The truth about Trump's tower of lies

On the issue of health care, Trump issued a vague promise to “get something done,” notably stopping short of endorsing the bill drawn up by congressional Republicans, perhaps mindful of the Public Policy Polling survey published the same day showing just 24% support for the legislation drafted to replace Obamacare.

He assailed a federal judge in Hawaii, Derrick K. Watson, who had blocked his travel ban limiting immigration from six Muslim-majority countries. “This ruling makes us look weak,” he said, adding that he would take the case to the Supreme Court. Polls show a roughly even split for and against the new immigration restrictions, unless one discounts surveys which don't support your own political position, as Trump does. “Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election,” he's tweeted.

Outside the bubble, it has been another tough week for Trump’s embattled presidency. Sebastian Gorka, a top national security adviser to Trump, had to deny reports that he was a member of and took an oath of loyalty to a Hungarian Nazi-allied group. If the claims are true it could have serious implications for the immigration status of Gorka – who was born in the UK, lived in Hungary, ?and became a US citizen in 2012.

As the health care bill came under attack from left and right, the travel ban was shot down, and Senate Republicans threatened to block Trump’s nominee for Deputy Attorney General until he produces evidence to support his claim that President Obama tapped his phones during the campaign. Absurd claims that Obama used the UK's GCHQ have been shot to pieces by the British intelligence community.

On Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, Trump implied that he got the idea Obama bugged his office from the New York Times (which he's ironically described as a source of 'fake news'), and then claimed to have proof - “some very good stuff” - that would be revealed at a later date. The chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, both Republicans, said there is no indication Trump Tower was targeted by the FBI.

Two leaked pages of Trump’s 2005 tax return, over-hyped by MSNBC presenter Rachel Maddow, provided a welcome distraction. The fact that only the front and back page from a single year were left in financial journalist David Cay Johnston’s postbox, showing $153 million income and $36.5 million tax paid (but not the sources of the income) led Johnston to speculate that Trump had leaked the return - stamped Client Copy - himself.

On Fox, this was reported as FAKE NEWS (all caps) and proof that the left’s insinuations that Trump pays no tax are unfounded. Next to a graphic declaring “NBC’s Corporate Jihad,” the president’s friend Sean Hannity railed against “the alt-left, propaganda, destroy Donald Trump media” and its underhand tactics (such as publishing a tiny, favourable portion of a federal income tax return, of the kind all other presidents since Richard Nixon have voluntarily provided).

Trump has used the term ‘fake news’ eighteen times on Twitter since the election, hi-jacking a term coined to describe conspiracy theory sites and employing it against the “dishonest” and “failing” mainstream press. White House press conferences and briefings have been given over to right wing bloggers and Christian broadcasting networks, ignoring and effectively shutting out journalists who strategist Stephen Bannon, formerly of the far-right website Breitbart, refers to as “the opposition party”.

Conservative talk radio host John Ziegler said this was the culmination of a campaign to discredit the press, in response to liberal bias. “For decades, talk radio - and I was part of this - has effectively educated, and now I would say brainwashed, a huge portion of the conservative base in this country to not believe anything that the mainstream news media says.” In a Gallup poll last September, only 14% of the Republicans surveyed said they trust the media.

“Conservatives are on a drug binge right now,” added Ziegler. “It feels good. In the early stages of getting on drugs very few people are thinking that they’re making a bad choice, but inevitably it ends up with you vomiting in the foetal position in the gutter. And that will eventually happen here.”

In the echo chamber, untroubled by fact-checkers, lies gain traction. Some 67% of the Trump voters surveyed by Public Policy Polling last December said unemployment increased under President Obama, 73% believed anti-Trump protests were bankrolled by George Soros and 51% thought the “Bowling Green massacre,” a fictitious terror attack dreamed up by Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, really happened.

“Factual belief is subservient to policy preference,” said Professor Thomas Wood, a political scientist at Ohio State University. “There’s really no attitudinal consequence for the vast majority of Americans being misinformed on questions like the prevalence of crime or illegal immigrants voting.”

“People’s partisan loyalty is so intense,” said Wood’s research partner, George Washington University Professor Ethan Porter. “And sometimes this partisan loyalty is going to lead people to espouse positions at odds with empirical evidence.”

