The Press, the Government, and the Culture of Lies

 

     We all know that Donald Trump lies with every breath, and that literally nothing he says can be trusted beyond the next sentence out of his mouth. Okay, we’re used to that.

What we’re not used to, and need to be horrified by, is that the executive branch of the federal government is doing much the same thing. In matters affecting our health and welfare — literally our lives and deaths — all communication from our most vital agencies must now be assumed to contain MAGA propaganda. A culture of lies has taken over, and our own government cannot be trusted any further than we can trust Trump.

Yes, there are many countries whose citizens have been through far worse, and for much longer than our single year in hell. They might be laughing at our panic, had not so many of them moved here to get away from the very thing they now see happening to their neighbors.

But our homegrown, low-interest citizens have been a bit slow to see what’s going on. They don’t make the connection between ICE arrests and their mom’s nursing home having nobody to change the bedpans. Or between the migrants rounded up and the crops that don’t get picked. Or between the crops that don’t get picked and the price of everything we eat. Or between the deported construction workers and the obscene cost of housing.

But glimmers are being reported, as 2026 shapes up to be the Year of FAFO. There are now three-time Trump voters out there whose spouses of twenty-plus years have been deported. There are three-time Trump voters out there actively losing their jobs, their homes, their farms, their health insurance, and their nearest hospital.

There are also plenty of three-time Trump voters — sadly, as many as 37 percent of the electorate — who will never learn, and who will believe any lie they’re told about how they got into their current situation. Their ignorance will continue to be bliss, until it’s not.

The legacy media has no such excuse. In no way are they ignorant of the culture of lies. They just insist on pretending it’s not happening. But Bleeding Minnesota seems to have brought into sharp relief just how corrosive so much lying can be.

We expect this administration to lie with the same fluency as Trump, if that’s even possible. But we expect more from our mainstream press, especially the New York Times, in calling out the lies, or at the very least not perpetuating them.

I single out the Times, not just because I wish they would stop enabling these repulsive people, but also because we can no longer look to the Washington Post for a second opinion —or for any kind of responsible journalism.

And let me say, as I have in the past, that it’s not so much the reporters in these organizations who are letting us down. The raw news does get gathered and more-or-less disseminated, at least for now. Nor is it necessarily their op-ed columnists, who have, for the most part, had no problem calling out the spectacular mendacity of the Bondis, Noems, Millers, and the like.

But it’s their editors, the guys doing the bidding of the corporate owners, who seem invested in perpetuating that mendacity. These are the guys who slant the headlines, arrange the home page, and turn the clicks into bucks, and they continue, quite ludicrously, to pretend that Trump is just another statesman whose presidential “style” remains “controversial.”

To that end, they sane-wash his embarrassingly public dementia, pretending to intuit coherent policy positions from his stream-of-consciousness rants and midnight rage tweets. As if coherence can be wrung from a rock.

Almost worse, is that they pretend the people around Trump are human beings, as opposed to malignancies. When the press gives disingenuous deference to their offices, it lends them a seriousness — and even worse, a credibility — that they’ve neither earned nor deserve. It’s the most corrosive kind of complicity from career journalists who know better, and I still don’t get it.

And strangely, this complicity is happening just as a new era in reportage is taking hold, where eyewitness videos can be out on the internet before Pam Bondi can even think up her first lie. 

This creates a new paradigm of sorts, for dealing with events like the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Using only phone videos, the reporters and techies can take graphic footage of each shooting, from multiple angles, and do a complete second-by-second analysis. This makes it unmistakably clear what happened, thereby underscoring both the legal evidence of fascist violence, and the lies being told to whitewash it.

And yet, these same media remain so shackled to their both-sides narrative that they run, right next to that same analysis, a story about “conflicting accounts” of what happened. Like there’s some doubt that a trigger-happy ICE thug should be getting the benefit of. Whenever a story like this gets framed as a conflict — as a he-said-she-said — it lends instant legitimacy to right-wing conspiracy nuts straining to crank up any explanation for what was, to all the world, an assassination in plain sight.

It’s also worth restating the obvious: The media think it’s good business to scare the shit out of us. How else will they keep us clicking? So whenever Trump pulls some new distraction out of his butt — anything to change the subject from the Epstein files — they go right along with it, giving credence to fears that are visceral but usually unfounded.

When Trump first hinted that the midterms should be cancelled, or nationalized, or whatever he said this week, the Times published at least three days’ worth of fevered stories about the sky falling in. Few if any of those stories addressed Trump’s credibility on the subject, or whether there is any mechanism short of a complete military takeover of the country that could let such a thing happen.

Would Trump love to cancel the midterms? Absolutely. Can he actually do it? Probably not, but that’s where the Times might’ve helped us out. They might’ve told us that the chances of Trump pulling off such a thing, while not exactly zero, are pretty close to zero. But if they told us that, what would we stress about? By pretending Trump’s silliest tirades are real policy, the media only succeeds in panicking us.

Same deal with the disgusting Obama meme from last week, another non-story that’s a waste of good outrage. Yes, it was repugnant, but why would we dignify it with any reaction at all? Did we just figure out that Trump and the people around him are racists? Gee, who knew?

Let’s be like the Obamas, and save our outrage for the important stuff. Because we’re going to get a lot more practice at it. Trump will be escalating all his worst tendencies between now and the midterms — and probably beyond. When we give oxygen to these tendencies it just agitates us, while playing into his hands.

So it’s on us to stop falling for it. Whenever we see some newly-minted piece of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, transphobia, or grand larceny — no matter how vile — we need to take a deep breath, and point to the Epstein files.

We also need to take every opportunity to remind the legacy media that there is a demented serial sex offender in the White House who knows he should be in prison and will do anything he can to stay in power for that reason, and that most of his actions and behaviors can be explained by that one overarching truth.

Any journalism that denies, avoids, or bends over backward to justify these actions and behaviors must be regarded as suspect.