39using racial slurs crop up faster than social-media platforms can
remove them. As news outlets scramble to correct the inaccura-
cies, hordes of Twitter bots respond by smearing and threatening
reporters. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has spent the final days
of the race pumping out Facebook ads at such a high rate that no
one can keep track of what they’re injecting into the bloodstream.
After the first round of exit polls is released, a mysteriously
sourced video surfaces purporting to show un documented immi-
grants at the ballot box. Trump begins retweeting rumors of voter
fraud and suggests that Immigration and
Customs Enforcement officers should be
dispatched to polling stations. are il legals
stealing the election? reads the Fox
News chyron. are russians behind false
videos? demands MSNBC.
The votes haven’t even been counted
yet, and much of the country is ready to
throw out the result.
NOTHING IS TRUE
There is perhaps no better place to witness
what the culture of disinformation has
already wrought in America than a Trump
campaign rally. One night in November, I
navigated through a parking-lot maze of
folding tables covered in MAGA merch
and entered the BancorpSouth Arena in
Tupelo, Mississippi. The election was still
a year away, but thousands of sign-waving
supporters had crowded into the venue to
cheer on the president in person.
Once Trump took the stage, he let loose
a familiar flurry of lies, half-lies, hyperbole,
and nonsense. He spun his revisionist his-
tory of the Ukraine scandal— the one
in which Joe Biden is the villain—and
claimed, falsely, that the Georgia Demo-
crat Stacey Abrams wanted to “give illegal
aliens the right to vote.” At one point, during a riff on abortion,
Trump casually asserted that “the governor of Virginia executed a
baby”—prompting a woman in the crowd to scream, “Murderer!”
This incendiary fabrication didn’t seem to register with my
companions in the press pen, who were busy writing stories and
shooting B-roll. I opened Twitter, expecting to see a torrent of
fact-checks laying out the truth of the case—that the governor had
been answering a hypothetical question about late-term abortion;
that a national firestorm had ensued; that there were certainly
different ways to interpret his comments but that not even the
most ardent anti-abortion activist thought the governor of Vir-
ginia had personally “executed a baby.”
But Twitter was uncharacteristically quiet (apparently the
president had said this before), and the most widely shared tweet
I found on the subject was from his own campaign, which had
blasted out a context-free clip of the governor’s abortion com-
ments to back up Trump’s smear.
After the rally, I loitered near one of the exits, chatting with
people as they filed out of the arena. Among liberals, there is a
comforting caricature of Trump supporters as gullible personality
cultists who have been hypnotized into believing whatever their
leader says. The appeal of this theory is the implication that the
spell can be broken, that truth can still triumph over lies, that
someday everything could go back to normal—if only these vot-
ers were exposed to the facts.
But the people I spoke with in
Tupelo seemed to treat matters
of fact as beside the point.
One woman told me that,
given the president’s accom-
plishments, she didn’t care if
he “fabricates a little bit.” A
man responded to my ques-
tions about Trump’s dis honest
attacks on the press with a
shrug and a suggestion that
the media “ought to try telling
the truth once in a while.” Tony
Willnow, a 34-year-old main-
tenance worker who had an
American flag wrapped around
his head, observed that Trump
had won because he said things
no other politician would say.
When I asked him if it mat-
tered whether those things were
true, he thought for a moment
before answering. “He tells you
what you want to hear,” Will-
now said. “And I don’t know if
it’s true or not—but it sounds
good, so fuck it.”
The political theorist Han-
nah Arendt once wrote that
the most successful totalitar-
ian leaders of the 20th century
instilled in their followers “a mixture of gullibility and cyni-
cism.” When they were lied to, they chose to believe it. When
a lie was debunked, they claimed they’d known all along—and
would then “admire the leaders for their superior tactical clever-
ness.” Over time, Arendt wrote, the onslaught of propaganda
conditioned people to “believe everything and nothing, think
that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”
Leaving the rally, I thought about Arendt, and the swaths of
the country that are already gripped by the ethos she described.
Should it prevail in 2020, the election’s legacy will be clear—not
a choice between parties or candidates or policy platforms, but
a referendum on reality itself.McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic.E V E NTUA LLY,
THE FEAR
OF COVERT
PROPAGANDA
INFLICTS AS
MUCH DAMAGE
AS THE
PROPAGANDA
ITSELF.