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As Donald Trump attempts to return to the White House, he is not operating a political campaign as much as mounting a disinformation campaign.
The rough and tumble of American politics often includes false statements and lies—what once was called spin. Unfortunately, there has always been a degree of tolerance for campaign dissembling. Trump is no stranger to this mundane practice. He freely tosses falsehoods at the electorate. The economy when he was president was the best ever. He did a great job on Covid. The current rate of inflation is the worst in US history. The US has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe. Every Democrat and legal scholar wanted Roe v. Wade overturned. He was the smartest and most accomplished president the country has ever seen. And so on. It’s absurd braggadocio and a firehose of supposed but untrue facts—spewed to a degree far beyond what previous presidential candidates attempted to get away with.
Yet Trump’s dishonesty goes further than the usual campaign lying. He concocts and promotes utterly false narratives to shape voters’ perceptions of fundamental realities. His campaign is a full-fledged project to pervert how Americans view the nation and the world, an extensive propaganda campaign designed to fire up fears and intensify anxieties that Trump can then exploit to collect votes. And the political media world has yet to come to terms with the fact that Trump is heading a disinformation crusade more likely to be found in an authoritarian state than a vibrant democracy. This is unlike other presidential campaigns in modern American history—other than his own previous efforts.
Throughout the 2024 campaign and those earlier presidential bids, Trump has pitched numerous overlapping phony narratives. His false claim about Springfield, Ohio, has been the most obvious one in recent weeks. He has repeatedly said that this small city has been taken over by illegal migrants. He asserted that “20,000 Haitian immigrants have descended upon the town of 58,000 people, destroying their entire way of life. This was a beautiful community and now it’s horrible.” And, he asserted, these migrants are stealing and eating pets.
“Trump is one of the most successful propagandists in history. He managed to convince tens of millions that he won a national election working not in a domesticated media system or a one-party state but in a fully pluralist media environment in a democracy. No one has ever done that on that scale. Also look at what he’s accomplished with the perception of January 6.”
This absurd and false allegation about legal immigrants—debunked by the Republican mayor and the state’s Republican governor—dovetailed with Trump’s false meta-narrative: The US is being overrun by criminals from abroad who are making the nation unsafe and life a nightmare for citizens across the land.
During his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump said that millions of these thugs are pouring into the United States every month—a vast exaggeration. (Illegal crossings at the US-Mexico border have dramatically decreased this year.) And he has repeatedly depicted this flood of immigrants as coming from prisons and “insane asylums,” which he described as “a mental institution on steroids.” Using racist imagery, he recently declared, “They come from the Congo in Africa. Many people from the Congo. I don’t know what that is, but they come out of jails in the Congo.” As numerous media fact-checks have established, there is no proof that migrants are convicts let loose from prisons; the Trump campaign has not been able to supply reporters evidence to back up this Trump contention. Most recently, Trump maintained that the Biden administration “stole” disaster relief funds and handed the money to illegal migrants rather than use it to assist the victims of Hurricane Helene. Another fabrication.
Not merely peddling a series of lies, Trump is knitting together a full story that is utterly bogus, trying to convince tens of millions of a reality that does not exist: They’re living in a dangerous hellhole in which they’re imperiled by barbarians, who happen to be people of color. And Trump then accuses Harris and President Joe Biden of purposefully orchestrating this purportedly deadly situation and the collapse of America. At a recent campaign stop, Trump presented a nutty conspiracy theory: “I will shut down all entries through Kamala’s migrant phone app. She’s got a phone app. It’s meant for the cartel heads. The cartel heads call the app, and they tell them where to drop the illegal migrants…It’s not even believable.” It’s not true.
The overarching goal of Trump’s disinformation efforts is to persuade voters that they should live in fear—and that only he can save them. At a campaign event in Wisconsin, Trump said of migrants, “They will walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.” And elsewhere he brayed, “They’re conquering your communities.” He pointed to Aurora, Colorado, “where they’re taking over with AK-47s.” In another campaign speech, he warned it will get worse: “They’re going to take over a lot more than Aurora. They’re going to go through Colorado. They’re going to take over the whole damn state by the time they finish. Unless I become president.” This was another phony story. Crime in Aurora is not driven by migrant gangs. On a different occasion, Trump maintained these beasts were on the rampage across Middle America: “You see how bad it’s getting when you look at what’s going on with migrants attacking villages and cities throughout the Midwest.”
Trump has been depicting all of America as a place of tremendous peril: “You can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped, you get whatever it may be and you’ve seen it and I’ve seen it.” Yet crime rates across the nation are down this year, including for murder.
Trump’s effort to manipulate reality encompasses more than fear-mongering on immigration and crime. He regularly portrays America as in economic free fall: “A lot of great things would have happened, but now you have millions and millions of dead people. And you have people dying financially, because they can’t buy bacon; they can’t buy food; they can’t buy groceries; they can’t do anything. And they’re living horribly in our country right now.” While poverty remains an issue, as it always has, and prices for certain goods and services are high, traditional economic indicators show the US economy growing at a healthy clip and stronger than the economies of other Western nations. Still, Trump preaches doom-and-gloom: “Our country is a failing nation. This is a failing nation…We’re failing at everything we’re doing.”
