“Alternative facts” could kill, warn national security and other government veterans, and eventually could unravel the fabric of democracy and America’s standing in the world.

This weekend, it was crowd size. By next week, it could be how many troops were killed, and who was responsible for the attack. Or how successful the American response was. Or whether there is an actual threat to homeland security that requires government action. Or even a dispute with a foreign government over a sensitive detail in negotiations.


Donald Trump kicked off his presidency by spreading falsehoods about how many people came to the National Mall to see him take the oath of office and apparently ordering his staff to do the same — with senior adviser Kellyanne Conway calling such statements “alternative facts.”

Trump and his team frequently stretched — and often broke from — the truth on the campaign trail. But it’s the risk of now applying this combative approach to reality on much more substantive matters of government and national security that has many really worried.

“It absolutely puts lives at risk. If the president claims that Iran is cheating on the nuclear accord, or that North Korea is about to test a nuclear device on an intercontinental missile,” said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, “the public needs to believe him, and if he so undermines his credibility we can’t build an international coalition … it has the gravest consequences.”

“You could easily see a situation where Trump meets with [Vladimir] Putin, Putin promises to remove his little green men from Ukraine, Donald Trump crows about his foreign policy success, and then we learn that the Russians in fact haven’t left Ukraine,” Schiff said in an interview on Sunday.

Retired Lt. Gen. Patrick Hughes, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said he believes delivering straight truth is always important, even when dealing with sensitive and classified information that can’t be told in full.

“When you’re talking about intelligence that involves military or intelligence operations, or when you’re talking about international relations — relations between the United States and other countries, or between other countries themselves and groups and subnational entities … of course, there will be consequences. And that’s a reason why you should be absolutely factual,” Hughes said.

In front of the wall of stars memorializing intelligence officers killed in duty, the president spoke for several minutes at CIA headquarters on Saturday about how the media wasn’t accurately reporting the size of a crowd that all evidence showed was far smaller than former President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009. He then ordered White House press secretary Sean Spicer to use his first appearance at the White House podium, framed by carefully selected photos of the crowds, to make a series of false statements, capped off by the blatantly untrue claim that “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.”

These weren’t the only confrontations with truth: The new administration’s dispute about crowd size came over a first weekend in office that also included the president telling the CIA that the U.S. should have taken Iraq’s oil after the American invasion but, “OK, maybe we’ll have another chance,” and his aides saying Trump would not release his taxes after all, despite repeatedly pledging during the campaign to offer them up after an unsubstantiated routine audit was completed.

Sunday morning, Conway, Trump’s former campaign manager and now counselor to the president, coined Spicer’s Trump-ordered statement of deliberately misrepresenting the crowd size as “alternative facts.”

GOP strategist Steve Schmidt’s alternative view: “purposeful deceit, willful lying by a government spokesperson, is the hallmark of a totalitarian or an authoritarian regime. It's absolutely pernicious in a democracy.”

“The issue is small, trivial and stupid — but the act of dishonesty and arguing about it is a big deal,” Schmidt added.

“There are narcissists who think anything they do is right and anything they say — not persuaded by evidence — that is what is frightening,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian who met with Trump during the transition. “When you're saying something that is brazenly false and expecting your followers to adhere to it, that's a dictator. That is not an American president.”

As was widely expected, Trump and his team have begun governing much like they successfully campaigned: on the attack, demanding respect they say they don’t get, and adamantly insisting that their victory validates insisting on a version of events that serves their purposes.

Much of this is Trump and his team purposefully stoking a new war with the press, which many suspect serves ulterior motives of getting journalists to look petty and self-obsessed, and undercutting the credibility of critical media overall.

“He and people who support him are going to talk around the media and right to the American people. The opportunities we will succeed upon,” said Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.), who is on the president’s executive transition committee. “Anytime the president of the United States and his administration speaks, it carries tremendous credibility around the world. The office of the presidency carries with it its own credibility. When the president speaks, I am confident that the credibility will continue.”

The new White House is also tapping into perennial suspicions, often borne out, that governments lie all the time — and the sense especially among the Republican base that under Obama, giant lies were accepted and reported all the time, and what’s happening now is just howling sensitivity because of bias against Trump.

“When the press is focused on facts that there are a few more people at Obama’s inauguration than Trump — just even the tone of that question is inappropriate, frankly,” said Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.), who was Trump’s earliest supporter in Congress and remains deeply involved in planning. “The appropriate questions are asking about Obamacare and immigration. Not about Obama and Trump's crowds. Give me a break.”

Schiff called the national security implications of an administration willing to dispute facts “a great concern” and a “crisis waiting to happen.”

Hughes, while taking care not to speak directly about the new president or the ethics of his staff, said that he sees a simple and crucially important principle at play when thinking about how those in government present themselves publicly.

“You should never say anything unless you’re sure that what you’re saying is both truth,” Hughes said, “and that you can try to anticipate the effect of what you say.”