Trump’s Immoral Legacy of Distrust

Flags at the D.C. Armory grounds in Washington representing those who have died of the coronavirus in the United States. The lasting effect of Mr. Trump’s relationship with the truth may be most evident in terms of the pandemic.

The New York Times writes about the president's legacy as one of significantly eroding public distrust in facts, the legitimacy of political opposition and democracy itself. Those have been among the top Trump goals from day one. Sadly, he succeeded. The NYT writes:

“Born amid made-up crowd size claims and “alternative facts,” the Trump presidency has been a factory of falsehood from the start, churning out distortions, conspiracy theories and brazen lies at an assembly-line pace that has challenged fact-checkers and defied historical analogy. 

But now, with the election two days away, the consequences of four years of fabulism are coming into focus as President Trump argues that the vote itself is inherently “rigged,” tearing at the credibility of the system. Should the contest go into extra innings through legal challenges after Tuesday, it may leave a public with little faith in the outcome — and in its own democracy.

During his final weekend of campaign rallies, Mr. Trump continued to sow doubt about the validity of the election, making clear that he would deem any outcome other than victory for him to be corrupt. At a rally in Philadelphia, which has a sizable nonwhite population and a Democratic-led government, he asserted that the city would falsify the results. “Are they going to mysteriously find more ballots” after polls close, he asked. “Strange things have been known to happen, especially in Philadelphia.”

The nightmarish scenario of widespread doubt and denial of the legitimacy of the election would cap a period in American history when truth itself has seemed at stake under a president who has strayed so far from the normal bounds that he creates what allies call his own reality. Even if the election ends with a clear victory or defeat for Mr. Trump, scholars and players alike say the very concept of public trust in an established set of facts necessary for the operation of a democratic society has eroded during his tenure with potentially long-term ramifications.  

‘You can mitigate the damage, but you can’t bring it back to 100 percent the way it was before,’ said Lee McIntyre, the author of “Post-Truth” and a philosopher at Boston University. ‘And I think that’s going to be Trump’s legacy. I think there’s going to be lingering damage to the processes by which we vet truths for decades. People are going to be saying, ‘Oh, that’s fake news.’ The confusion between skepticism and denialism, the idea that if you don’t want to believe something, you don’t have to believe it — that’s really damaging, and that’s going to last.’”

That assessment is basically correct. In my experience, most of the president’s supporters are mostly closed to accepting facts, true truths and/or sound reasoning. In particular, true truths and sound reasoning are often rejected out of hand. Unfortunately, most of his supporters cannot see this and deny it when the facts and argument is presented. 

Maybe his worst legacy boils down to this: Tribal loyalty and reality talk, and everything and everyone else walks. Tribal reality can be true, false, mixed or ambiguous, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is loyalty. The radical right has been working for decades to get the typical conservative mind to this point. They surely are not going to give up on what has finally succeeded for them. Radical right elites are on the cusp of realizing their decades-long vision of a corrupt, authoritarian, white America and culture. That vision is built mostly on lies and deceit, and thus it is built mostly on immorality.

As the NYT comments, “the very idea of truth is increasingly a fungible commodity in a political environment that seems to reward the loudest voices, not the most honest.”