Trust Issues
The Orange Elephant in the Room
Public trust is eroding for plenty of reasons, but let’s not discount the man at the heart of it all
The presidency of Donald J. Trump and the campaign he ran to get to the White House have been fueled by lies and misinformation that undermine the public’s trust in government and the electoral process and subvert the very idea of objective truth. The implications could not be more serious. The barrage of lies and conspiracy theories we are being subjected to today — from President Trump, his Republican enablers, and the right-wing media that amplifies his message — are normalizing mendacity, suspicion, and disdain for the rule of law.
This “firehose of falsehood” (to borrow a term used to describe the high-intensity stream of propaganda spewed forth by the Kremlin to engulf Russia in a fog of disinformation) foments cynicism, mistrust, and chronic emotional exhaustion. As Hannah Arendt pointed out in her 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, the resulting lack of trust makes people reach the point where they “would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”
In such a world, people can’t make informed choices at the ballot box. In fact, if they come to…
