have lived through and experienced firsthand.”
So, when Trump insisted that he won his 2020 reelection bid, it represented a wholesale threat to our system of government. It led to his failed legal efforts to remain in the White House and the violent January 6 disruption of the electoral vote count. Peddling the lie that the Capitol riot was a primarily peaceful assemblage and that those serving sentences deserve pardons adds proof to Benen’s central notion that manipulation of the recent past is distinctly dangerous, different than gauzy debates about the Founders, and threatening to us all. When significant majorities of Republicans believe Democrats stole the election, the lie goes from a risible claim to a severe threat. Would Trump even be the GOP nominee in 2024, were it not for over 70 percent of Republicans believing he won in 2020?
There’s no shortage of Trumpian lies for Benen to chronicle. They range from absurd claims (I built the wall) to absurd and contradictory claims (Elect me again so I can finish the wall). The lies require not just ego but mendacious manipulations of fact, for instance, the repeated airing of that video of ballots being “stolen” in Michigan.
Trump’s pathological need to lie would be a historical oddity rather than a democratic threat had it not become normalized. For Benen, the enablers are essential. The familiar right-wing echo chamber of conservative news outlets more committed to Trump than truth is, of course, one element. But the paroxysms of a Republican Party that supplicates itself to the needs of one man is the other key. The transformation of J. D. Vance, who once fretted Trump could become “America’s Hitler,” only to become his running mate and ultimate wingman, is the most obvious example. Or take the pirouettes of Senator Lindsey Graham, who called Trump “xenophobic” and “racist” before he clinched the 2016 Republican presidential nomination and then fawned over him only to seemingly break with him decisively on the night of January 6 in an impassioned floor speech but then returned to his lickspittle ways. Simone Biles is not capable of such flips.
In the Dominion case, we saw how Fox News promulgated a lie that the company’s voting machines were somehow behind a fictitious result in the 2020 elections. Top Fox personalities like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham said one thing in private text messages and quite another to their audience. News Corporation paid dearly to settle the case.
Wisely, Benen doesn’t offer a ten-point plan for pushing back against Trumpian-style lies. He urges journalists, educators, and citizens to stand for the truth in the hope that, in time, the power of fabrication will erode. “Recognizing misinformation campaigns is a key element of defeating them…Like a magic trick that becomes less impressive after an audience knows how it’s done, voters are less likely to believe rewritten stories once they’re exposed as part of a pathological sham.”
I think that’s right. Eventually, lies wear thin, which is why the Stalinism that threatened the world and that inspired Orwell’s 1984 (along with Nazi totalitarianism) couldn’t last forever. Truth has a way of prevailing.
Benen doesn’t see a left-liberal parallel to the Trumpian fog machine, and I agree with that. There isn’t the same infrastructure to support it. Air America Radio, the great liberal hope of the George W. Bush era, which launched Maddow’s rising star, is now a memory, and it was not a lie machine. MSNBC is liberally slanted but does not engage in wholesale fabrication. When it makes mistakes, and those errors are pointed out, it does not willfully repeat them, which makes it legit and different from the more notorious conservative outlets.
Still, the desire to be told comforting stories is profoundly human. It transcends politics, which is how plenty of Democratic politicians could say one day that Joe Biden can prevail in November and then be immensely relieved that he’s off the ticket. That’s not a carefully orchestrated lie like Trump referring to the January 6 rioters as patriots or selling the con that a conspiracy so immense (to paraphrase Joe McCarthy) stole the election, but neither is it radical candor. While Democrats at large were quick to tell pollsters Biden was too old to be on the ticket, many elected Democrats kept their doubts to themselves that is until his CNN debate performance—less a series of gaffes than a televised medical incident—acted like truth serum on the Democratic political and donor class. It’s crucial for Democrats not to read Ministry of Truth with hubris but with the self-knowledge that the sin of deception and the sin of self-deception are both universal. But it’s also crucial not to engage in both-sidesism. Democrats eventually accepted an unpleasant truth about their admired candidate. Republicans, save for a few brave ones, have not.
Benen’s fine book is a must-read in the Trump era. The sheer compendium of the 45th president’s lies and the psychoses/neuroses required to tell them at a machine gun clip is worth keeping at hand in print, although the Maddow-narrated audiobook is also good. But lying is human nature, something we all do consciously. Some fibs like “I love your mother’s cooking” are innocent and politesse. Some are self-serving and immoral: I’m looking for Nicole’s killer. The question is whether we have norms and institutions to keep political lies from mortally wounding our politics. We’ll find out in a few weeks, and Benen’s fact-based bestseller will be there, a reliable guide in turbulent times.
