On the road again, and full of indignation about, or perhaps admiration for, what he called “made-up” and “fabricated” Democratic accusations during the recent judicial confirmation turmoil, America’s feral president swerved into a denunciation of a nonexistent bill — “It’s called ‘the open borders bill’ ” — that, he thundered, “every single Democrat” in the Senate has “signed up for.” Now, before you wax indignant, if you still bother to, about such breezy indifference to reality, you must remember this: Donald Trump is guilty of much, but not of originality.
Before Trump was in the White House, Harry Reid was in the Senate. In 2012, while the Nevada Democrat was majority leader, he brassily said during the presidential campaign that the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, had paid no taxes for a decade. This was wildly, demonstrably untrue: Romney, unlike the Republicans’ nominee four years later, did not hide his tax returns. Reid, however, remained proud as punch of his accusation when, three years later, he was asked why he still defended it: “Romney didn’t win, did he?”
Although 2018 has 2 1/2 more months in which to provide redundant evidence against belief in progress, it is not too soon to award the trophy for the year’s most cogent distillation of urgently needed thinking. It is this: “We don’t mail Elvis a Social Security check, no matter how many people think he is alive.”
This apercu comes from the Brookings Institution’s Jonathan Rauch. His essay, titled “The Constitution of Knowledge,” in National Affairs quarterly, is his response to Trump’s guiding principle, as stated by Steve Bannon: “The way to deal with (the media) is to flood the zone with s&!t.” Rauch says: Trump’s presidential lying, which began concerning the size of his inauguration crowd, reflects “a strategy, not merely a character flaw or pathology.” And the way to combat Trump’s “epistemic attack” on Americans’ “collective ability to distinguish truth from falsehood” is by attending to the various social mechanisms that, taken together, are “the method of validating propositions.”
