Susan Walsh/AP Photo
Trump talks with members of the press before departing Andrews Air Force Base, May 5, 2020.
If he is to win reelection in November, Donald Trump needs the public to focus on something other than his spectacular failure to contain the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic catastrophe the country is now enduring. So he is returning to one of his favorite strategies, the political equivalent of the childhood taunt, “I know you are but what am I?”
At the very time when he is purging the government of inspectors general and deploying the attorney general to help his friends, he wants to convince the public that Joe Biden is the one guilty of abusing the powers of government.
It may seem absurdly unlikely to succeed, but you never know. And it helps us understand the dynamics of misinformation that will play out from here to November. Trump’s reelection will depend on his ability to turn the information environment into a fog of chaos and confusion.
Which brings us to his attempt to fashion a scandal out of the strange tale of Michael Flynn, whose 24-day tenure as national security adviser came to an end after he lied to the FBI and to Trump administration officials about his discussions with the Russian ambassador. Flynn was a crook and a crackpot, who among other things spread bigoted conspiracy theories and was secretly working as an agent of the Turkish government while advising the Trump campaign.
But now Trump is trying to turn him into a martyr by claiming that Flynn’s prosecution for lying to the FBI was the result of an Obama-administration conspiracy that involved, among other people, Joe Biden. At the center of this tale is the idea of “unmasking,” which sounds like revealing someone’s name publicly but actually has to do with a practice in which the identities of Americans who fall under the gaze of intelligence agencies monitoring foreign targets are concealed in internal government reports.
If they need to know, for instance, who are the Americans communicating with the Russian ambassador, American officials who deal with intelligence and foreign policy can ask the National Security Agency that the identities be unmasked, so they can understand what decisions should be made. Unmasking is a routine practice in the federal government—under President Trump, there were 10,000 requests for unmaskings given to the NSA in 2019, and 17,000 in 2018—but most Americans have never heard of it. Which creates an opportunity.
Biden had little to do with Flynn, the Obama administration did nothing wrong, and the story just reminds people that Trump surrounds himself with grifters and loons, many of whom have ended up in handcuffs.
Since the Flynn story touches on matters of law enforcement and intelligence, it involves a complex web of procedures and practices that are unknown to most people and can therefore be made to sound shocking even when they’re applied in a routine way—and provide lots of fodder for endless discussion and “revelations” that aren’t revelatory of anything.
So the fact that Obama administration officials saw intelligence reports saying the Russian ambassador was talking to an American about sensitive matters regarding the relationship between the two countries and asked “Who is this American who’s negotiating with the Russians?” (it turned out to be Flynn) can be characterized not as what those officials absolutely should have done, but as the heart of a sinister conspiracy.
The people who are feeding this lunacy—Trump himself, Republican politicians, media figures—all understand this perfectly well. But their project is built on the assumption that their target audience, the great mass of conservative voters, is ignorant and easily misled. They have seldom been given cause to think otherwise.
So they scream “Obamagate!” and give the topic wall-to-wall coverage on Fox News, in the hope that the end result will be that while most people won’t have much of a grasp on the details, they’ll remember that Obama and Biden tried to frame Trump and victimized his aides, just as all they grasped in 2016 was that Hillary Clinton was a corrupt schemer. As former Trump adviser Steve Bannon once said, the strategy is to “flood the zone with shit,” to pour so much misinformation into the media that the truth loses any importance.
Here’s the dilemma we in the media often find ourselves in: Trump will make some fantastical claim, and because he’s the president, everyone reports it. Some of the most important news outlets reflexively do so in an even-handed way that gives automatic credence to the charge. One could imagine the headline: “Trump Says Obama Killed Kobe Bryant With Ebola; Former President Denies.” With Trump’s charge immediately amplified by the conservative media, legitimate news organizations feel they have no choice but to spend time debunking the claim, the result being that the story is given even wider circulation. Most Americans just hear that there was something about Obama killing Kobe Bryant.
Unfortunately, except under the most extraordinary of circumstances, there is never a story that is widely understood in all its nuance by the public as a whole. The best we can hope for is that despite its limited capacity for attention and understanding, the public winds up reaching an accurate conclusion despite the attempts to mislead it.
But it often doesn’t work out that way, and Republicans are very practiced at engineering the opposite result. Experience has taught them that the variables that would matter in a more rational world—Is there any evidence for the charge they’re making? Is it relevant to the question of who should be president? Does it actually reveal something about the Democrat in question?—don’t actually matter at all.
You might look at the Michael Flynn nonsense and predict that it won’t catch on, and the attempts to spin it up into such a whirlwind of confusion that it seriously damages Joe Biden’s campaign will fail. Biden had little to do with Flynn, the Obama administration did nothing wrong, and the story just reminds people of not only how Russia helped Trump get elected in the first place but also how he surrounds himself with grifters and loons, many of whom have ended up in handcuffs.
But you might have said something similar four years ago about Hillary’s emails. Could the public possibly care about this? Would the news media really be so gullible as to give it more than a moment’s attention?
Yet they did. Republicans used the same resources they’re deploying now, including the power in Congress to begin “investigations” and the power of conservative media to create an ear-splitting din of feigned outrage, to push the story high up the campaign agenda. They’ll deploy administration officials to create “news” around the story and propel it forward—indeed, they already have, with the acting director of national intelligence (and pro-Trump Twitter troll) staging a dramatic in-person delivery to the attorney general, staged for a Fox News camera, of the names of Obama officials who requested the unmasking of the person who turned out to be Flynn.
The goal is not just to convince Republican voters to loathe Joe Biden with every fiber of their beings, but to convince everyone else that Biden is just as bad as Trump—just as corrupt, just as dishonest, just as likely to abuse his power. If Trump can accomplish that, he just might win.
