Wake Up Media! Here's a Bullshit Detector for Trump 2.0

“Facts don’t cease to exist because they are denied.” —Aldous Huxley

Despite all his lies, crimes, impeachments, bad polls as well as a scandal-free opponent and a strong economy, Donald Trump defeated his opponent by, among other reasons, exploiting polemical sleights-of-hand. Witnessing the legacy corporate media cling to its “both-sides” template in the face of his rhetorical war was akin to watching a video-game battle between muskets and drones.

Like Trump, cold-blooded thinkers from Catherine the Great to Machiavelli have understood how in political life the “first lie” usually wins and there’s a “liars dividend” since normal people tend to believe what they’re told by authorities, especially when it’s consistent with their “confirmation bias.” (Supporters of Mussolini's fascism had a phrase that simplified matters: “Il Duce is always right.”)

In this context, disinformation and gaslighting spread like hot embers to dry forests in 80 mph winds. Sadly, it appears to only be getting worse: next day fact-checking and letters-to-the-editor are certainly desirable but no match for invisible algorithms, A.I. content, corporate-owned media, and reactionary tech bros who can reach a billion people in an instant. Has there ever been a faster-rising or more influential press lord than Elon Musk?

Biden's farewell warning against a growing "oligarchy" of political/economic/technological power will likely endure as a benchmark to measure Trump's yearning to be a "Dictator on Day One" (as if he'd stop 24 hours later).

In this hinge of history, can the media build a new template to hold the new billionaire bullies accountable or will it merely be deja vu in Trump 2.0?

Admittedly, there’s little expectation that the emerging Trump-Musk duet and their fellow oligarchs will alter their impulse to replace facts with fiction as a way to advance their financial ends and ideological aims. As the Number One's in the world in their respective categories, the tandem of these two strongmen understandably believe that might-makes-right for them. Similarly, it’s nearly psychologically impossible to sway hard-core MAGAs who merge their identities with those two, those who would insist that D.E I. caused the Los Angeles fires of recent weeks and that reverse racism (whatever that is) is worse than the abhorrent racism they've espoused.

Still, after the two national candidates in 2024 were separated by only 1.5% of the popular vote (a “massive landslide” it was not), there are small but potentially decisive percentages of swing voters—traditional Republicans, anti-Trump independents, and non-voting Democrats and progressives—who can make tip the scales in 2026 and 2028 between an America in the grip of a new class of billionaire bullies and one that reverts to a nation governed by and for the people.

The first step is for traditional executives, editors, journalists—as well as fretful Democrats in 26 purple congressional districts—to be armed with blunt language that was largely sidelined in the 2024 general election yet could disrupt Team Trump's propaganda and put him on the political ropes. After writing three books on Trump, what follows are eight types of his “twistications” (Jefferson’s word) and how participants in this struggling democracy can decode them as we enter the next Trumplandia of media and politics.

1. Assertions & Adjectives. Just recycling battle-tested assertions and adjectives no matter how ridiculous sure beats researching the facts. His most popular lines— “The Biden Crime Family…it was a perfect phone call…’tariff’ is the most beautiful word…January 6th was a day of love” —can only work if your target audience is as credulous as the jurors in the cult classic Idiocracy.

Which Trump understands. He simply told a confidant after his political escape from the Access Hollywood tape, “You just tell them and they believe it. They just do.” And when former aide Anthony Scaramucci asked why he lied so much at a rally, he replied, “Look, a billion people now know me and half hate my guts. But the other half are a great market for my brands, properties, product, campaigns.”

Two extremely effective examples of assertions passing as evidence are “Fake Media” and “Liberal.” They have become enormously powerful epithets for those who lack the time, ability, or motive to think independently.

