Donald Trump’s ubiquitous spokeswoman, Kellyanne Conway, coined a new term in the new president’s first week. In an exchange about Inauguration Day turnout with NBC’s Chuck Todd, she called false White House claims of record-setting crowds "alternative facts".
While the term is likely to become a signature catchphrase, forever to be associated with Trump, Conway, her boss and press secretary Sean Spicer are playing a White House game that is nothing new.
Ron Ziegler, the late press secretary to president Richard Nixon, tried over four decades ago to characterise White House lies as something other than lies. Past falsehoods were "inoperative" during the Nixon administration, he explained, and corrections to the record simply became "operative".
"The president refers to the fact that there is new material; therefore, this is the operative statement," Ziegler said at a media briefing in the early 1970s. "The others are inoperative."
(Another Ziegler statement on secret White House tapes won an award from a group calling itself the Committee on Public Doublespeak of the National Council of Teachers of English.)
This is also a very old game for Trump, who has spent more than 40 years extravagantly and publicly lying to burnish his reputation, mislead the public about his track record as a businessman and draw attention to himself as a man-about-town.
Truthful Hyperbole
Trump partially owned up to this during his early ascent as a celebrity, when he and his ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, published The Art of the Deal in 1987. He described repeated exaggerations, falsehoods and doublespeak as tools he used to get ahead in business and life, and labelled them "truthful hyperbole".
Schwartz, at least, feels bad about this.
"‘Truthful hyperbole’ is a contradiction in terms," he told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer last year, in a mea culpa of sorts. "It’s a way of saying, ‘It’s a lie, but who cares?’"
Schwartz also told Mayer that he regretted his collaboration with Trump and that if he were to write the book today, he would title it The Sociopath.
Trump once sued me for libel, claiming that my 2005 biography of him, TrumpNation, had damaged his reputation and business prospects.
He lost the case in 2011, but during a deposition with my lawyers, Trump was revealed as having lied over the years more than 30 times about everything from the success of his business deals and how much debt he had, to his actual ownership stakes in joint ventures, sales at his condominiums and even his speaking fees.
"Trump’s falsehoods were unstrategic — needless, highly specific, easy to disprove," the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold and Robert O’Harrow Jr wrote of the deposition. During one exchange with my attorney during that deposition, Trump added another term to his lexicon of euphemisms for untruth: "Mental projections."
After boasting about the profitability and success of his golf developments, Trump conceded in the deposition that those claims were not based on anything other than his imagination; he had never undertaken a formal financial study of the projects’ performances or prospects.
"No, I have never done an analysis," Trump said.
"Have you ever done a projection as to how much you will profit on these courses over time in light of the contributions that you are making in cash?" my lawyer then asked.
"Yes, I’ve done mental projections," he said.
"Mental projections?"
"Yes."
"These are projections that you’ve done in your head?"
"Yes."
Rendering an Opinion
During last year’s presidential campaign, Trump lied repeatedly, asserting that then president Barack Obama and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton founded the Islamic State jihadist group; that "large-scale voter fraud" always happened on and before election day; that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the assassination of president John F Kennedy; that there were 30-million to 34-million illegal immigrants in the US; that he had always opposed the Iraq War, and so on.
Like Trump’s public relations advisers in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s — and like Spicer and Conway today — Trump surrogates are forced to rationalise Trump’s meanderings. "In his mind, he’s taking information and rendering an opinion," the developer Tom Barrack told CNN earlier this week, explaining how the new president came up with data points that no one else had, indicating that millions of people voted illegally in the presidential election.
In the past week, Conway has tried to rebrand "alternative facts" as "alternative information" and "incomplete information". The latter two are unlikely to be the phrases that stick, however. Even so, Conway continues repackaging Trumpisms with brio, telling the Hollywood Reporter this week of her zeal for her role and the power Trump has invested in her.
"If you see me on TV, it’s because he wants me there," she said. Spinning takes energy, however, and it requires unpeeling some moral glue to do it day
after day — especially in the Trump era, when misdirection and lies are likely to be
regular occurrences. For his part, Trump has done this
for decades and it hasn’t appeared to take much of a toll on him.
But the White House’s machinations are likely to take a toll on Conway, Spicer and Trump’s other advisers (as it did on some of their predecessors in decades past) if they decide to stay in the presidential arena for long.
Proximity to Donald Trump can be corrosive.
All of this is also likely to take a toll on a public that Trump has just settled in to serve for the next four years — unless Congress, the business community and other institutions join average citizens in standing up for the idea that old-fashioned facts do matter.
Bloomberg View
• O’Brien is author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald
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