Professor Brian Schaffner, of the University of Massachusetts, and Samantha Luks, managing director of scientific research at YouGov, showed Trump supporters two photographs: one of the inauguration and another of Barack Obama’s much more crowded swearing-in. Some 15% said the image with the large empty spaces contained more people.

“Of Trump’s voters, it’s actually the most interested in politics and the most educated who make that assessment,” Luks said. “They might have heard Spicer’s statement [claiming Trump’s inauguration drew the largest audience ever] and already seen the pictures and are fighting back.” Political scientists call this expressive responding.

The American Health Care Act will test the limits of this loyalty. Analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the New York Times found that older Trump supporters living in rural areas would be among the hardest hit by the switch from Obamacare to its Republican replacement, with many due to receive $5,000 per year less in tax subsidies.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that if the legislation is passed, 14 million more people will lack health insurance next year, 21 million by 2020 and 24 million by 2026. On Fox, Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called for the CBO to be abolished, and OMB Director Mick Mulvaney said the estimates are bunk. “Go find the 55-year old person who is on ObamaCare right now and ask them if they can afford to go to the doctor - they will tell you, without exception, that they can’t and they know that our program will give that to them,” he claimed.

Finding people earning too much to qualify for Medicaid but too poor to afford health insurance is not hard. Newspapers are filled with stories of Trump supporters who depend on coverage they have gained under the Affordable Care Act. The president has sworn, repeatedly, that his health plan will cover everybody: “You're going to end up with great healthcare for a fraction of the price. And that's going to take place immediately after we go in. Fast Quick."

This is a promise he cannot keep without introducing single-payer healthcare (an idea he has flirted with but Republicans will not countenance). Will it also turn out to be a lie with political consequences? As fiscal conservatives denounced the bill as too timid, Trump doubled down on his impossible pledge. “If we’re not going to take care of the people, I’m not signing anything,” he told Carlson.

Trump’s outline budget proposal, released on Thursday, also slashes government programmes and grants his supporters rely on. For instance, cutting $2.6 billion from the Environmental Protection Agency means the end of the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative that has created tens of thousands of Rust Belt jobs while addressing the region’s toxic post-industrial legacy. Eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts and cutting funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is a slap at coastal liberals but will hurt small museums and community radio stations most.

The Appalachian Regional Commission, an economic development programme set up to create jobs and invest in infrastructure projects in a dozen states, is gone too, as is $715 million in Community Block Grant funding aimed at reducing poverty and revitalising low-income communities.

Free breakfasts at school for poor children and Meals On Wheels for the elderly have been deemed wasteful spending. The 5.7 million people who depend on the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program will just have to find some money, cut back on other essentials or be cold next winter.

“One of the questions we asked was can we really continue to ask a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mom in Detroit to pay for these programs? The answer was no,” said Mulvaney. "We can ask them to pay for defence, and we will, but we can't ask them to continue to pay for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting."

If Trump's lies were true - if democracy was compromised by millions of undocumented immigrants voting, if the crime rate was the highest it has been for half a century, if terrorist attacks did go unreported - then cutting all these programmes to pay for a $54 billion increase in military spending and $2.8 billion in enhanced border enforcement might almost make sense. The only problem is the lies are lies, not truth. Trump’s lies “annihilate truth,” in the words of Russian chess champion turned dissident Garry Kasparov, but in the short term they prepare the ground for unpopular policies that require voters to make sacrifices.

The GOP health bill contains an average tax cut of $37,000 per year for the richest 1% of Americans. If Trump’s tax reform, due later this spring, looks anything like the plan in his manifesto, it will also disproportionately benefit the wealthiest. The non-partisan Tax Policy Centre estimates that it will blow a $6.2 trillion hole in federal revenues over a decade. More cuts in services are inevitable. Bigger lies will be required to distract from them.

In a Quinnipiac poll released last month, six in ten Republicans said mass voter fraud is a problem - suggesting Trump’s evidence-free claims of non-citizens being bussed to polling stations, endlessly backed up on conservative networks, had an effect. On National Public Radio, Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes famously declared: “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts." If the president says it, for millions of supporters it is automatically true.