Truth Still Matters

 

Victory in the Wisconsin state supreme court race with a record turnout gives democracy advocates plenty of reason for optimism. Money cannot buy everything. Lottery gimmicks and deceptive ads just might have less impact than Elon Musk and his deputy (Donald J. Trump) would hope. That raises the question: Are mere lies the all-powerful weapon that MAGA politicians imagine?

Some of Trump’s most egregious lies have imploded…spectacularly. During the campaign, Donald Trump and his toadies insisted that tariffs would not raise prices. Tariffs, in fact, would make inflation vanish! By December, he said he couldn’t guarantee tariffs wouldn’t raise prices. In early March, he conceded tariffs might cause some...“disturbance.”

Now he denies he “ever” said otherwise. Moreover, he doesn’t care if consumers get slammed. “I couldn’t care less. I hope they raise their prices, because if they do, people are gonna buy American-made cars. We have plenty.” (No word on how American cars, whose parts will be demolished by tariffs, are going to escape price hikes.) Mad King Donald wants more tariffs! Bigger tariffs! The Biggest!

His announcement on Wednesday, proclaimed under a “Make America Great Again” banner, had the whiff of President George W. Bush’s disastrous “Mission Accomplished” speech. In Trump’s case, we will await Republicans’ explanation as to how new consumer taxes (tariffs) make us wealthier. Once upon a time, they used to ridicule such sophistry.

The damage from his lying and economic illiteracy has only begun to be felt. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Worries about tariffs and the economy sent the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite to their worst quarters since 2022, a setback that is pushing some investors overseas.” His tariffs are also decreasing, not increasing (as promised), domestic manufacturing. Bloomberg reports:

U.S. factory activity contracted in March for the first time this year and prices accelerated sharply for a second month as the drumbeat of higher tariffs reverberated through the economy. Investors and consumers alike see a gathering storm.

“Policy uncertainty and new sweeping tariffs from the Trump administration are combining to create a stag-flationary outlook for the U.S. economy,” CNBC reports. “[A]veraging forecasts from 14 economists for GDP and inflation, [we will see] first quarter growth registering an anemic 0.3% compared with the 2.3% reported in the fourth quarter of 2024. It would be the weakest growth since 2022 as the economy emerged from the pandemic.”

So, was/is Trump an economic ignoramus, or just a pathological liar? Both, most likely. It is precisely because his lies promote policies that wreak such havoc that news outlets, Democrats, and anyone who cares about truth must reject the notion that fact-checking no longer matters. Eliminating it would normalize (a.k.a. memory-hole) his lies and allow for the magnitude of the lies and their consequences to escape notice.

What we need is a different sort of fact-checking that captures the plethora and consequences of lying. Trump lies about most everything—from inventing the “invasion” by Venezuelans to blaming Ukraine for a war Russia started to insisting the timing of attack planes is not classified intel.

Only lies (e.g., President Biden left him the worst economy ever, we have been overrun by migrants, Biden killed manufacturing, Democrats—not him and Elon!—weaponized the justice system ) can justify extreme, unconstitutional and/or deeply unpopular policies (e.g., massive tax cuts for the super-rich, snatching students off the street, inflation-producing tariffs, trampling on law firms and clients’ 1^st, 5^th, and 6^th Amendment rights).

Trump invents his own rationale, or the last one he heard (“Panama is doing...something unfair” or “Our national security demands we have Greenland!”) to launch another boneheaded policy that is indefensible on real-world merits.

-The Contrarian