What are we to take from the news that not only has the theoretical "president" of the nation has told well over 15,000 documentable public lies since his inauguration, but told more lies during this past year than the previous two years combined?
That Donald J. Trump is getting worse, obviously. That's not a particular surprise. Trump is transparently a malignant narcissist, and is facing a malignant narcissist's single worst fear: being exposed as not the greatest gift to this universe and all who inhabit it, but a fraud. He will remain "impeached," in the history books, forever.
But we can also infer from this news that Trump is lying more boldly and more often precisely because he was successful at it the previous two years. That isn't Trump's doing. That is the doing of journalists, of "pundits," of their editors and outlets, and of, especially, Republican lawmakers.
Donald Trump could not lie to the American public 15,000 times if lying to the public carried negative consequences, rather than positive ones. It doesn't. We can debate whether this was the case in past decades, and in some other context that might be useful, but all can certainly agree that lying to the public right now, in the forms of government-to-public, lawmaker-to-public, pundit-to-public, or media-outlet-to-public is not only commonplace but has been elevated to become a top political strategy.
Did a sitting president get caught asking a foreign government to investigate a political opponent? Lie about it. Outright. Boldly. It is possible to gaslight the public furiously, on basic questions of current fact, without the news anchors of the day sternly pointing out that lawmaker so-and-so has evidently either 1.) lost their grip on reality and needs to be removed from elected office for public safety reasons or 2.) is being so blazingly dishonest that the public cannot, and should not, believe anything they say ever again.
That part, right there, is the catastrophe. If it is possible for a national leader to tell 15,000 lies to the public without being considered unfit for the job, then democracy does not exist.
There is no such thing as candidates making their case for the best path forward, and the public validating which path, collectively, the nation should follow. There is no best path. There is no path. There is only a contest to see who can invent the most self-serving version of reality, upon which we elect the best of the liars, who will continue to lie to the public about what they are doing while, instead, they do anything else.
That Republican lawmakers sought to defend Trump from impeachment with false information, claiming Joe Biden was not referenced in the phone call (despite even the White House's text saying otherwise) or that no pressure was put on Ukraine (despite witness after witness confirming it) is not surprising. It also may not be survivable. If we are two countries, served by two competing narratives and pushed forward according only by who can best sell their version to a public with fewer and fewer means of verifying which is true and which is the lie, with competing oligarchic factions here and abroad funneling cash into the particular frauds that best benefit them, that will be the ball game.
This rather dire but by no means uncommon warning and/or prediction is sometimes described as the nation's epistemic crisis, a turning point at which factionalism (aka being a Republican) trumps regard for facts themselves (such as which laws truly exist; whether the economy is doing well or is not; whether Russia was responsible for election hacking, as all experts attest, or whether the president's pro bono personal lawyer is right that none of it actually happened, according to the testimony of known hucksters). It's less often that anyone comes with a credible scenario for how that end point is dodged.
There is only one such scenario. Lying to the public—propagandizing—must be punished. We can leave the moralizing out of it; you will not get far with the claim that telling 15,000 lies is bad or wrong. Surely, however, surely we can as a matter of journalistic convention agree that telling 15,000 lies makes you untrustworthy. It renders you unfit for public service. No matter which moral stipulations we might attach to the post, from marital fidelity to paying your damn taxes, the matter of lying repeatedly to the public as means of obtaining and extending public power defeats the principle of democracy itself, and must be shunned.
Fox News will not do that. But The New York Times could, if the editors truly believed their paper had public responsibilities commensurate with its public footprint.
If CNN inflicted a penalty upon liars, rather than hiring them on and giving them salaries to perform their antics, circus-style, much of this would end. If other networks chose to ignore the frothiest of propagandists when putting together panels, the professional liars would have fewer places to go. That would be a start. The airports of the world do not need to broadcast blaring lies, day after day and month after month, and there is nothing about the travel experience made better by hearing from known liar Kellyanne Conway. You could replace every television with a fish tank and the traveling public would come out better informed. It would probably cut airport drunkenness in half.
And yet here we are, still, and there seems no inclination to upset a status quo in which lawmakers and paid propagandists can lie, outright, to the American people and be granted the same conventions of pseudo-respect as honorable counterparts. Why wouldn't they lie, then? There is literally zero downside. The not-liars, in the meantime, are hopelessly constrained by having to live only in one reality rather than dozens.
It is evident the press favors the thrill of conflict and believes itself to have no public responsibility in these matters whatsoever. It is obvious that Republicanism itself will not right itself, not after collapsing completely into a cultism in which the Dear Leader of the moment can not only do no wrong, but that if he does do wrong, that thing is now retroactively right and good and was commonplace at all along.
So we know what must happen—but there seems no way to get there. None. It would require a great many very powerful Americans to all do the right thing, all at once, while sliding into kleptocratic pseudo-democracy requires no action at all and comes with substantial tax cuts.
Surely, it cannot be as hopeless as that. Surely.