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As the presidential candidates head into their first debate next week, Trump’s people should be happy. Their candidate, of course, is dragging around a sled loaded with politically toxic baggage: He’s a convicted felon; he was found liable for sexual abuse; he tried to incite an insurrection; his speeches include gibberish about sharks and a movie cannibal. He multiplies his own troubles at every turn, even undermining surrogates who keep trying to explain away his darker or weirder statements. And yet, against every rule of political physics, Trump is running even or perhaps pulling ahead of a reasonably successful incumbent.
But if Trump is doing so well, why is his campaign and its support system in right-wing media resorting to easily disproved lies? Joe Biden’s age has been a brutal factor in keeping his poll numbers low. The president is weaker of voice and stiffer of gait than he was even a few years ago, and more likely now to mangle a word or phrase. The GOP has its pick of examples to use to keep making that case, yet the party resorts to cheap tricks such as deceptive video editing.
Last week, for example, Biden was at the G7 meeting in Italy. The Republican National Committee released a video of him apparently wandering off from a group at a skydiving exhibition, like a confused grandpa looking for the van back to the senior-citizens home. The New York Post dutifully ran with the video. It looked bad—but as presented, it was a lie. Biden was turning to talk to a paratrooper just a few yards to his left.
The RNC video and the Post’s obedient amplification weren’t based on spin or interpretation. Someone had to have looked at that video of Biden in Europe and made the conscious decision to create a lie. Let’s just cut the frame right there so that Biden looks like he wandered off. By the time anyone figures it out, it won’t matter.
The video made the rounds, and maybe that’s all the RNC wanted. A lie, as the saying goes, gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. And, as I often point out, I am a grown-up who has worked with local and national politicians. I am fully aware that politics ain’t beanbag and dirty tricks are part of the game. But if your candidate is doing well, why take the risk? A party that thinks its candidate is in control doesn’t take the chance of pulling the spotlight away from the opponent, which is exactly what happens when campaign operatives get caught in a lie.
The campaign engaged in a similarly baffling move this past weekend, when Trump went to Detroit. The Trump courtier Kellyanne Conway went on Fox News to congratulate him for speaking to 8,000 people at a Black church. Trump did, in fact, speak at a Black church—but to a crowd of perhaps 100 or so mostly white people in a half-empty space that couldn’t hold 8,000 people even if seats were installed in the rafters and on the roof. (Its pastor gamely said the next day that he was surprised at the number of Black people who actually attended, considering that some had initially laughed at him when he approached them on the street about the event.)
So why not take the win, run the video of Trump with a Black pastor, and leave it at that? Why go for the big lie and then look foolish?
One possibility is that the Trump campaign is worried. Maybe Conway was just gilding the Trump lily, but MAGA world appears to be working overtime to make Trump and Biden seem indistinguishable and thus equivalently awful. Last week, Andrew Ross Sorkin reported on CNBC that top U.S. business leaders were concerned about Trump’s mental fitness after a meeting on June 13 with the former president. Several CEOs, according to Sorkin, said that Trump “was remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought,” and “was all over the map.”
Hours after the Trump story dropped, the New York Post ran an article that used almost identical language about Biden meeting with G7 leaders, featuring comments attributed to a “diplomatic insider” and an “attendee from a non-US delegation.”
Deceptively edited videos, nonexistent crowds, and No, your man is more senile than ours counterprogramming is not the sign of a confident campaign. But Trump’s team might also be doing these things because they work.
The Biden video—even if only the arguing over the provenance of the video itself—wrested attention away from yet another disturbing Trump rant about sharks. Conway was ridiculed for her Detroit comments, but the media response to the Trump event was all the campaign could ask for. Instead of publishing a headline like “Trump Speaks to a Small, Mostly White Audience of Loyalists in Black Church as His Campaign Lies About Crowd Size,” the Associated Press rolled out an article titled “Trump Blasts Immigrants for Taking Jobs as He Courts Voters at a Black Church, MAGA Event in Detroit.” CBS went with “Trump Hosts Roundtable at Detroit Church, Says Biden Has Been ‘Worst President for Black People.’”
If nonevents bolstered by outrageous falsehoods generate coverage like this, who could blame the Trump campaign for thinking that lying is merely a small frictional cost of getting great headlines? Trump’s people understand the power of the fast lie and slow correction, and they know, too, that the media are reflexively averse to reporting on one of the major candidates as an unstable felon who is flatly lying to the public. Don’t believe me about that “felon” part? Today, The New York Times ran the headline “Biden Campaign Ad Paints Trump as a Felon.” Britain’s Financial Times likewise wrote: “Joe Biden to Paint Donald Trump as ‘Unhinged’ Felon in $50mn Ad Campaign.”
“Paint”?
Someone at The New York Times must have caught up with this headline, because by midday, the story was retitled “Biden Campaign Ad Calls Attention to Trump’s Felon Status.” But that first draft was indicative of the deep reluctance in some quarters to talk about Trump accurately, as if this were still 2016 and Trump hadn’t yet shown that his flaws were more than mere speculation by his opponents.
The Trump campaign has seized on the essential truth that this election is about images and feelings rather than facts or policies. It is working to squeeze every vote it can out of its most extreme supporters by providing them with the high-octane Trumpiness they crave. But the campaign is also resorting to sometimes-desperate ploys in order to cover both candidates in a carefully formulated smog, hoping to obscure the differences between an old man who occasionally stumbles over his words and a nearly-as-old criminal who regularly wanders out of the gates of Fort Reality to go on a walkabout in the wilds of his unstable mind.
In the end, the Trump campaign has chosen the path of deception both because the weaknesses of its candidate demand it and because it’s a more reliable path to better media coverage and to winning over credulous and inattentive voters. Why bother telling the truth if lying works so well?
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