These days, witnessing the administration’s never-ending cruelty at the border, the shenanigans of a White House caught red-handed in attempted bribery in Ukraine, and the disarray of this country’s foreign policy, I feel like I’m seeing a much-scarier remake of a familiar old movie. The cast of characters and the headlines are different, but the thinking underlying it all is, in many ways, eerily reminiscent of what we as a nation experienced during the early years of the Global War on Terror, particularly when it comes to the interactions between the White House and the public. As then, so today, there is distrust, there are conflicting facts, and there is little in the way of a widely agreed upon narrative about what’s happening, no less how to interpret those events.
The most blatant attack on facts comes in the form of the unabashed lying of President Donald Trump, who obfuscates and changes his many stories with impressive regularity. By this October, after almost 1,000 days in office, according to the Washington Post’s Fact Checker’s database, he had made 13,435 false or misleading claims. He had lied about immigration, the stock market, the impact his sanctions and tariffs were having on the American economy, U.S. troop withdrawals from the Middle East, the size of his crowds, and even the weather, which, of course, is just the beginning of a far longer list.