When did it become okay to lie at will in American politics?

Lies, smears and even dirty tricks are nothing new in American politics, and when caught red-handed in a falsehood, politicians have traditionally been contrite in one way or another and often faced consequences. 

Think of President Nixon denying that anyone in the White House was involved in the Watergate break-in just after it was exposed by the Washington Post. Or President Johnson assuring American voters when he ran for president in 1964 that no U.S. troops would be sent to Vietnam while, as would later become clear, there were plans already in place for a dramatic escalation.

But the last few presidential elections, and the current one in particular, have been defined by a unique torrent of shameless disinformation that has landed in the form of bald-faced lies and fabrications that have their origin in foreign as well as domestic sources. By the estimation of election officials and experts in tracking disinformation, this presidential campaign far exceeds anything that has come before and what is most distressing is that the deceit comes with impunity.

So we are all left asking, “When did it become okay to lie at will in American politics?” And it seems this Election 2024 will be remembered as the tipping point of a new era of misinformation and disinformation in American politics. 

We live in what can be called a post-truth era, an idea I first began writing and speaking about in 2018 and which I was able to frame in a public speaking event at Boston College called the Lowell Lecture Series, where I pointed out that we find ourselves living in a world where facts matter less than feelings and when solid research can’t stand up to ideology.  

This struggle to define what is truth and the efforts to enshrine its pursuit as the highest calling for humanity goes back to the beginning of time. It dates to the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle and continues through the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament and then to the Enlightenment thinkers and more modern philosophers and writers like George Orwell. And truth has not always won, think of the witch trials in 17th Century Salem, MA or the lives ruined by McCarthyism in the 1950s during the Red Scare. The history of defining and defending the truth is in many ways a throughline of our shared history.

But what is unique and pernicious about this moment is that even if we know something is false, it is suddenly okay not just to state it, but then to defend it.  The New York Times spelled this out convincingly on Thursday in a frontpage article titled “Voters Strain Under Deluge of Untruths,”: which told the story of how the aftermath of hurricanes in the South unleashed conspiracy theories and physical threats against aid workers on the scene. 

The story also covers how vice presidential candidate JD Vance popularized a racist fiction that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were hunting down pet dogs and cats and eating them. When confronted with the facts that this was not substantiated, Vance doubled down saying that he was reflecting the concerns of voters in that area, even if they are not actual facts. If you stop to ponder that, it is a horrifying dialogue in which one lie begets another. 

In the same vane, Trump has succeeded in repeating his unfounded allegations that the election of President Joe Biden involved voter fraud so many times that it has gained traction in this election more than in the last one even though every one of the dozen court cases brought by supporters of Trump claiming voter fraud has been established in court and in government inquiries and from the testimony of election officials to be utterly untrue. There are no facts to support the claim. It has been dubbed “The Big Lie.” 

Still, the lies gain momentum through social media and then are further accelerated through AI. So how do we as a country and as a world put the breaks on this? How do we counteract the lies, and the drumbeat of disinformation and misinformation? One way is to keep doing the hard work of finding the truth, and journalists are our eyes and ears on the ground to do the fact-checking. 

A paragon of this effort is PolitiFact which the award-winning journalist Bill Adair, the former Washington Bureau Chief for the Tampa Bay Times, founded in 2007 which rates statements made by politicians from true to mostly true to mostly false to “pants on fire.” In an interview at the launch of his new book, “Beyond The Big Lie,” Adair has spelled out this era of lying and the pervasive spirit that lying is okay: “It has never been worse.” 

Pointing out that all political parties have had elected officials who lie and that the tendency to do so – and to stand by the lie – has become a signature of Donald Trump and the Republican Party that nominated him and his running mate Vance. “You have a convergence of a politician and a party that believes they can benefit from lying,” said Adair. 

While Adair has had an extraordinary impact on the national stage, there are local journalists who are fact checking and exposing the falsehoods of local politicians and government officials every day. Their work is what holds the country together and it is vital to our democracy which relies on the idea that there are discernible truths that need to be unearthed and offered to communities so that they can have a shared set of facts upon which to make good decisions.

The Haitian migrant’s case is a clear example of the corrosion caused by misinformation, but also of the impact that journalism can have in countering it. In the days after Vance started spreading lies about the migrants, there were at least 33 bomb threats in the city, which led to the cancellation of events and the disruption of life in the city. Local reporters responded fast to Vance’s allegations, but had to work around the clock to keep up with the deluge of misinformation, as described by the Columbia Journalism Review “Jessica Orozco, a News-Sun staffer, was the first to report—within a half hour of Vance’s Saturday post on X—that local police couldn’t find any recent evidence of pets being stolen or eaten. She’s since written nearly two dozen articles for the paper, including one on how local leaders have responded to the situation by rejecting falsehoods and urging residents to focus on actual challenges presented by the population influx, such as increased competition for housing, school funding, and healthcare.”

The crisis in local journalism, and the distressing fact that as many as 2.5 local newspapers have been closing every week, should be alarming to all of us who care about truth and why the work of our service program Report for America is so vitally important. Next week, I will be writing from Michigan where we have reporters on the ground in one of the most hotly contested battleground states. I will be there with them, seeing how they are doing in the local trenches in the war to expose lies and defend truth.

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