I recently watched the new Spielberg film, The Post, starring Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as Katherine Graham. While I wouldn’t say the film was award caliber, it was definitely enjoyable and did its best to engender some suspense over whether Graham, the Post’s owner, would defy the Nixon Administration’s injunction against publication of Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers. Anyone who lived through this, as I did, knew that Graham would publish, but the film nonetheless succeeds in building the tension over her decision—which involved not only the possible insolvency of her paper, but possible jail time for her as the owner, and of editor Bradlee and writer Bagdikian as well. What the film mainly recaptured for me, though, was the joy that prevailed, particularly among anti-war activists, when that edition of the Postcontaining the Pentagon Papers piled off the presses; to then be followed by a delirious Tom Hanks dropping on Katherine Graham’s desk copies of a dozen other newspapers across the country that had similarly defied the Attorney General’s injunction against publication. That meant that the strength of all those papers challenging the government and asserting their freedom-of-the-press rights would influence the subsequent Supreme Court decision that agreed with their assertion of those rights. The power of Nixon’s imperial presidency was broken right then and there—which the film makes clear by closing with a night watchman, about a year later, noticing an opened door at Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate office building. The initial reporting about this break-in by Nixon’s so-called “plumbers” (who had earlier broken into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist) would lead inexorably to Nixon’s resignation. The Vietnam War would ignominiously end soon thereafter.
Given our current dire situation, the film could not help but bring up my hope that something like the miracle of the Pentagon Papers would happen again to bring to ruin the alleged presidency of the Drumpf. Our situation in 1972 was actually similar to what we are experiencing now. Nixon’s grip on the presidency seemed unassailable; despite his 1971 loss regarding the Pentagon Papers, he won a landslide victory over a rather hapless George McGovern in the 1972 election and seemed well on his way to controlling the nation for years to come. But so outraged was he by the Pentagon Papers leak that he set up the “plumbers’ operation,” Watergate became their signature caper, and Nixon was disgraced, humiliated, and forced to resign rather than face inevitable impeachment. Could it happen again? Who knows? But there are forces in motion that could do the same to our wannabe King.
We all know what those forces are. To begin with, Donald Trump’s criminality, not just as president but throughout his long career, makes the lawlessness of Nixon’s burglars seem akin to high-school pranks. And it appears that Robert Mueller’s investigation is focused pretty heavily on that lawlessness—the years of real estate scams culminating in the 1990s sale of scores of properties to Russian thugs and oligarchs to launder their money. Paul Manafort, once Trump’s campaign chief, has already been charged with such money laundering, and there are suspicions that Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner have been and still are up to their eyeballs in the same skulduggery. And it is skullduggery. As 18 U.S. code from 1957 says:
Whoever, in any of the circumstances set forth in subsection (d), knowingly engages or attempts to engage in a monetary transaction in criminally derived property of a value greater than $10,000 and is derived from specified unlawful activity,shall be punished as provided in subsection (b).
In layman’s terms, laundering money through real estate is a crime—one that involves using criminally-derived money to buy properties and then selling them. Thereby, the income from the sale will have been “laundered” through property to look legal. Even according to Trump Jr., much of the money that poured into the Trump organization since the 1990s to bail out the then-bankrupt Trump came from Russian sources seeking to launder their loot. These, and a lifetime of other shady deals, not excluding presidential violations of the emoluments clause (whereby foreign visitors to Washington DC, for example, are induced to spend huge amounts of money at the Trump Hotel in that city, or in Florida at his Mar-a-Lago property benefiting the president directly), would be used to indict the president himself.
The problem would be pinning something on Trump or any of his henchmen in today’s ethical climate. Indeed, if we look back to the Nixon-era 1970s, we can see that the issue of a Trump presidency would never have arisen in the first place. No one with Trump’s record of misstatements, corrupt business dealing, outright lying, and sexual outrages could have even been considered for, much less won the nomination of either of the two parties. Yes, Richard Nixon was a crook and a racist, but he covered it with practiced and well-accepted coded language: the ‘southern strategy’ was kept more or less secret from the mainstream, while the ‘moral majority’ did not obviously signify white supremacists but right-thinking Americans in the suburbs. With Trump, though, the racism, the goatish behavior, the contempt for government itself, the scapegoating of the press, the open nepotism with his daughter, and a whole galaxy of attitudes and practices going on quietly to cripple government for decades, are all out in the open. And what is astonishing is not only that Republican politicians seem deaf to these ethical breaches (making impeachment a distant dream), so does what is accurately called his “base” (the people from the basement, the people who are truly basein the worst sense of that word). An incredible instance of that baseness made the news on June 22, when an actual pimp owner of several whorehouses in Nevada named Dennis Hof won the Republican primary for a seat in the Nevada assembly! Explaining his rather surprising support among those highly ‘moral’ Christian evangelicals, Hof, owner of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, told Reuters, “People will set aside for a moment their moral beliefs, their religious beliefs, to get somebody that is honest in office. Trump is the trailblazer, he is the Christopher Columbus of honest politics” (“In age of Trump, evangelicals back self-styled top U.S. pimp,” by Tim Reid, www.reuters.com, 6.22.18). The Christopher Columbus of honest politics—you just can’t make this stuff up. But it is clearly what Trump’s supporters, including his evangelical ones, seem to think and feel. We heard it repeatedly during the election: “He tells it like it is.” Which is to say, he’ll insult anyone, especially the “elites” that the great unwashed envy and hate, without dressing up his language. That most of what he says is pure fabrication, outright lies, or worse, seems not to matter. That he takes damn fool actions, like the recent ones against asylum-seekers at the border that amount to child abuse, doesn’t matter. That he is a billionaire who is making money that will never reach his impoverished supporters, whose policies will only impoverish them further, doesn’t seem to matter. He is sticking his thumb in the eye of the hated “coastal elites” whom they blame for their troubles, and that’s enough for them.