Whenever reports show that the GOP is doing something scandalous, Trump just utters the near-magical words “Fake Media” to erase any controversy. Trump once admitted to Leslie Stahl that he "constantly berates Fake News to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”

As for “Liberal” (aka, CRT, DEI, Deep State, Woke), it too can paralyze the cognitive abilities of MAGA audiences. Decades later, journalists—and defensive Democrats too—should no longer turn the other cheek when hearing this polemical kill shot. “So which of these ‘liberal’ policies would you reverse—Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare, the Freedom of information Act, environmental protection laws, labor laws, health safety rules and agencies—all were passed by liberals and opposed by conservatives?” It’s past time to re-focus such conversations away from abstractions like "Big Government" to specifics like "whether government should make sure that your children don’t burn to death in a low-speed rear-end collision."

2. Playing on Fears. Trump told Bob Woodward, “Real power is—I don’t really want to use the word—fear.” Comedian Larry Elmore put it best when he joked, or appeared to joke, that “Trump is our FDR since the only thing he has is fear itself.”

This goes well beyond the normal political anxiety of, say, losing an election or a job. Chief of Staff Mark Meadows presumably now regrets going along with his boss’s orders on January 6 because “I was afraid of being yelled at.” Trump now routinely deploys fear of actual violence to get his way.

For example, when rebutting rival Hillary Clinton in 2016, he said that some of his supporters might have to use “their Second Amendment rights.” After he blamed the FBI for investigating him with a lawful warrant, one enthusiast shot up a Bureau office and was killed. And when irked in court, he personally assailed judges, their families and clerks who then invariably were subjected to scores of death threats. Hence the gag-orders imposed on Trump as if he were a vengeful mob boss.

Sen. Mitt Romney admitted as much when some fellow Republicans privately acknowledged that they voted to acquit Trump during two impeachment trials because they were afraid for themselves and their families.

3. Big Lies. What percent of sentient adults don’t think that he relentlessly lies? That even includes many followers who shrug and say, “Well, they all do it.”

But no one in American history has remotely lied so voluminously or bigly as Donald J. Trump. The Washington Post famously documented over 30,000 lies or falsehoods in only his first term, including 22 per day in his final year.

Then there are the Big Lies on the Goebbels’ scale, like repeatedly implying that Obama was a foreigner, Trump won the 2020 election because of invisible voter fraud, and Biden’s DOJ was behind multiple indictments in several jurisdictions around the country. Up to now, such falsehoods merely resulted in news stories burying the mild admonition that articles that “lacking evidence, Trump today claimed that…” Something more riveting will be needed this time around.

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ” – George Orwell

4. False equivalence – WhatAbout-ism. Trump can turn any criticism into an attack-line if he can find some Democratic example in the past say hundred years. So when he rejected the outcome of the 2020 election and 139 House Members refused to certify the results, Trumpers indignantly replied, “neither did Hillary Clinton…and Democrats also refused certification.” Except that Clinton did concede the day after her loss. And while a few Democrats did question the results and begged questions of possible misconduct, they had no expectation of actually blocking certification.

The difference between these two examples could not be more stark.

5. Cherry-picking. When data is overwhelmingly against Trump—say the polar ice caps are melting faster than predicted and 97 percent of scientists agree that current trends could lead to ecocide—not a problem. Trump calls it a “hoax” or finds one study alleging that 300,000 years ago the climate was just as hot. That is, isolate one black swan to imply all are black.

Or if too many swastikas appear on signs at a rally where white protestors chant “Jews will not replace us,” Sean Hannity can announce that “Democrat Bob Byrd was a Klansman.” Which was true…100 years ago when he was in his twenties and before he recanted to become a renowned senator. Indeed, one party now contains not all but most American white supremacists and it’s not the Democratic Party.

6. Anti-Science. Because the U.S.S.R. believed in the perfect “Soviet Man,” Stalin embraced biologist Lysenko’s ridiculous view that learned traits can be inherited. And the Kremlin delayed responding to the lethal Chernobyl meltdown because they thought it couldn’t happen.

A president of course needn’t be a scientist—indeed we’ve never elected one. But they should ideally be open-minded and resilient when national emergencies strike. That means according to the scientific method when facts lead to conclusions rather than conclusions leading to “facts.”

With each recent year being “the hottest ever,” Team Trump’s political hostility to rapid climate change is like denying the comet in Don’t Look Up, as the calamitous Los Angels fires demonstrated. Vaccine denialism too was once a fringe view. But MAGAs resistance to vaccines during Covid-19 caused many needless deaths, with more likely to come if RFK Jr. is confirmed as HHS Secretary.

