How The "Post-Truth Era" Began

Romney wasn’t the last Republican establishment nominee. He was the nominee who established the GOP as the party of lies.

According to the lead story on the New York Times website on Christmas morning, "the Obama-Romney race in 2012 was the last in a familiar pattern in U.S. politics."

In Nate Cohn's telling, "Until Mr. Trump, there was a lot about American politics that you could take for granted... That all changed when Mr. Trump came down the escalator."

Obama, who defeated Romney by 5 million votes in 2012, "won by a modest margin," Cohn tells us. (If that's a modest margin, how would he describe Trump's three consecutive failures to top 50%?)

As Trump assembles a rogue's gallery of billionaires to fill his new Cabinet, Cohn tells readers that Trump is a man of the people who "champions the working class" and "rails against elites." He insists that Trump's "conservative populism" caused a historic "realignment" that turned "former Obama supporters" like Elon Musk and RFK, Jr into MAGA Republicans and left conservatives like the Cheneys, the Romneys, and Paul Ryan "without a home."

As part of this realignment, there are now "plausible areas of bipartisan consensus, with Republicans seemingly receptive to labor and spending on infrastructure."

The New York Times fails again

I'm old enough to remember when Elon Musk almost shut down the government so he could build a bigger factory in China.

Because that was last Friday.

I'm also old enough to remember when RFK, Jr. called Trump "a terrible president" and a "threat to democracy."

Because that was this year.

Does Nate Cohn really want us to believe that the Musk supports Trump because of conservative populism designed to help America's working class? Does he not remember that time Trump and Musk had a good chuckle about firing striking workers?

Because that was four months ago.

It's also wrong for Cohn to suggest that the Cheneys, the Romneys, and Paul Ryan have turned away from Trump's GOP simply because of "conservative populism." In reality, all have rejected Trump for issues of character and criminality, and his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

Cohn also fails to point out that Trump didn't deliver on his populist promises the first time round. His entire article acts as if Trump's populist rhetoric has been (and will be) backed by actual policies, as opposed to a record of failure, corruption and incompetence that harmed the poor, allowed factories to close, bankrupted farms and coal mines, and left America sicker, poorer, and weaker—with 3M fewer jobs and $8T more debt.

And infrastructure? GTFOOH. Trump not only failed, repeatedly, on infrastructure, he also tried to sabotage Biden's historic infrastructure deal.

Meanwhile, Cohn also fails to mention that the only things guaranteed in a second Trump term are more unpopular tax cuts for the rich, more unpopular attacks on immigrants, women, minorities, education, Social Security and Medicare—and a looming takeover of the government's "IT department" by maniac tech fascists and crypto bros.

Sanewashing a Lame Duck

As Trump re-enters the White House, the new political era will be defined less by the aging, term-limited psychopath and more by the actual head of The Mump Regime, Elon Musk.

As Cohn, The New York Times and the corporate media at large continue to sanewash and suck up to Trump, what they are failing to cover is the actual reality of "the new political era."

It's an era not defined by policies, but by lies and con artistry. It's a "post-truth" era in which Trump's and the GOP's success have been made possible by a media ecosystem designed to expand the number of "poorly educateds" in America—and by the new tools, tactics and trickery that have enabled Republicans (and Musk) to get them to the polls.

Trump became the celebrity face of Republican post-truth politics. But he didn't invent it. He definitely didn't define it. And he has never worked alone.

Romney was the first "post-truth" GOP nominee

I'm also old enough to remember that time in 2008 when John McCain showed that remaining connected to the truth still mattered by refusing to let a racist woman call Obama an "Arab."

That notion was abandoned in 2012 by Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. Their campaign waged an all-out war on truth in which they were willing to say, as David Corn wrote in Mother Jones, "whatever needs to be said to win, reality and facts be damned."

The Republican war on truth is nothing new. Rush Limbaugh, who dominated talk radio in the 1990s, is now remembered for "the destruction of truth, the manipulation of his audience and the promotion of conspiracies." Fox News launched in 1996 with the Orwellian slogan "Fair and Balanced." In 2003, Al Franken even wrote a book called Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.

Though it took a year like 2016 (dominated by Trump and Brexit) to make "post-truth" the word of the year, it was the Romney-Ryan campaign that first took "win-at-all-costs" lying to a truly detached-from-reality level.

As Obama told young supporters at a rally in Virginia in August 2012:

"Somebody was challenging one of their ads, they just—they made it up about work and welfare… Every outlet said, 'this is just not true.' And they were asked about it and they said—one of their campaign people says: We won't have the fact checkers dictate our campaign. We will not let the truth get in the way."

Obama was commenting on what Romney pollster Neil Newhouse had famously said at an ABC News panel in Tampa, Florida. Asked why the Romney campaign continued running attack ads filled with easily disproved lies, Newhouse said: "we're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers."

Lying was so integral to the Romney-Ryan strategy that the supposedly "wonky" Paul Ryan was routinely caricatured as Pinocchio and became forever known on Twitter as "Lyin' Ryan."

To claim with a straight face, as Cohn does, that Trump's election wins were based on "populist" appeals to working class voters ignores the reality that Trump's populist appeal is based entirely on selling a fictional narrative.

His storytelling is tested and shaped by conservative voices on social media, then given a sheen of respectability by hosts and grifters on Fox News and other right-wing media, and then reliably amplified by politicians and pundits on "mainstream" media such as CNN and Meet the Press.

