Whether you watched it all unravel on television or on Twitter, it was hard to look away from the ugly scene in Chicago last weekend. Inside the stadium where Donald Trump was set to speak, thousands of his supporters and protesters threw punches, yelled racial slurs, and ripped at each other’s signs in what was the most violent clash of Trump’s perpetually rowdy campaign. The scene was so chaotic that even before the fights broke out, Trump’s campaign canceled his appearance citing “security concerns.”
That was Friday night.
By Monday morning, Trump was on stage in Hickory, North Carolina, telling the crowd gathered before him that his rallies aren’t violent. Instead, he said, they’re “love fests.”
“There’s no violence,” he claimed. “There’s none, whatsoever.”
It was a statement so glaringly fallacious it would be shocking were it not coming from the mouth of Donald J. Trump. After all, Friday night’s protest was far from the first well-publicized instance of violence at a Trump rally. Just a quick YouTube search turns up footage of this woman, this man, this photographer, and all these people who might challenge Trump’s claims.
But it wouldn’t matter even if they did, not to Trump supporters, anyway. Because this is also far from the first time Trump has told, shall we say, an untruth. In fact, a recent Politico analysis showed that over the course of 4.6 hours of speeches last week, Trump uttered a “misstatement” once every five minutes. Meanwhile, fact-checking site Politifact shows that Trump says things that aren’t true far more often than his fellow presidential candidates.
And yet, as voters in five states head to the polls to cast their primary votes today, in what is bound to be one of the most important days of this election cycle, Trump will likely prove once more, that he can get away with it. He’s expected to win at least four of those states.
In the so-called Information Age, Trump’s ability to stretch the truth so blatantly and seemingly without repercussions is a phenomenon that seems to undermine the very promise of the Internet. With the truth never more than a click away, the Internet is supposed to help people keep the powerful in check and make us less susceptible to propaganda.
Information on the Internet Is Truth-Agnostic
A lot of the time, of course, that’s exactly how the Internet works. It’s why in countries like North Korea where Internet access is limited, activists risk their lives just to smuggle old American sitcoms into the country in hopes that exposure to any new information about the wider world will free North Koreans’ minds.
But in the case of Trump, the system isn’t working as it should—or at least, not as many people believed it would. Instead, even as the Internet has democratized access to information, it’s also democratized who gets to be the source of that information, creating an environment in which the truth is easily discovered, but misinformation, and those who spread it, can also thrive.
“The Internet is the best fact-checker and the best bias-confirmer ever invented,” says Michael Lynch, professor of philosophy at University of Connecticut and author of the new book The Internet of Us. “It’s both things at once.”
One of the key reasons Trump has been able to get away with stretching the truth so often, Lynch says, is because he repeatedly condemns the media for being morally bankrupt and biased. He positions The Media as a single, unified organism, instead of the increasingly fragmented and polarized jumble of websites, blogs, television networks, and print publications it is. And unlike his Republican counterparts, he doesn’t just reserve this disdain for the so-called “liberal media.” “He’s getting people to think he’s valuing objectivity,” Lynch says. “Actually, what he’s doing is undermining it.”
The more he does it, the more his supporters are trained to believe that the only source they can trust on all things Trump is, well, Trump. And so, he uses his Twitter feed, a powerful media outlet in its own right, to craft a narrative about himself that is so consistent, so pure, that when his supporters are presented with contradictory information, they’re more likely to write it off as bias.
“From a contradiction, you can derive anything,” Lynch says. “You get people to a point where they’re receiving contradictory signals, and they start to just ignore the bit that seems inconsistent with their own beliefs.”
The Power of Unspeakable Truths
The reason this strategy works particularly well for Trump is that he eschews detail for what Jason Stanley, author of the book How Propaganda Works, calls “unspeakable truths.” In Trump’s case, Lynch says, there are two of these supposed truths: The first is that immigration is ruining the country; the second is that moneyed interests own the American political class.
It’s because he speaks these unspeakable truths that Trump gets so much credit for “telling it like it is.” In reality, he’s telling it the way his followers perceive it to be. “Truth is not something he cares about, and if he did care about truth, it would undermine his very campaign message,” Stanley says.
In that way, Trump’s version of the truth is the same as reality television’s version of reality. Sure, there are scraps of fact and raw emotion there, but they’re all bent and twisted to fit the greater story arc. We know reality television is scripted, but we ignore that fact, because the narrative is so compelling.
Of course, all politicians stretch the truth. According to Politifact, 49 percent of what Hillary Clinton says is somewhere between half true and completely false. For Bernie Sanders, that number is the same. For Marco Rubio, it’s 64 percent. For Ted Cruz, it’s 78 percent. And for John Kasich, it’s 50 percent. But Trump takes the cake: According to Politifact, just 8 percent of his statements check out.
The other candidates could never pull that off. That’s because candidates like, say, Clinton, tend to wonk out on the details of why and when she supported or opposed which idea in order to defend and amplify her own record. Because Clinton dwells so much in the world of fact, any time she says something that isn’t true—like she did last week when she claimed that former first lady Nancy Reagan was an advocate for the HIV/AIDS cause during the 1980s—the backlash is swift and mighty.
“Clinton’s public expects her to say what she thinks is true,” Lynch says. “Trump’s supporters don’t expect the literal truth. They expect him to speak to this deeper truth they perceive.”
That is precisely what’s so challenging about the Internet as an information delivery device. The web has put a world of information at our fingertips, but often, our perceptions override that information. The more we can use the Internet to find like-minded people who share those ideas, the more like fact they become.
The openness of the Internet only validates those perceptions, Stanley adds, by creating safe spaces for people to air those ideas. “It is a clear, historical error to think that more openness always leads to more goodness,” Stanley says. “It leads to badness and goodness.”
