Editor’s Note: Frida Ghitis, a former CNN producer and correspondent, is a world affairs columnist. She is a weekly opinion contributor to CNN, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post and a columnist for World Politics Review. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.
Yes, it’s happening again. Former President Donald Trump has taken center stage again and we’re about to become the targets of his relentless disinformation campaign, an effort that has proven astonishingly successful in creating a new reality for a large part of the electorate. That’s why Trump can be so hard to beat.
On Tuesday night, when he emerged at his Mar-a-Lago resort to declare victory in the Super Tuesday primaries, Trump unfurled an elaborate tapestry of misrepresentations, exaggerations and outright lies that jolted many of us to the reality of what lies ahead.
His dark vision of what America is today, so divorced from reality, is aimed at frightening voters into supporting him. And his surreally glossy reminiscence of his days in the White House seeks to convince Americans that all was great when he was president, now that the years may have clouded the worst of those angst-ridden days in the fog of our memory.
Fact-checking does not work against such well-practiced manipulations. It’s impossible to keep up. By the time judicious professionals bring up the truths that Trump has sought to bury, millions have already heard and accepted them, or at least absorbed the essence of Trump’s self-serving message.
Repeated regularly before a swarm of microphones and cameras, the lies come alive, the truth vanishes. The facts deployed later barely manage a scratch.
That is Trump’s pernicious superpower. He repurposed the snake-oil hawking skills of a salesman into the rabble-rousing rhetoric of a demagogue. A demagogue, Merriam-Webster tells us, is “a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power.” It’s almost a portrait of Trump and his Mar-a-Lago speech (and the ones that Americans will be bombarded with for the next eight months).
I found it particularly amusing, and more than a little galling, to hear Trump claim that because of President Joe Biden’s policies, “the world is laughing at us.” In fact, it was him that the world quite literally laughed at when he boasted at the United Nations in 2018 that “In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.” The solemn hall erupted in guffaws at the absurd claim.
Then there was the time when NATO leaders were caught on tape appearing to mock the strange behavior of the American president. Those were just some of the many times when Trump was ridiculed.
The significant possibility that Trump will become president again has left America’s allies in worried disbelief as they consider what a second term would do to global security, given Trump’s expressed admiration for dictators and disdain for NATO and other alliances.
If Trump was suggesting that the world has lost respect for the US under Biden, he got it backwards. Poll after poll shows that views of US leadership collapsed during his presidency, in some cases to record lows, and recovered strongly since Biden came to office.
Trump called Biden “the worst president in the history of our country.” But when American Political Science Association members were asked to rank US presidents from best to worst, guess who came dead last? Trump finished 45th out of 45, well below Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter. (Biden was 14th; Abraham Lincoln 1st). There was a reason for that. Few presidents have inflamed the country’s divisions more than him; none have been indicted, found responsible by juries for hundreds of millions worth of fraud and sexual abuse and launched an effort to overturn the results of a democratic election. But Trump’s speeches weave a fantasy that turns dark into light, and radiance into shadows.
As demagogues do, Trump tried to portray our times as filled with dread and danger, much as he did during his infamous “American Carnage” inaugural address in 2017. In his telling, the country is in the grip of rising crime, much of it he says is committed by sinister undocumented immigrants who are “invading” the country. As he has told us, they are “poisoning the blood” of America, using the preferred language of Adolf Hitler and White supremacists when seeking to rile up their base against a minority.
In reality, violent crime has recently declined rapidly, especially in large cities. Homicides, assault, rape, robbery are all down. But that’s not what most Americans believe, at least in part because political propaganda works. That menacing, distorted image of reality will help Trump, regardless of statistics.
In fact, it was under Trump when crime skyrocketed, with FBI numbers showing a near 30% jump in murders between 2019 and 2020, in the early days of the pandemic. Assault, robbery and rape all rose, too.
Of course there’s crime, and some is committed by migrants. Expect every act of violence by migrants, especially those with Hispanic names, to receive outsize attention, weaponized against Democrats.
Then there’s the economy, another area where Trump is gaslighting the country with some success.
“We had the best economy in the history of the world,” he bragged about his presidency. But the economy has performed even better under Biden by almost any measure. Under Biden, more than 14 million new jobs have been created, an average of 400,000 a month. Compare that to the 176,000 monthly average under Trump before the pandemic. (A pandemic, by the way, that Trump mismanaged to the point that the wealthiest country on Earth became one of the world’s hardest hit.)
The overall economy, GDP, has grown faster under Biden than it did under Trump, even ignoring the pandemic disaster, with unemployment reaching a 50-year-low.
Inflation remains a problem, another after-effect of the pandemic, but it’s falling fast.
Trump lied about having achieved “energy independence” during his term and seemed to suggest US oil output is weaker because of Biden. In reality, the United States is producing more oil than ever. More oil, in fact, than any country has ever produced. Biden is not destroying the oil industry.
When one hears Trump’s ominous warnings, it’s helpful to recall his market prognostication. “If Biden wins,” he predicted confidently during the 2020 campaign, “you’re gonna have a stock market collapse, the likes of which you’ve never had.”
Then the stock market climbed to record after record, powered by an economy that has defied recession forecasts. After one of those records, the Biden campaign dug up the clip of Trump predicting market doom.
“Good one, Donald,” Biden joked on X.
That was Biden and his campaign confronting Trump and his followers with the truth. But they are up against a mighty power, the power of brazen, shameless, incessantly repeated lies.
It’s a challenge for Biden, to overcome Trump’s practiced tactics – the Washington Post clocked 30,573 lies and misleading claims during his presidency. It is the duty of the media to cover his campaign without magnifying the destructive impact of his endless salvos of lies. It’s no easy task.