http://www.politico.eu/article/trump-an ... -at-birth/
I'm not in 100% agreement with everything in the article (it's written by a former high ranking Obama State department official) but in terms of the analysis of Trump's cynical contempt for truth and manipulation of reality and the comparison with Putin's techniques, I think it's spot on.Trump and Putin: Two liars separated at birth?
No wonder they seem to like each other; they are akin in their abuse of the truth.
Among the many dangers of Donald Trump is that he will make the United States “great” again in exactly the way that the GOP front-runner’s one-time admirer, Vladimir Putin, claims he is making Russia “great” again.
In other words, fraudulently.
In Russia today, thanks to Putin, spectacle, theater and lying pervade the media, confuse the discourse and have turned the viewing public into an electorate that no longer seems to care about the truth. The Russian people have grown indifferent to or remain in denial of the basic truth of present-day Russia: that in exchange for the order Putin promised them in 2000, he has brought them corruption, economic and social decline, international denunciation, and partial diplomatic isolation. The geopolitical posturing of his temporary intervention in Syria has not changed that....
...All this serves Putin’s purpose of imposing whatever truth he pleases. In the past two years alone the Russian president has uttered a stream of fact-defying statements that could easily rival Trump’s. In March 2014, after Crimea was seized by what journalists called “little green men”—soldiers of mysterious provenance—Putin insisted they were local militia, but the next month he admitted Russian troops had invaded the peninsula.
In June of that year, Putin stated there was no Russian military presence in eastern Ukraine, but in December he admitted Russian military personnel had been and were there. In September 2015, Putin declared he was sending troops to Syria to fight the Islamic State, but focused instead on saving Bashar Assad; when he announced his recent drawdown, he said Russia’s objectives had largely been met, even though the Islamic State received only a small proportion of airstrikes and remained a threat.
And on the domestic front, a fact-check of a December 2015 Putin news conference by the online newspaper Meduza highlighted six alleged lies he told on topics including toll rates between cars and commercial trucks, parking fees in Moscow and foreign adoption of Russian children.
“This is not merely an ‘information war,’ in other words, but a ‘war on information,’” Pomerantsev said in April 2014. “If the very possibility of rational argument is submerged in a fog of uncertainty, there are no grounds for debate. Sooner or later, the public will give up trying to understand what happened, or even bothering to listen.” This statement illuminates the deeper danger Trump poses to democracy in America today.
Trump, in his own way, is seeking to turn the United States into a post-factual society analogous to Putin’s Russia. He makes claims that are false, doubles down on them when challenged and seems to care not a whit for video or documentary evidence that proves him wrong. He says over and over that America is “losing” and he can make it “win” without substantiating either claim. It’s not that the media don’t challenge him a lot, but simultaneously they give saturation coverage to everything he says and they don’t seem able to keep up with the torrent of nonsense issuing from his mouth.
Thus, as in Russia, Trump’s lying is enabling and feeding an indifference to the truth. In a March 28 speech, President Obama cited the work of Politico reporters who fact-checked 4.6 hours of Trump speeches and news conferences and identified more than 51 lies, or as David Brooks of The New York Times put it, “one every five minutes.” This past week alone, Trump made false and irresponsible statements about the Geneva Conventions, nuclear proliferation, and NATO and our Asian allies’ contribution to security. More recently he offered up a view of the U.S. economy that forecast a coming “very massive recession,” which Washington Post writer Jim Tankersley called a mix of “economic conspiracy theories with magical-thinking accounting.”
Despite such attempts at fact-checking, reporters just don’t seem to know how to counter Trump’s large-scale deployment of WMD — Weapons of Mass Denial (of the truth). There are so many lies to dispute now, it seems an overwhelming task; where to start? Intentional or not, the end result is Trump’s statements are not being sufficiently exposed as falsehoods. As with Putin in Russia, his many misrepresentations are enabling and feeding an indifference to the truth in this country....
...In Trump’s case, he is fostering and exploiting indifference toward truth in the service of fear, hatred and a mishmash of poor foreign and domestic policy ideas — including potentially repudiating our alliances in Europe and Asia, undoing decades of free trade reform and trying to force Mexico to pay for an expensive, likely ineffective North American Berlin Wall.