Trump's re-election was made possible by Republican voters who were programmed to forgive his numerous crimes against America and spoon-fed false and outrageously manipulated stories about illegal immigrants, pets in Ohio, trans women, and big-city crime.

The biggest lie of all, that the Biden economy sucked, evaporated faster than a migrant caravan the moment Trump won.

"Believe what you want" is the mantra of the current era

Nate Cohn contends that the Romney-Ryan campaign marked the end of an era in Republican politics.

My concern is that New York Times readers will simply accept and parrot this flawed and lazy analysis. That they will "memory-hole" Mitt Romney's and Paul Ryan's dastardly roles in paving the way for Trump.

In 2012, the so-called party of business, family values and personal responsibility literally announced that they were willing to abandon truth if it helped them gain power.

In a world where facts no longer mattered, the Romney-Ryan message to voters was "believe what you want."

Trump, Musk and others have tapped into that new reality. They know that telling stories that inflame prejudices, stir resentments and excite emotions are far more likely to motivate low-info voters than boring facts, informed reporting, or even old-fashioned expertise.

Mitt Romney shouldn't be remembered as the Republicans' last establishment nominee. He should be remembered as the nominee who established the GOP as the party of lies.

P.S. Cohn's article reminded me of something I wrote in 2013, when Open Rights Group invited me to contribute an essay about news consumption for their "ORG Zine" site. As it seems that particular site is no longer being maintained, I've pasted the whole essay below.

The one true account of the history of news

(originally posted Feb. 2013)

Once upon a time there was news. Things happened. Smart journalists were assigned to report and write about these events. An all-powerful editor decided how the stories should be assembled and displayed in a way that best indicated their relative importance to the community. And the world, in the form of a newspaper, was delivered directly to your doorstep.

"News" was a real-life storybook with a beginning, middle and an end.

We believed in it.

"News" was the way we, as individuals, could make sense of the world at least once a day.

We agreed this to be true.

Plus, the "news" was mostly good. Suddenly, it was the 1990s! The economy was strong. America was not at war.

We were happy.

And then it was 1996. We all had cable TV. And 20 million of us were waiting patiently for our dial-up internet connection to go through. But "news" was still news. Despite the predictions of media experts, CNN hadn't killed newspapers or even newsmagazines. In fact, when big stuff happened live or was given saturation coverage on CNN, print sales went up as people's desire to read about what happened, to understand it, to put it into the context of our shared history, actually increased.

Along came a Fox.

Until Fox News launched in 1996, nobody knew how unfair and unbalanced the news was. Thankfully, Fox rectified that. It helped America understand that a blowjob in the White House was the only thing we needed to worry about, despite whatever Osama Bin Laden might have been planning.

By 2000, Fox News was so powerful that when it hired a cousin of George W. Bush and allowed him to award the 2000 Presidential Election to George W. Bush even though the election was still "too close to call" by any traditional journalistic standards, all the other networks went along with the plan. (Later, when traditional journalistic organisations actually counted all the votes, it turned out Al Gore had actually won. But I guess we should just get over it and stop being such sore losers, right?)

1996 also saw the launch of a comedy program called The Daily Show which, in the era of the "fake news" disseminated by Fox News, quickly became one of the most trusted news sources in the world.

You know the rest, right?

Terror attacks. Phony intelligence. Fake wars. Torture. The New York Times goes along with it all. Holy shit, what kind of world is this?

We weren't happy.

Nothing was true.

We couldn't trust anyone.

Except maybe bloggers. And citizen journalists. And social media. And suddenly, now, what's in the newspapers and on the TV doesn't actually matter anymore. The only thing that matters is the news we choose to read and share and tweet and joke about. And our Klout scores.

Your mind is being polluted. Unless you agree with me.

When I joined TIME Magazine in 1992, one of the things we believed in was the ability of a news organization to separate the "news" from the "noise."

In the past 20 years, the noise has multiplied and the traditional news organization has shrunk to the point where it often lacks the ability to be heard above the din. Media consolidation has put control of the mass media in the hands of very few people. The audience for news has been fragmented and polarized. In the US, that divides between the Fox News/Drudge Report/Rush Limbaugh vision of the world and The New York Times/MSNBC/Huffington Post way of seeing things. It's creating a world of misinformation, ignorance, division, and bumper sticker insults offered as wisdom. Meanwhile, the celebrities, business people and politicians covered in the "news" know the game is no longer about telling the truth but about working the refs.

Everyone lies. (And unless they are on our team, it's unforgivable.)

Facts don't matter. (That one's true. Mitt Romney told us.)

You can't trust anyone. (Not journalists. Not the government. Not the media. Not even Lance Armstrong.)

We now live in an age in which the internet is the newspaper. Where the paper of record has been replaced by the tweet of the moment. Where a journalist's success is measured not by the quality of her work, but by the traffic it generates. Where a fake news story from The Onion becomes a major feature in China's People's Daily and we think that's funny. Where twice-elected President Obama is either a pragmatic centrist or Hitler, depending on the audience. Where honest debate is polluted by PR people or drowned by trolls. And nothing ever stops. And making sense of the world is literally impossible. It's an age where you're either a cynic or a dittohead, so you better pick a side. And, in case I wasn't clear, print is dead.

Thus concludes The One True Account of the History of News. If you don't like it, read a different version. Or write one yourself. Believe what you want. The news is all yours.

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P.P.S. This really is the time to get off X once and for all. Please find me on Bluesky and these other places.