by JD Vance held court on CNN’s State of the Union program. “The American media completely ignored this stuff,” he complained last Sunday, “until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes.”
But it was just a meme, protest interviewer Dana Bash. The Republican vice-presidential nominee gave an encouraging answer: “If I have to create stories so that the American media will pay attention to the suffering of the American people, that’s what I will do, Dana, because you are letting Kamala Harris coast completely. “
Related: ‘Racism is embedded in our society’: how attacks on immigrants in Ohio highlight US disinformation crisis
If there was ever a case of saying the quiet part out loud, Vance had the art perfected. The cat memes he referenced fueled unfounded rumors about legal Haitian immigrants in his home state of Ohio eating pets — rumors that led to bomb threats and the evacuation of schools and government buildings in Springfield.
But Vance’s willingness to “create stories” was to be highlighted before the November election for a sense of a new frontier in a post-truth America, where lies are no longer slyly spread but entrenched as a tactic to win political support. and stir up social chaos. .
Some commentators draw a parallel to Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway’s fabrication of “alternative facts” when, on another Sunday political program back in 2017, she sought to defend White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s false statements about the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration.
Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “It’s a logical continuation of what was once called ‘alternative facts’ in the same camp. It’s clearly a long-term mission statement, more than a casual comment.
“Their whole strategy is to say anything, make anything up, make up false stories to try to distract from the really radical and extreme consequences they have that are so far out of the mainstream of people’s interests America. They think they have a better chance of winning by making up vague stories about people eating pets than having a conversation afterwards about the consequences of their policy agenda.”
Dishonesty is hardly new in politics, from President Richard Nixon’s cover-up of the Watergate scandal to the false claim that weapons of mass destruction were used as a pretext for war in Iraq. In 2004, the New York Times Magazine quoted an unnamed official in the George W Bush administration as saying: “We are now an empire, and when we act, we create our own reality.”
It was fertile ground for Trump, who spent years exaggerating his personal wealth and charitable giving, misleading the public about ventures like Trump University and even misrepresenting his own height and weight. Since 2011, he has been the main promoter of the false conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible to be president of the USA.
Since his inauguration, Trump has made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims during his four years in the White House, according to a count by the Washington Post. He memorably claimed to have presided over the biggest tax cut in history – indeed, Ronald Reagan’s was bigger – and repeatedly downplayed the coronavirus pandemic, telling the public that it would soon be over .
But perhaps the biggest lie of all came on the night of the 2020 presidential election when Trump claimed victory. He clung to this position, arguing that it was “stolen” from him through widespread voter fraud, which ultimately led to a deadly uprising at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Now making his third consecutive bid for the White House, Trump’s mendacity has, if possible, changed. He made more than 30 false claims during the presidential debate against Joe Biden in Atlanta, according to a fact-check by the host network CNN, but escaped scrutiny because of Biden’s poor performance.
In the debate against Harris in Philadelphia, he made false statements about topics including inflation, immigration, tariffs, the role of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on January 6, Joe Biden’s role in the criminal cases against him and popular support for the rollback of constitutional rights to. abortion
Amazingly, he pulled the Springfield racial conspiracy theory out of the fever swamps of the internet and gave it a national platform in front of thousands of viewers when he said: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people who came in, they are eating the cats. They are eating the pets of the people who live there.”
Not for the first time that night, ABC News moderators had to step in to fact-check. There is no evidence for such a claim. The Wall Street Journal newspaper reported that Springfield’s city manager informed his office that they were baseless on the day Vance first promoted the correct rumors.
Vance’s staff gave the Journal a police report in which a resident claimed her cat may have been stolen by Haitian neighbors. But a Journal reporter tracked down the resident and discovered that her cat had been in the basement the entire time, prompting her to apologize to her neighbors.
Yet Trump and Vance continued the knowing lies at rally after rally on the campaign trail, undeterred by warnings from the White House that they could provoke ugly backlash against Haitians in Springfield. Then came Vance’s shocking admission that he would make things up and be proud of it.
A day after the CNN interview, Vance continued to defend the comments, admitting that he did not fact-check the residents’ claims about the pets. “The media has a responsibility to check facts,” he said at a rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in an effort to shift the blame.
Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “What JD Vance is saying is that the facts don’t matter and I’m not ashamed to be accused of a false story.
“It underscores how much Trump and Vance and the Maga movement have given in to these fake internet memes online and can’t relate to them. Even when they’re disproved, they stick to them, which is dangerous because it means that no matter how much evidence you can provide, no matter how dangerous the lies, they’re not going to back down.”
Sykes warned: “They’re going to keep pushing. Extrapolate this to what will happen in November and the election results. Extrapolate it to anything.”
On Saturday, Vance will appear with conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson on the former Fox News host’s live tour in Hershey, Pennsylvania. This is despite Carlson recently hosting Nazi apologist and Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper on his podcast, a decision roundly condemned by Jewish members of Congress.
Meanwhile, far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer has joined Trump on the campaign trail. She appeared at the debate and then a day later in New York for the 23rd anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Loomer, who commands a 1.2m following on social media platform X, has previously suggested that 9/11 was an inside job. At a rally in Las Vegas, Trump said he heard that Harris used a secret earpiece during their debate, a baseless conspiracy theory promoted by Loomer on X.
Loomer added to X that if Harris, who is of Indian origin, wins the election, “the White House will smell like curry and White House speeches will be facilitated through a call center”. Even far-right Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene condemned the comment as racist.
Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, sees Loomer as a symptom rather than a cause. “Run through a list of all the conspiracy theories that Donald Trump has embraced or pushed and it’s long,” he said. “It’s not like Laura Loomer is making Donald Trump a conspirator. Donald Trump has been one for years. He is now finding people who will stroke and validate his dark impulses.”
There is another reason for Trump and Vance’s understanding of punishment. Their lies emanate from and are legitimized by a right-wing media ecosystem that now includes X, formerly known as Twitter, owned by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who has endorsed Trump, interviewed him and lashed out at his critics to be portrayed as enemies of free speech.
Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at the watchdog Media Matters for America, said: “This is a proper media ticket. Donald Trump and JD Vance are people who are fully immersed in the information ecosystem of the far right and have embraced its lack of standards and total unwillingness to use any means necessary to achieve their ends of political gain and political victory. What we see here is how these lies can get completely out of control. Springfield, Ohio is in real chaos right now.”
Heading into the final sprint of the election, where he could face jail if he loses, Trump is outdoing himself with a false blitz. On Thursday, CNN’s fact-checkers compiled a list of “12 completely fictional stories” it has told in the past month, including Harris reintroducing the military draft, schools sending children to gender-confirmation surgeries in unbeknownst to their parents and Harris was negotiating with him. Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2022 in an attempt to prevent the invasion of Ukraine.
Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said: “There is nothing worse than a desperate man. There is nothing worse than a desperate racist man who can’t control the woman in front of him who happens to be African American. He cannot control the conditions that have changed around him – the political race for the presidency is intensifying.
“You can’t control what people are saying, the fact that Republicans are coming out now and speaking out against Trump’s second term and creating lanes where we’re willing to support the Democrat over Donald Trump because he’s so so bad and so dangerous. When he can’t control that, he becomes even more dangerous and desperate and you need to be aware of that because there’s more of it coming between now and November.“
