Veritas, Disinformation and Trump 2.0

Veritas – Truth – is the motto of Harvard University. Harvard is not a perfect institution, but in its current battles against the Trump Administration, it has Veritas on its side, at least when it comes to its lawsuits. As pundits, legal scholars, academics and left-leaning politicians have been stressing for as long as Trump has been on the scene, the judicial system in the United States depends on facts and evidence – in short, Truth. And that is often in short supply on the Trump side and why he keeps losing in court.

A well-functioning society depends on trust and reliability. And trust depends on truth-telling. When there is a high level of trust in our social interactions – when we all agree on basic facts, basic Truth/Veritas – we may not even notice; it is just the way things are. These are some of the interactions and transactions which, under the rule of law, are absolutely essential but may go unnoticed most of the time:

• Money and finances. We trust our banks to keep our funds secure, to give us honest and accurate statements, to keep the value of the dollar stable.
• Food. Our regulations, developed and honed over decades or more, generally ensure that the food we purchase in our grocery stores and restaurants are healthy and have been through processes that reduce contaminants and other dangerous substances.
• Motor vehicles. Over time, motor vehicles, roads, rules, street lights, crosswalks and other aspects of daily travel became standardized, at least to some extent. Trust and reliability are a major reason that we do not experience crashes and other mishaps every time we use our vehicles and roads: we trust that most drivers will stop at red lights, that we will drive on the right-hand side of the road, that we do not drive on sidewalks and thus injure pedestrians, and so on.
• Education. We realize that our educational systems can be very uneven throughout our country. Students who go through public schools in some zipcodes do better than students from other zipcodes – this is a travesty, at least in the opinions of millions of Americans who know that we should be able to do much better. However, Americans generally trust teachers to do their jobs well and feel they should be paid more, and recently there has been a consensus that the American higher education – college and university – system has long been the envy of the world. There is, at base, trust that we generally do better as a country if we educate our children and young people well.

Note that a primary reason that trust is at the bedrock of some of these national characteristics is that the rules governing them have been passed, over decades, by both Democratic and Republican elected officials who have agreed to them. There is, of necessity, a fair amount of compromise – and few of us are ever thrilled with compromise.

Despite democracy’s shortcomings, including the need to compromise, we Americans (and citizens of our sister democratic nations) disrespect countries that essentially operate dishonestly and corruptly – defying any laws that they might have, or operating in systems based on bribery, greed and the black market. We do not want to live in such countries. Also, at international levels, our diplomats often find it quite challenging to negotiate with corrupt representatives – the trust and reliability levels are very low. As the Allies realized, it was a huge mistake to try to appease Hitler…

Many of us believe that we in the US are on the brink of totalitarianism and the breakdown of the rule of law – if we are not there in many ways already. We believe that we have ample evidence – facts, Truth – that President Donald Trump is the quintessential corrupt, untrustworthy, anti-democratic, authoritarian leader. The facts – the Truth – include these: Trump is twice-impeached, adjudicated liable for sexual assault, indicted in four different jurisdictions, and a convicted and sentenced felon.

However, the Truth/Veritas factor goes beyond his personal history. Because he was a well-known “personality” even before he launched his presidential bid in 2015, he was already famous. Because he had published (co-written) a best-seller, The Art of the Deal, he was believed to be a highly successful businessman. Because he deftly used his fame and notoriety (and “friends” in many powerful media outlets) to spread his messages, he was able to bowl over all his GOP adversaries and ultimately win enough Electoral College votes and the presidency (although he did not win the popular vote) in 2016.

Unfortunately, as we learned in shocking, unprecedented fashion, Trump – and a cadre of loyal supporters – has taken a sledgehammer to Truth. We cannot possibly list here all the ways in which Trump – during his first presidential term, after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, during his 2024 campaign, and now as President again – has scammed millions of Americans with blatant, easily-provable lies. But by pointing out a selection we can see part of the problem – why the magnitude of his lies are so different from what we have historically witnessed from other politicians and thus so dangerous to our society.

• Trump and his Administration told over 30,000 misleading or false statements during his first term.
• Trump and his cronies have repeatedly disparaged immigrants with unfounded claims about crime: “immigrants – including undocumented immigrants – are less likely to commit crimes than the U.S.-born.”
• The bipartisan January 6th public hearings, which featured primarily Republican witnesses and often previous supporters of Trump, exposed an abundance of lies, fraud and conspiracy, as well as Trump’s overseeing of the use of false electors and providing false information in court proceedings.
• Trump and his cronies have repeated over and over again Russian/Putin talking points that Ukraine is responsible for the war and that President Volodymyr Zelensky is an unelected dictator.
• Trump claims, without evidence, that the economy he inherited from the Biden-Harris Administration was terrible. Although inflation was high (because of what Biden inherited, in part, from Trump’s gross mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic), and Americans despaired over high grocery bills, experts showed for four years that the American economy – under Biden – was among the strongest in the world.
• Trump 2.0 seems to have a fixation with issues around sexuality. (Hmmm…) Trump uses lies to engender Americans’ fear of transgender individuals – who comprise only approximately 0.6% of Americans 13 and older. In addition, incompetent Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, implying that “gay service members can’t be warriors and aren’t tough enough to serve in the military” – a clear lie – is using his authority to strip gay hero Harvey Milk’s name from the ship named after him.

