Trump’s Most Malicious Legacy
“We are entering into an epistemological crisis,” Barack Obama recently told my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg.
The crisis didn’t begin with the Trump presidency, but it rapidly accelerated over the course of its term—and the situation has, if anything, grown worse in the aftermath of the presidential election.
According to one poll, 70 percent of Republicans say they don’t believe that the 2020 election was free and fair. According to another, 77 percent of Trump backers say President-elect Joe Biden won because of fraud. And a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 68 percent of Republicans said they were concerned that the 2020 election was “rigged,” and that only 29 percent believed that Biden had “rightfully won.” More than half of Republicans said Trump “rightfully won” but the election was stolen from him because of widespread voter fraud that favored Biden, claims that are hallucinatory.
[Uri Friedman: The damage will last]
This may be Donald Trump’s most enduring legacy—a nihilistic political culture, one that is tribalistic, distrustful, and sometimes delusional, swimming in conspiracy theories. The result is that Americans are disoriented and frustrated, fearful of and often enraged at one another.
Donald Trump didn’t invent misinformation and disinformation; they have been around for much” and diminishing trust in sources of factual information—exploited them more effectively than anyone else has in American history.
