Evelyn N. Farkas is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia from 2012 to November 2015.

Among the many dangers of Donald Trump is that he will make the United States “great” again in exactly the way that the GOP front-runner’s one-time admirer, Vladimir Putin, claims he is making Russia “great” again.

In other words, fraudulently.


In Russia today, thanks to Putin, spectacle, theater and lying pervade the media, confuse the discourse and have turned the viewing public into an electorate that no longer seems to care about the truth. The Russian people have grown indifferent to or remain in denial of the basic truth of present-day Russia: that in exchange for the order Putin promised them in 2000, he has brought them corruption, economic and social decline, international denunciation, and partial diplomatic isolation. The geopolitical posturing of his temporary intervention in Syria has not changed that.

In Russia, as the journalist Peter Pomerantsev explains in his captivating and disturbing book, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, the news media provide entertainment spectacle to the public and delivers Kremlin messages that change according to the audience and the moment; they are alternatively socially conservative/religious; ethnic nationalist; imperial or pan-ethnic; and liberal modernizing. Toward the end of the Cold War, people in Russia didn’t believe in communism; they pretended to in public, not always in private. Today, they believe in imperial Russia, the Orthodox Church, the Russian Federation, modernization and capitalism. They “put on” ideologies as if they were new outfits, unflummoxed by the contradictions between them. They don’t even pretend to be true believers, because they don’t care which idea represents the truth. The elites alternate between expressing different incompatible world views and lifestyles, as if they were practicing doublethink: One day they are nationalist bureaucrats, and the next they are vacationing and investing in the West and sending their children to study in Western Europe. ”It’s almost as if you are encouraged to have one identity one moment and the opposite one the next,” says Pomerantsev.

All this serves Putin’s purpose of imposing whatever truth he pleases. In the past two years alone the Russian president has uttered a stream of fact-defying statements that could easily rival Trump’s. In March 2014, after Crimea was seized by what journalists called “little green men”—soldiers of mysterious provenance—Putin insisted they were local militia, but the next month he admitted Russian troops had invaded the peninsula. In June of that year, Putin stated there was no Russian military presence in eastern Ukraine, but in December he admitted Russian military personnel had been and were there. In September 2015, Putin declared he was sending troops to Syria to fight the Islamic State, but focused instead on saving Bashar Assad; when he announced his recent drawdown, he said Russia’s objectives had largely been met, even though the Islamic State received only a small proportion of airstrikes and remained a threat. And on the domestic front, a fact-check of a December 2015 Putin news conference by the online newspaper Meduza highlighted six alleged lies he told on topics including toll rates between cars and commercial trucks, parking fees in Moscow and foreign adoption of Russian children.

“This is not merely an ‘information war,’ in other words, but a ‘war on information,’” Pomerantsev said in April 2014. “If the very possibility of rational argument is submerged in a fog of uncertainty, there are no grounds for debate. Sooner or later, the public will give up trying to understand what happened, or even bothering to listen.” This statement illuminates the deeper danger Trump poses to democracy in America today.

Trump, in his own way, is seeking to turn the United States into a post-factual society analogous to Putin’s Russia. He makes claims that are false, doubles down on them when challenged and seems to care not a whit for video or documentary evidence that proves him wrong. He says over and over that America is “losing” and he can make it “win” without substantiating either claim. It’s not that the media don’t challenge him a lot, but simultaneously they give saturation coverage to everything he says and they don’t seem able to keep up with the torrent of nonsense issuing from his mouth.

Thus, as in Russia, Trump’s lying is enabling and feeding an indifference to the truth. In a March 28 speech, President Obama cited the work of Politico reporters who fact-checked 4.6 hours of Trump speeches and news conferences and identified more than 51 lies, or as David Brooks of The New York Times put it, “one every five minutes.” This past week alone, Trump made false and irresponsible statements about the Geneva Conventions, nuclear proliferation, and NATO and our Asian allies’ contribution to security. More recently he offered up a view of the U.S. economy that forecast a coming “very massive recession,” which Washington Post writer Jim Tankersley called a mix of “economic conspiracy theories with magical-thinking accounting.”

Despite such attempts at fact-checking, reporters just don’t seem to know how to counter Trump’s large-scale deployment of WMD — Weapons of Mass Denial (of the truth). There are so many lies to dispute now, it seems an overwhelming task; where to start? Intentional or not, the end result is Trump’s statements are not being sufficiently exposed as falsehoods. As with Putin in Russia, his many misrepresentations are enabling and feeding an indifference to the truth in this country.

Where could it end, if Trump does gain the presidency? In Putin’s case the people’s indifference to the truth has allowed him to secure and retain power, to run the Russian Federation as an autocratic, Mafia-style capitalist state, to pursue a neo-imperial foreign policy for its own sake and to keep him in power, and reportedly to amass vast fortunes for his friends that he may secretly benefit from. The Kremlin hypes the more recent Russian military deployments in Ukraine and Syria (the ones in Georgia, Moldova, Armenia and Tajikistan and elsewhere receive little attention) as a demonstration that Russia is great again. In 2010, the Kremlin announced a 10-year roughly $700 billion modernization initiative for the armed forces. The defense budget, until this year, has been largely protected from the now-necessary and increased belt-tightening.

But—if I may be permitted to indulge in actual facts for a moment—Russia is becoming less great each year. The International Monetary Fund forecast Russia’s economy will fall in 2016 by another 1 percent, on top of last year’s 3.7 percent decline. Inflation is well above the official 6 percent target and the ruble has fallen precipitously to the dollar. Sanctions have cut Russian banks’ access to capital. The Russian economy remains energy-dependent, and undiversified. The government has failed to spur innovation or even build upon Soviet scientific achievements (with some exceptions, such as in the information technology field), satisfied for the most part with manufacturing based on Cold War era technology and propping up uncompetitive state-owned enterprises. As a result, the steep drop in oil prices from a high of about $100/barrel to a low of about $30/barrel earlier this year has dealt a crushing blow to Russia’s budget. Meanwhile, the average lifespan of the Russian male remains low for the developed world, about 65, and the government has failed to curb chronically high levels of alcoholism, drug abuse and HIV/AIDs.

Putin has blamed all of this on sanctions and outside actors, including the United States, not his poor economic policies and state-sanctioned corruption. He has kept the truth from the Russian people. They blame their local officials, and appeal to the Kremlin for help. Putin’s staged responses include theatrical dressing-downs of local politicians or managers and occasional firings.

In Trump’s case, he is fostering and exploiting indifference toward truth in the service of fear, hatred and a mishmash of poor foreign and domestic policy ideas — including potentially repudiating our alliances in Europe and Asia, undoing decades of free trade reform and trying to force Mexico to pay for an expensive, likely ineffective North American Berlin Wall.

America has long had an anti-intellectual strain, dating back to our earliest days, but we have also always had a willingness to examine and re-examine facts, to understand and reconceive our history from Columbus’ landing through colonialism up to the recent past. We have used our interest in the truth to acknowledge the persecution of African-Americans, Native Americans, Jews, homosexuals, transsexuals, the mentally and physically disabled and others. Through independent media and civil society, we have fostered debate and sought the best truth in the service of democracy. This American pursuit of truth — through media, Hollywood, television (and yes, intellectuals) — is what has made America great and the only way to keep America great.

How then are we drifting toward a situation where we resemble Putin’s Russia?