1/25/21
"We won this election and we won it by a landslide," said Donald Trump at his "Save America" rally on January 6, which incited the assault on the Capitol. This is Trump's "Big Lie," a brazen falsehood with momentous consequences. Trump's accusation that "radical left" Democrats stole his victory is certainly a whopper. But the focus on his Big Lie misses something fundamental about how propaganda works. A leader's Big Lie has no power and makes little sense on its own. It has traction only if the public has been fed many, many smaller lies. It relies on a larger network of falsehoods told by the leader and reinforced by his government officials and compliant media. The Big Lie works because it is part of an established alternate belief system -- an edifice of lies, assembled piece by piece. Trump, a leader of authoritarian intentions and tendencies, had disadvantages with respect to the foreign autocrats he so admires. He had no state media, like China's Xi Jinping. He could not rule by decree, like Hungary's Viktor Orbán. He had to govern and run for reelection in an open society with a relatively robust free press. Moreover, although he succeeded in making journalists into hate objects for many of his followers, he could not revoke or destroy the First Amendment. So Trump took a different tack, unleashing a barrage of disinformation common in authoritarian states.
This encouraged followers to believe that Trump's destiny was to stay in office, priming them for the moment when Trump's asserted that a second term was rightfully his. He told more than 30,000 documented lies in public on Twitter, at rallies and in interviews. If taken as an average, it would come out to 21 lies per day over his four-year term. Trump's claims to a unique competence to rescue America got an assist from a cadre of evangelical Christian preachers, authors, and government officials, former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders among them, who contended that he ruled by divine benediction -- that God installed him to do His will. The events of January 6 cannot be understood without this structure of blind belief and all the small lies that supported it. For his supporters, Trump was a victim of the "Deep State" and other enemies. Focusing only on the Big Lie misses the big picture. It fails to convey the scope and gravity of the institutionalized lying that was Trump's biggest weapon. And it obscures the way minds were worn down, day after day, by one lie after another after another. While Trump is now gone from the White House, millions of his supporters still cling fiercely to his lies. Each lie deserves our attention as we seek to combat the mass disinformation that threatens our democracy.
