From the moment Donald Trump challenged the validity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, Mr. Trump has lied more frequently and egregiously than perhaps any other major figure in American political history. From the relatively trivial lie that began his administration (that 1.5 million people attended his inauguration) to the extremely consequential falsehood that ended it (that the 2020 election was stolen), his presidency was in large part defined by mendacity.
The constancy and brazenness of Mr. Trump’s lies can blind us to the fact that his opponents lie, too. Though she did not descend to the level of Mr. Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris did not strictly adhere to the truth at the presidential debate this month. Mr. Trump, she asserted, had said that there were “fine people” among the neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville seven years ago, an oft-repeated distortion of a statement Mr. Trump made at the time that nonetheless remains an article of faith among American liberals. She also deceptively claimed that Mr. Trump had said that there would be a “blood bath” if he was not elected when the original reference was to a loss of U.S. auto jobs.
Graver than Ms. Harris’s cynical mischaracterizations of Mr. Trump’s words was her assertion that “there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world — the first time this century.” This statement disregards the thousands of American troops deployed in the Middle East since the Oct. 7 attacks, not to mention the service members killed in Jordan in January’s drone attack. Despite these false statements, however, it was only Mr. Trump whom ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis tried to correct.
This highly selective fact-checking is indicative of the double standard that many in the media follow when dealing with Mr. Trump, a double standard usually justified by the supposedly awesome threat he poses to the country. Rather than respond to him as the egomaniacal mountebank he is, many of his opponents see in him an incipient dictator hellbent on destroying the 250-year-old American experiment in constitutional democracy. And because he presents such an extraordinary threat, this thinking goes, only extraordinary measures will suffice in stopping him.
Prominent among these measures is the campaign to suppress misinformation (false information whose purveyor believes it to be true) and disinformation (false information whose purveyor knows it to be false) — terms once used primarily to describe Russian influence operations against the West. The recent federal indictment of two Russians accused of funneling money to right-wing American social media influencers on behalf of the Kremlin-backed RT propaganda network is an example of this phenomenon, which poses a genuine threat to democratic societies around the world.
The conventional perception of misinformation and disinformation, however, began to change during the 2016 presidential campaign, when an analytical framework for understanding the malign activities of hostile foreign powers was appropriated by American political operatives to use against their domestic opponents. Much of what Mr. Trump and his supporters said was classified as disinformation, and tens of millions of Americans came to believe a baroque narrative positing that Mr. Trump had colluded with President Vladimir Putin of Russia to steal the 2016 election (itself, ironically, a form of disinformation promulgated by Mr. Trump’s opponents).
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