Former shadow Foreign Secretary thinks we’re living in the post-truth era

Marc Nozell, Flickr

Before the election, President Obama spoke with Bill Maher about the “balkanization” of the media, arguing that in the US facts-based news is at the risk of being eclipsed by opinion-driven narratives. He lamented the “environment where everything’s contested, [and] where nothing is true”, wishing instead for a news paradigm grounded in truth where people across the political spectrum agree on the facts and the problems and debate how to solve them.

President-elect Trump disagrees.

The Donald has always had a colourful relationship with the truth which he terms ‘truthful hyperbole’. But that is itself a lie: ‘The Art of the Deal’ ghostwriter Tony Schwartz coined the term to make Trump’s compulsive lying more palatable to readers. Schwartz remembered Trump lying about “how much he had paid for something, or what a building he owned was worth, or how much one of his casinos was earning when it was actually on its way to bankruptcy.” Schwartz isn’t a lone accuser; there are countless examples of Trump’s dishonesty from his mogul days to the presidential debates themselves.

Debuting a political career that would promote dozens of fringe conspiracy theories to the forefront of America, Trump took the birtherism movement mainstream in 2008. He has since claimed that Obama and Clinton founded ISIS, that Obama is a Muslim, that the election was rigged and more. Trump surrogate Ben Carson has gone as far as to state in an RNC speech that Hillary Clinton is a Satanist.

Schwartz believes that Trump lashes out whenever the “the thin veneer of [his] vanity is challenged”. This means doubling down on his lies whenever he gets called out. He “really [didn’t] know” if Obama was born in the US as late as July 2015. He insisted “I meant Obama was the founder of ISIS ... the most valuable player” when conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt suggested Trump meant Obama “created the vacuum” which gave rise to ISIS. We still don’t know if he would have conceded the election to a President-elect Clinton.

And when he finally admitted that Obama was a natural born US citizen, he replaced birtherism with two more lies: that Clinton’s 2008 primary campaign started the phenomenon and that he finished it.

Ben Stevenson, using data from PolitiFact

Trumpian ‘truthful hyperbole’ is in no way equivalent to conventional exaggeration and political promises: it’s far more dangerous. It corrupts and degenerates the national dialogue; when Trump elevated awareness of birtherism, he blew the dogwhistle into a megaphone. And it creates a paradigm where Trump supporters can accept factually inaccurate conspiracies as truth. 79% of Trump supporters thought the media was against them and 64% of Trump supporters thought the polls were against them. This is exactly what Obama warns against. If the American people can’t agree on facts, they cian’t discuss and compromise and run an effective democracy.

One of the most important questions for the Trump presidency is: how will the President treat facts and truth?

We can examine Trump’s backup plan for clues. If the election had proceeded according to polling and Clinton won, it is widely believed that Trump would have established a Trump News Network. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner approached boutiquer and investor Aryeh Bourkoff in October concerning a Trump media deal. Trump campaign chief executive and ex-Breitbart editor Steve Bannon, Trump adviser, disgraced ex-Fox News CEO and alleged sexual harasser Roger Ailes and conservative television pundits Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity were all linked to the project. A biased, Trump-run news organisation would have undermined the Clinton presidency and deepened the divisions between Republicans and Democrats, the right and the left and the people and the establishment in America.

Trump has named top climate change sceptic Myron Ebell to transition the Environmental Protection Agency from an environmentalist Obama presidency to an anti-alarmist Donald “Global Warming Was Created By And For The Chinese In Order To Make U.S. Manufacturing Con-competitive” Trump presidency.

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012

NBC News just called it the great freeze - coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX? — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 25, 2014

Snowing in Texas and Louisiana, record setting freezing temperatures throughout the country and beyond. Global warming is an expensive hoax! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 29, 2014

Give me clean, beautiful and healthy air - not the same old climate change (global warming) bullshit! I am tired of hearing this nonsense. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 29, 2014

Ebell is Director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition, a group of nonprofits that “[dispel] the myths of global warming.” Ebell believes the government should steer largely steer clear of environmental policy on libertarian grounds. He sued the National Science and Technology Council and President Clinton in 2000 for violating federal open-meeting, appropriations and research statutes in composing the National Climate Assessment, a report on global warming. He calls the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which sets limits on carbon emissions from power plants to encourage use of renewable energy sources, illegal. He said that the US joining the Paris Climate Agreement “is clearly an unconstitutional usurpation of the Senate’s authority.” He believes the Endangered Species Act violates landowners’ rights. He thinks European environmental agencies are not independent or trustworthy because they are government-funded. None of this bodes well for a man managing a government department.

It’s unclear whether or not Ebell believes climate change in man-made like Trump, but he is definitely against so-called global warming alarmism:

There has been a little bit of warming ... but it’s been very modest and well within the range for natural variability, and whether it’s caused by human beings or not, it’s nothing to worry about. - Myron Ebell

Republican energy lobbyist Mike McKenna, dismissed by Scientific American as a “hired gun” is heading up the Department of Energy with GOP energy expert Mike Catanzaro developing energy policy for the Trump transition team.

Hunter Ramos, Pixabay Trump Tower, Chicago: Dark and uncertain days loom for a post-truth America

While Barack Obama believes climate change to be the greatest threat of the modern age, Donald Trump has assembled a team willing to dismiss it altogether despite overwhelming evidence that it is a real and severe threat. This speaks volumes about the President and the will-be President. Obama genuinely believes in a listening to a range of views and in building opinions and policies from the facts. Trump is single-minded and will rewrite the facts to fit his feelings. In the words of Tony Schwartz, “he is likely to lie about anything ... Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.”

President-elect Trump’s post-truth temperament is a threat to the fundamentals of American democracy. With no mutual understanding between Americans, no one can reach across the schism in US politics and it can only widen.