President Trump has provided his opponents abundant material with which to criticize him. His Twitter feed as commander in chief is similar to what it was when he was a candidate: an early-morning soapbox about cable news and what bothers him. It often gets him into trouble. So do his policy planks and his efforts to make them law, such as his travel ban order and the GOP health care bill. That he followed through on bombing the stuffing out of ISIS in Afghanistan isn’t surprising; that his military assertiveness unexpectedly includes Syria has given some of his isolationist supporters fits. Mar-a-Lago has become a place more specific than just the southern White House—it’s the southern situation room, from where he ordered the strike on Bashar al-Assad’s airfield and monitored a North Korean missile test with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe at his side and resort-goers in proximity. The president’s trips there have prompted security concerns.
With all these the realities of the new administration in just the first 100 days, there would figure to be little incentive to make false attacks against Trump, an astonishing development for our politics of distortion. But that conclusion implies there’s enough hard substance at some point—say, a 42-percent approval rating—to dial down the exaggeration and hyperbole. That’s not how the game is played.
Look no further than Easter Sunday. A pollster at a Democratic-founded firm, Matt McDermott, tweeted at 8:39 a.m., “The Obama’s [sic] spent every Easter attending church service. Trump hasn’t attended church once since his inauguration. Where’s the GOP outrage?” The tweet featured four photos of the former first family, all presumably at Easter services or walking to or from them. It has received 33,000 retweets, well beyond the indefinable threshold that constitutes something “viral.”
About two hours later, Trump attended church in Palm Beach, Florida, with the first lady. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski made McDermott aware of the development. Instead of deleting the tweet or even acknowledging the relevance of what Kaczynski stated, McDermott deflected.
“Eh, the hypocrisy still stands,” McDermott wrote. “[W]e had people who spent 8 years calling the president a Muslim, now holding up Trump as ‘a true Christian.'” This charge of “hypocrisy” replaced the original point of the tweet: that Trump hadn’t attended church. Kaczynski observed as much. McDermott didn’t back down.
The tweet “wasn’t factually inaccurate when it was posted, nor (unless I totally missed it) was it on [the White House] schedule this AM where it should’ve been!” he continued. Yet another defense: That the White House needs to be more transparent in disclosing the president’s activities. Fair, but immaterial. “Yeah I get that it’s a mistake and was accurate at the time,” Kaczynski wrote, “but right now it’s mega viral and spreading misinformation.”
McDermott’s response: “There’s no reason for things like this not to be on [the] public schedule.”
It’s like this: One minute you show up in Vegas for a bachelor party, and the next you wake on the hotel roof. You may ask yourself, “How did I get here?” The tweet remained at the time of this article’s publication.
McDermott is hardly the only Trump detractor to use misinformation against the administration or its Republican allies in recent weeks. Rachel Maddow, whose platforms are relatively humongous, was among the first to misinterpret a Congressional Budget Office report as saying the GOP’s American Health Care Act would cause 24 million people to “lose” insurance. Her take received more than 52,000 retweets. The talking point spread with electric speed and the legislation was zapped. Maddow also teased a show on Trump’s tax returns in February, which received nearly 84,000 retweets. More than 4 million viewers watched the actual program, which revealed only that Trump had actually paid $38 million in taxes in 2005.
Trump’s ascension and staying power, of course, owe something to how effectively his campaign used half-truths and outright fabrications to support his platform. The president’s conduct, not just his policies, can set the agenda for the entire capital. Skewing information is old hat in politics. But Trump has been more overt and shown little restraint, and the nation’s many political apparatuses have taken his behavior as an invitation.
Not that they need to. The president and the new Congress have given us a buffet of issues to chew on. Why choose red herring?