The lies and misrepresentations go on and on, without end, from Trump and his supporters. They hurt fellow Americans, they give the US a black eye in the minds of our historic allies around the world, they destabilize our economy, and they pit Americans against each other – often for no reason.

Despite the fact that most of Trump’s lies are easily proven to be false, he became President for the second time. Why did millions of Americans vote for him? Taking a step backwards, why does our nation allow a blatant, pathological liar and convicted felon to even run for office in the first place?

Unlike some other countries, the US has no restriction on such persons running for the highest office in the land. Further, the far-right Supreme Court ruled in March 2024 – against several lower courts and conservative judicial experts – that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution did not actually say what it says: that someone (like Trump) could not hold office if he previously engaged in insurrection against the Constitution (which he did when he fostered the assault on the Capitol by his supporters on January 6, 2021). The Constitution gave us an out: the States could have left Trump off the November 2024 ballots, but SCOTUS twisted the law into a pretzel and led inexorably to the result we have now. (Maybe when the Democracy Coalition gains national power again, and we must believe that will happen, taking this up legislatively might be a good idea!)

However, the other important question, of course, is how did someone like Trump so successfully fool and win over millions of intelligent, patriotic, basically good American voters – citizens who presumably want the best for their families, friends, coworkers and fellow citizens? Democrats, or at least a certain swath of Democratic leaders, are engaged in somewhat agonizing analyses, hand-wringing, soul-searching, and other exercises to figure out what they did wrong to lose the November 2024 election. Some of the standard explanations may well have played parts: Biden’s age and his performance at his debate with candidate Trump in June 2024; the fact that Americans cannot get used to the idea of a woman president, no matter how qualified she might be; the notion that Trump has been better at “relating” to the supposed average American, especially on the issue of the economy; the idea that Democrats have not found the right way to get their messages of success and progress across. We might also add that millions of voters did not choose Trump at the ballot box but also did not choose Kamala Harris (perhaps because of racism and/or misogyny?), thereby helping to give Trump the win.

A major, and often overlooked, answer, however, lies in large part with the scourge of disinformation (lies) and its metastasis through innumerable, omnipresent social media platforms. Because of Trump’s (and others’) demonic ability to make people believe that down is up and white is black, much of our discourse has been turned upside down.

It only takes a few well-placed, emotionally-laden snippets – repeated over and over again – to create major smokescreens. Take some of these soundbites that have been so effectively used by the right not only recently but over decades:

• Government is the problem, not the solution.
• Minimum wages and rent control are economically disastrous.
• There’s no such thing as white privilege.
• The left are woke totalitarians trying to destroy free speech in the name of “social justice.”
• Socialized medicine will kill your Grandma.
• The welfare state will lead us down the “road to serfdom.”
• Academia is a radical indoctrination factory.
• There is a war on cops when we need to be tougher on crime.
• Transgender people are delusional and a threat.
• Abortion is murder.
• There is a war on Christianity.
• People should “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” and not need “handouts.”

Millions of Americans ingest, feed on, repeat and sincerely believe these and other falsehoods that come their way on a regular basis. The bottom line is that, if we truly want to enable the Democracy Coalition to succeed in future years, we MUST find ways to combat the rampant, deliberate lies that are overwhelming us.

Contrary to the well-worn headline that we are an extremely divided country politically, this is not the whole story. Polls – and common sense – tell us that the vast majority of Americans share many of the same values – civility, bipartisanship, “principles before politics,” being patriotic, sacrifice and community. Also, the rule of law, free speech and fair elections rank high for us Americans.

Therefore, it is essential that we rebuild what has been lost. Each of us has a responsibility to be reliable, truthful and trustworthy in our own lives, to support leaders and elected officials (among others) who tell the truth and do not deliberately lie to us, to combat rampant disinformation, to put a certain amount of faith in institutions that have generally served us well for decades, and to have a healthy skepticism toward people and ideologies that unnecessarily and unjustifiably erode trust and Truth.

Veritas is not just the motto of a prominent University that is doing battle against the authoritarianism of Trump 2.0: Veritas is assuredly essential to the smooth and fair operation of a democratic republic. Thus the erosion of Veritas, especially over the past 10 years as brought about by some of the most powerful people in the world, is extremely dangerous, not to mention scary and disheartening. But we who want democracy and the rule of law to win have to reclaim our own power and influence. We must stay hopeful and engaged. We do that in solidarity with like-minded people around the world – and we do not give up or give in.