7. Projections. Trump’s greatest homage to Goebbels was embracing his own rhetorical maneuver to “accuse the other side of that which you are guilty of.” Like when Trump accused Robert Mueller of ”treason” and Democrats of ”election interference” when they brought indictments against Trump for “election interference.” And after Biden last year laid out a bill of particulars on how Trump was a dire threat to democracy, the latter claimed that “Joe’s abuses of power will go down as among the most shameful, corrupt and depraved chapters in all of American history.”

The goal here is not to actually win a policy debate but to get inattentive voters to throw up their hands.

8. Rhetorical Questions. Few politicians under fire can resist the age-old device of planting a false premise in the form of a rhetorical question in order to mislead audiences to a wrong conclusion.

So candidate Trump urged Black voters to support him in 2016 because “what could go wrong?” Or Tucker Carlson wondered “why should I not side with Putin” during his genocidal invasion of Ukraine? Donald Jr. asked after January 6th: “Do we really want to pretend it’s not a false flag?” Vivek Ramaswamy questioned whether “there were any federal agents on those planes on 9/11…I’m not saying there were but it’s a fair question.”

No it’s not.

Historically, bi-partisan debates saw exaggerations but rarely blatant falsehoods…until Reagan’s “Reign of Error” came along in 1981 (that being the title of a book on the subject by this author.)

Today, however, we’re in a different dimension as Trump normalizes disinformation and falsehoods. Like the difference between comfortably warm and life-threatening boiling water, it’s a difference not merely in degree but kind. A functioning Democracy can survive a leader and party that occasionally deploys hyperbole, tells “stretchers” (Twain), or even lies. (Ike certainly lied over the U-2 incident, which was an exception then justified by the stakes.)

But since legislation often requires compromises between two major parties, a democracy cannot survive when one side believes that it can get away with creating a fabulous alternate universe that infected some recent confirmation hearings chaired by Senate Republicans.

The American media understands this when it applies to, say, an authoritarian like Putin but has, with exceptions, refused to assume the same about Trump despite all the supporting evidence. Yet in the insight of Yale language professor David Bromwich, “the presentation of factual truth matters because we have no substitute world to live in when this world is gone.”

How can the Fourth Estate adjust to another post-truth era—one even more vicious and sophisticated that the first? Will they even attempt a new playbook? Already, MSNBC is strengthening its prime-time lineup for Trump Redux. The Washington Post, meanwhile, seems ready to embrace anticipatory genuflection due to the business conflicts of owner Jeff Bezos. At "The "Paper of Record," New York Times publisher and executive editor, A.G. Sultzburger and Joseph Kahn, have given no indication of changing their model of merely being a conveyor belt of Trumpian disinformation in the face of the most radical revanchists in American history.

For now, independent news outlets, podcasts, and writers at some platforms are objecting to giving a standard “benefit of the doubt” to government officials who don’t deserve it. And new models of non-profit news and tax-supported platforms—we subsidize farmers because making food is urgent even if not always profitable—so why not 'food for thought' as we enter this unprecedented four year stress test?

Are our major civic institutions ready to acquiesce to Trump and his band of oligarchs who blithely claim that disinformation is "mere speech," that 1,400 people convicted of a violent riot on January 6 are now "hostages" and that the catastrophic L.A. fires were the result of D.E.I. and Mayor Karen Bass' trip to Ghana?

January 20th is a good time for our major media to understand how a fascist oligarchy—of the kind we now see in Russia and Hungary, and in Italy and Germany in the early Thirties—could allow neoliberal capitalism to purchase democracy to write the next (if not the last) chapter of our nearly 250-year experiment in majority rule.

Surely smart publishers have learned lessons from their failure to hold Trump accountable in the nine years since he came down that elevator, and understand the insane irony that a small country born in reaction to a powerful monarchy would voluntarily accept a home-grown version 248 years later.

Who will emerge as the Keynes of journalism to explain that, when it comes to truth, might can’t make right?