What You Can Do About Trump’s Escalating Lies

robertreich:

As the political season heats up,
Trump is ramping up his lies through his three amplifiers: Fox News, rallies,
and Twitter.

According to The Fact
Checker’s database, the average daily rate of Trump’s false or misleading claims is climbing.

The problem isn’t just the number
or flagrancy of the lies – for example, that Putin and the Russians didn’t intervene
in the 2016 election on behalf of Trump, or that the Mueller investigation is
part of a Democratic plot to remove him.

And it’s not just that the lies
are about big, important public issues – for example, that immigrants commit
more crimes than native-born Americans, or trade wars are harmless.

The biggest problem is the lies aren’t subject to the filters traditionally applied to presidential
statements – a skeptical press, experts who debunk falsehoods, and respected
politicians who publicly disagree.

The word “media” comes from the
term “intermediate” – that is, to come between someone who makes the news and
the public who receives it.

But Trump doesn’t hold press
conferences. He doesn’t meet in public with anyone who disagrees with him. He denigrates the mainstream press. And he shuns experts. 

Instead, his lies go out to tens
of millions of Americans every day unmediated.

TV and radio networks simply rebroadcast his rallies, or portions of them.

At his most recent rally in Great
Falls, Montana, Trump made 98 factual statements.
According to the Washington Post’s fact checkers, 76 percent of them were
false, misleading or unsupported by evidence.

For example, Trump claimed
that “winning the Electoral College is very tough for a
Republican, much tougher than the so-called ‘popular vote,’ where people vote
four times, you know.”

The claim ricocheted across the
country even though countless studies have shown that Trump’s claims of
widespread voter fraud and abuse are simply not borne out by the facts.

Meanwhile, over 50 million
Americans receive his daily tweets, which are also brimming with lies. 

Recently, for example, Trump tweeted that Democrats were responsible for his administration’s policy
of separating migrant families at the border (they weren’t), and that “crime in
Germany is way up” because of migration (in fact, it’s down).

Around 6 million Americans
watch Fox News each day and relate what they see and hear to their friends and
relations.

Fox News is no longer
intermediating between the public and Trump. Fox News is Trump. Trump takes many of his lies from Fox News, and Fox News amplifies Trump’s lies. 

Fox News’s Sean Hannity is one of
Trump’s de facto top advisers. Trump has
just appointed Bill Shine, the former number two at Fox News, as his deputy
chief of staff for communications.

No democracy can function under
a continuous bombardment of unmediated lies.

So what are we to do, other than
vote November 6 to constrain Trump?

First, boycott Fox News’s major
sponsors, listed here. Vote with your wallet and starve the
beast. Get others to join you.

Second, attend Trump’s rallies,
as distasteful as this may be. You’re entitled to attend. He is, after all, the
president of the entire country.

Organize and mobilize large
groups to attend with you. Once there, let your views about his lies be heard
and seen by the press. You can find out when and where his rallies will occur here.

Third, sign up for his tweets, and
respond to his lies with the simple: “b.s.” You can sign up here.

Fourth, write to Twitter and tell its executives to stop enabling Trump’s lies. Its contact information is here. 

In addition, as the Times’ Farhad Manjoo suggested recently, Twitter’s employees should be encouraged to
make a ruckus – as did Amazon workers who pushed the firm to stop selling
facial recognition services to law enforcement agencies, and Google employees
who pressured Google not to renew a Pentagon contract for artificial
intelligence.  

Twitter defines its mission as
providing a “healthy public conversation.” Let them know that demagoguery isn’t
healthy.

Your vote on November 6 is the key,
of course.

But as the political season heats
up, Trump’s lies are heating up, too. And they will sway unwary voters.

So you need to be active now, before
Election Day – on behalf of the truth.