More important, though, was the overlap between that anti-establishment sentiment and the embrace of outright false claims about political subjects. Part of the frustration with Republican leaders was that their actions and rhetoric were increasingly divergent from the rhetoric on Fox News and on fringier upstarts like Breitbart. Trump was both unattached to D.C. respectability and immersed in the fringe-right vernacular, and that’s what he presented to Republican primary voters.
This was the origin of the idea that Trump speaks frankly while others don’t. It wasn’t that he was honest; far from it. It was that he said the things that his supporters were hearing from (dishonest) actors elsewhere because he didn’t care about being seen as dishonest. His supporters saw this as unusual honesty, when it was in fact the opposite.
Trump’s dishonesty has been relentless ever since, often infecting his allies and his party. But he retains a perception of honesty and frankness among his supporters because they dislike and distrust those pointing out his dishonesty — his opponents, the media, etc. Trump is granted the benefit of the doubt, despite being perhaps uniquely undeserving of it.
Over the weekend, CBS News published the results of a poll conducted this month by YouGov. It focused on views of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, but included a telling question related to the point above.
Respondents were asked to evaluate whether they viewed different sources of information about the war in Ukraine as trustworthy. Overall, only two sources were viewed as more trustworthy than not: the military/Pentagon and journalists and media operating in the war zone. Every other presented option was underwater, with more people saying they viewed them as untrustworthy than as trustworthy.
In part, that was because of broad skepticism from independents, who are generally more likely to indicate distrust when asked such questions. Only the military was viewed as more trustworthy than not on net among independents.
But it was also because, among Republicans, the only broadly trusted source of information about the war was … Donald Trump.
President Biden was viewed as trustworthy by four times as many Democrats as deemed him not trustworthy. That was a similar ratio to other sources of information: the military, the State Department, the media. Among Republicans, though, only Trump earned that level of confidence. They were 58 points more likely to say they trusted Trump as a source of information than to say they didn’t. The next closest source of information was the military, where the gap was only 20 points.
Some of this is performative, a presentation by Republicans that they agree with Trump and don’t agree with others on the specific issue of Ukraine. But, certainly, a substantial amount isn’t. If the military says that Ukraine is at risk of being overrun by Russia in the absence of more support, and Trump says this is just neoconservative warmongering, a lot of Republicans are going to nod along with Trump.
By itself, acceptance of this view of Ukraine is a demonstration of the triumph of Trump’s politics. In separate questions, CBS News also asked whether the United States had a responsibility to do something about Ukraine or to defend democracy broadly. That latter idea would have been uncontroversial among Republicans 20 years ago. Now, fewer than half of Republicans say the United States has a global responsibility to defend democracy.
Interestingly, the support among Democrats for defending Ukraine and democracy comes despite Democrats being more likely to say they don’t remember the Cold War — largely because Democrats skew younger than Republicans.
The Trumpian resurrection of “America First” leveraged hostility to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to broadly undermine the idea that the United States should retain its traditional alliances. This idea used to sit mostly on the right-wing fringe, too, but both Afghanistan and Americans’ general uninterest in foreign policy made it a valuable position for Trump to embrace. That it also empowers the autocrats he seems to want to befriend and emulate is a reward on its own.
That initial CBS News poll question shows the extent to which dishonesty has become embedded in the expectations of Trump’s party and his base of support. As was the case after the 2020 election, it can create friction in those places where his world intersects with the real world.
On Friday, for example, the judge overseeing his case in New York chastised Trump’s attorneys.
He felt compelled, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan wrote, to express his “continuing and growing alarm over counsel’s practice of making serious allegations and representations that have no apparent basis in fact — or at least are unsupported by a legitimate basis of knowledge.”
Well, Trump’s attorneys have to translate Trump’s dishonest presentations into something palatable for the American legal system. This is hard to do. It is much easier for Trump to simply immerse in his own dishonesty and pull his supporters in with him.
It has also proved to be more successful.
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