The Tribune

PERHAPS the biggest casualty of the Donald Trump presidency in the United States has been the truth. Trump lies all the time, without appearing to hesitate first. There is no evidence Trump possesses any internal governor that would regulate his mendacious behaviour.

Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler has for many years compiled a widely respected column called Fact Checker. The column is cited frequently by other news organisations, including by those with a right-leaning tilt. It is, therefore, something of an industry standard.

A couple of months ago, Kessler reported that in his first 406 days in office, Trump had made 2,436 false or misleading claims – that amounts to exactly six lies each day he has been president. Since he often tweets on the weekends, the American people can reasonably expect half a dozen outright falsehoods from their chief executive every day of every week he remains in the White House.

On some level, citizens of democratic governments generally expect a certain degree of deception or corrupt activity in their elected officials. Public service in governmental organisations often leads incumbents astray and constituents are seldom truly shocked when this is revealed. There may be entertainment value in the latest scandal, but the veil of innocence has fallen from most experienced eyes, especially in Europe and North America.

Even in this jaded context, however, Trump’s behaviour has been unusual, astounding, and has begun to make Americans wonder about their country in ways not witnessed since the dark days of fear monger senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin in the 1950s and of shady president Richard Nixon 20 years later. Who are we, that we can elect someone like Trump as our president, many now wonder.

In a lengthening list of zany, thoughtless and ultimately dangerous things this president has introduced into the American consciousness is his attacks on US intelligence and law enforcement. It is one thing to criticise institutions such as the CIA, Department of Justice, FBI and US Attorneys. They have all stumbled and made serious errors of commission and omission and judgment in recent decades. They can all improve, and all have admitted as much.

But Trump, by his own smug admission, is attacking these institutions not for their failures but for what seems to be an analytical triumph, belated as it appears to have been. A new book, Facts and Fears, by former Director of National Intelligence and lifetime intelligence official James Clapper has now offered sober judgments which should give pause to any serious citizen of the US or its allies.

Clapper says of Russian influence in the 2016 American election: “Of course the Russian efforts affected the outcome. Surprising even themselves, they swung the election to a Trump win. To conclude otherwise stretches logic, commonsense and credulity to the breaking point.”

Clapper writes: “We (the intelligence community) showed unambiguously that Putin had ordered the (disinformation) campaign to influence the election and that Russia had used cyber espionage against US political organisations and publicly disclosed the data (from Wikileaks and elsewhere) they collected.”

Of Trump’s disregard for the truth, and particularly the products of painstaking intelligence analysis, Clapper says: “I don’t believe our democracy can function for long on lies, particularly when inconvenient and difficult facts spoken by the practitioners of truth are dismissed as ‘fake’ news. The intelligence community cannot serve our nation if facts are negotiable.”

There is an eerie and profoundly discomfiting harmony between Trump’s blatant and remorseless lying and Russia’s disinformation efforts, which had their origins in modern Russian and then Soviet history under Lenin and were honed over decades of autocratic authoritarianism in Moscow. Russian President Putin would have been well schooled in such techniques during his KGB career.

Clapper writes that “getting its larger audience to conclude that facts and truth are ‘unknowable’ is the true objective of any disinformation campaign. If someone actually believes the falsehood, that’s a bonus, but the primary objective is to get readers or viewers to throw up their hands and give up on facts.”

Millions of Americans, including many in Congress, remain convinced by or at least indifferent to the continuing Trump disinformation campaign.

It will be up to Robert Mueller to open their eyes.