And yet, those of us who watch with horror as this happens, can’t help thinking that sooner or later, logic will catch up, truth will catch up, facts and common sense will catch up. And we comb history for parallels (Hitler, Mussolini, Huey Long, etc.) to see if we can understand how this could happen. For me, this comes down to a simple question: how can people believe this known liar? I keep thinking of the song from the 1951 musical (and later film), Royal Wedding: “How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Love you?” the second line of which is, “When you know I’ve been a liar all my life?” That’s it precisely. We all know, they all know that Trump is a serial, a compulsive, a habitual liar. And yet they believe. Why?
There’s a mountain of research on the true roots of belief, but most theories come down to a simple equation: people believe what they want to believe. This is generally called “motivated reasoning.” What that means is that we all have fears, or ideologies, or vested interests, or identity needs that influence what we’re willing to believe and what we’re prone to reject, in today’s term, as “fake news.” So, if we’re fearful about something, we’re much more prone to believe even a wildly improbable promise from a known liar like Donald Trump. If we’re anxious about maintaining our group identity, we’re driven by that to believe what accords with the group, especially if they’re all wildly cheering for the same Donald Trump. And the problem with such belief is that it’s not easily dislodged, least of all by introspection or conscious effort or even opposing facts. All of these motivations are discussed in a May 2017 article by Kristen Weir in Monitor on Psychology, “Why we believe alternative facts.” And what we learn is precisely how powerful motivated reasoning can be, how “our wishes, hopes, fears and motivations often tip the scales to make us more likely to accept something as true if it supports what we want to believe.” This is especially true given the media landscape we all live with these days—with fewer investigative reporters as failing newspapers struggle to maintain even skeleton crews; and with the proliferation of ‘echo chambers’ on the internet that reinforce every wacko bias—all of which makes it ever harder for real facts to win out over wishful thinking. And even when vetted facts can be marshaled for an argument against obvious lies coming from the top, believers can retreat into the accusation of “fake news.” In other words, anything that challenges my beliefs can credibly be attributed to “fake news.” Because after all, that’s what the president says all the time, isn’t it? Anything he doesn’t like is “fake news.” Anything that disputes his truth is “fake news.” And he should know: he’s the all-time champion dispenser of “fake news.”
There is probably one more (or a million more) element here as well. A 2017 book by Kevin Young looks at the endless variety of bullshitters in American history. It’s titled Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, and starts with P.T. Barnum (sideshow mogul born in my hometown of Bridgeport, CT) and ends with Donald Trump. And while there’s much to admire in the book, for me the most salient point is simple: it’s not only that the public, as Barnum proved, is eager to be taken in by hoaxes and ‘bunk,’ there is an element of awareness in its attitude which the bunco artist and con man seem to understand. That is, not only is it the case that we are “motivated” believers (Young says at one point about some fake memorabilia of Hitler, “the forgery is believed not because it alters history, but because we wishhistory were otherwise” p. 276), but also that, on some level, we knowthat we are being taken in, and enjoy or at least need the game. We wantto be fooled, perhaps because the made-up reality is better than the one we are trapped in. Young links this to the “confession” as the dominant form (usually in the form of memoir) in what he calls our ‘Age of Euphemism.’ Here is what he says:
Now the hoax, married to confession, caught in the narrative crisis [where we no longer can tell truth from falsehood, memoir from fiction, ed.], has replaced drink as our national addiction, and substituted loss for feeling lost (439).
In other words, we are, many of us, willing participants, willful believers, junkies ever more addicted to the deception that has become commonplace in our national life. We no longer seem to mind being taken advantage of by internet hucksters, political and financial scammers, bunco artists, and fake presidents. Many of us actually court the hoax, the lie, the gross exaggeration as a kind of entertainment—witness the huge profits being made by media companies that promote scripted ‘reality’ shows and every fart uttered by the Hoaxer-in-Chief. Of course, these same media companies pretend to be outraged by his “mis-speakings,” but almost all bend over backwards to employ euphemisms rather than calling a lie a lie. They seem reluctant, that is, to kill the goose laying the golden eggs—fake eggs though they may be—that have so many of us mesmerized.
And as long as this is so, we are caught, trapped in the need to amuse ourselves, no matter what the cost to our once-vibrant democracy. And it will be considerable.
Lawrence DiStasi
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