A few months back, I witnessed an exchange on a friend’s Facebook page. This person had posted something factually inaccurate to make a political point. Someone else politely pointed out that the information was not true. A third person then joined in, saying why the original “fact” was so convincing. When the second responded that it was not convincing because it was not a factual statement, the newcomer replied, “Fuck you. How’s that for a factual statement?”
Her profile photo identified her as a supporter of Donald Trump.
We all know that the new president lies as often as he breathes, and does not even seem aware that he is doing it. It seems to be a pathology with him. But while his spokespeople have been masters of obfuscation and evasion, it was not clear until they actually moved into the White House that they would be prepared to lie outright, to the media and to the public.
On Sunday, press secretary Sean Spicer appeared before the White House press corps for the very first time, and launched into an angry diatribe in which he lied five times in less than six minutes, before storming off without taking a single question (which former correspondents said was unprecedented). Watching Spicer, I saw something beyond anger: He seemed scared.
President Trump reportedly became increasingly angry throughout the day Saturday, as reports of the crowd size for his inauguration were juxtaposed with coverage of at least three million Americans taking to the streets. It seemed to me that Spicer had been reamed out by his boss and pushed out on stage to say things he must have known were not true. Bret Baier said on Fox News Sunday that Spicer “was clearly was told to get out there and do this,” while Chris Matthews said on NBC’s Meet the Press that Spicer seemed aware “that every word he spoke was being watched in real time or later by Donald Trump.”
Spicer’s lies were about the silliest of things: the crowd size at Trump’s inauguration. It was obvious to any observer that the crowds did not come close to matching those that greeted President Obama in 2009, and this should have been no surprise: Obama won by 10 million votes in 2008, and was the nation’s first black president. Only a man as insecure as Trump would feel threatened by being unable to match that. Instead, he had Spicer turn a soon-to-be-forgotten statistic into a multi-day news event.
And it got worse. Asked by NBC’s Chuck Todd why Spicer had appeared for “the very first time in front of that podium to utter a provable falsehood,” Kellyanne Conway first threatened to pull White House access from NBC (“If we’re to keep referring to our press secretary in those types of terms, I think that we’re going to have to rethink our relationship here”), before uttering the instantly infamous line, “You’re saying it’s a falsehood and Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that.” To his credit, Todd replied, “Alternative facts are not facts, they’re falsehoods.”
As Samantha Bee displayed in a must-watch segment last week, Conway has been a master at running out the clock on questioners. But after her Meet the Press appearance, coverage of both Conway and Spicer was damning, saying Trump was introducing “an ‘alternative’ reality,” that we were in an Orwellian era, and that Spicer’s initial remarks were “false,” “not true,” and “flat-out wrong.”
Lies have been rebranded alt-facts as brazenly as neo-Nazis were rebranded the alt-right, and national security experts warn that it could get much more serious. If the President of the United States will dispatch his team to lie about something as trivial as crowd size, “by next week, it could be how many troops were killed, and who was responsible for the attack.”