A critical piece of his disinformation strategy is to present Democrats as perverse extremists—and baby-killers. At rallies, he lies to his supporters and says that in states run by Democrats it is okay to kill infants after they are born. There are no states where that is legal. He says that Harris “wants to legalize fentanyl.” No she doesn’t. He claims that schools are conducting gender-affirming medical operations on students without the consent of parents: “Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.” With this especially bizarre and crazy charge, Trump is striving to spark a moral panic: They are coming for your children and surgically altering their genders! There is no known instance of this, and schools don’t even perform such procedures with the consent of parents.
Trump throws many other baseless charges at Harris, some from the worn-out far-right playbook, others fresher. Trump claims that she plans to confiscate all guns if she becomes president and that she “wants to bring back the draft and draft your child and put them in a war.” And there’s the constant barrage of unfounded name-calling. She’s “mentally disabled.” She’s “a communist.” She’s “a fascist.” She is “a radical left person at a level that nobody’s seen.” Trump circulated an AI-generated meme of Harris addressing a communist event. And he exclaimed, “She destroyed San Francisco. She destroyed California as the A.G…She destroyed the state of California.” Fact-check: She did not destroy California.
It’s one bullshit story after another, with the malicious intent of dehumanizing and demonizing his political rivals and large groups of people. When Trump denounced legal migrants at one rally, the audience chanted, “Send them back!” It was a real-life version of the Two Minutes Hate from George Orwell’s 1984. All told, Trump is relentlessly presenting a dark and spurious view of America—even darker and more spurious than previous iterations of the American Carnage message he has hawked—and proclaiming himself the only available savior. He is perpetuating a fraud. His electoral success is dependent on his ability to poison the national discourse and turn his fictions into reality for tens of millions of voters. And he is enthusiastically aided by a right-wing media ecosystem, a conservative movement, and a GOP that all work together to echo and affirm Trump’s deceptions, for that is how residents of MAGA-land attain influence, power, and profit. They must endorse Trump’s deceit or face being excommunicated.
“We live in a world now in which, because of social media and foreign interventions, the truth is always under assault, and that’s bound to seep into political campaigns,” says Larry Diamond, a professor of sociology and political science at Stanford who specializes in studying democracy around the world. “But to have a presidential campaign doing it on this scale—we’ve never seen anything like it. But this is not new for Trump. It’s his persona and mode of operation. In this campaign, it’s getting more chronic and extreme.”
Diamond, author of Ill Winds: Saving Democracy From Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, points out that politicians routinely attempt to frame races and opponents. The Democrats in 2012 cast Republican Mitt Romney as a corporate raider who only wanted to fire people. The Republicans in 1988 depicted Democrat Michael Dukakis as a soft-on-crime weakling. What Trump does, Diamond notes, is different: “It’s more comprehensive. It’s more systemic. It’s more outrageous. Most of the stuff pulled by previous candidates had some relationship to a real thing. He’s completely making stuff up. It’s not just one or two lies or the twisting of the truth. This is, like that film, everything, everywhere, all at once.”
Trump’s extreme reality-distorting tactics—which he has deployed since he decried “Mexican rapists” when he announced his first presidential campaign in 2015 and which he applied to his 2020 loss and the subsequent insurrectionist riot on January 6—may be relatively new to American politics, but they have obvious comparisons. Benjamin Carter Hett, a history professor at Hunter College and author of The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic, notes that “the individual components” of Trump’s disinformation campaign “are things we have seen before.” He explains: “After Hitler and Stalin, there wasn’t much more to add about the forms of political disinformation, and there is a recognizable lineage to a lot of what Trump and his running mate JD Vance say. I am not the first to note that the eating-the-cats-and-dogs thing is not far from the ‘blood libel,’ and of course saying that if I lose, it will be the Jews’ fault is a hardy perennial. Calling Democrats Communists or Marxists is at least as old as FDR (and very similar to Hitler’s rhetoric as well). It may be that the scale of this is different—the sheer volume of this garbage—and a free media can’t seem to root it out and put a stop to it.”
“Trump is running a disinformation campaign,” confirms Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University history professor who studies authoritarianism. “I also have long sustained that he is running a radicalization campaign, using his rallies since 2015 to change the way people perceive violence, to build his leader cult. It’s unprecedented even among most autocrats on the rise. People like Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, would tell lies about some things or target some subjects, but Trump lies about everything, on the model of the Kremlin (big surprise).”
The author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Ben-Ghiat adds, “Trump is one of the most successful propagandists in history. He managed to convince tens of millions that he won a national election working not in a domesticated media system or a one-party state but in a fully pluralist media environment in a democracy. No one has ever done that on that scale. Also look at what he’s accomplished with the perception of January 6.”
Trump is not merely heading a campaign fueled by the routine lies of politics. He is endeavoring to use these and other lies to create an alternative reality for millions so they will vote on the basis of a false understanding of the world. “I get asked all the time how to counteract it,” Hett notes, “and I wish I had a better answer than ‘come with the truth and try to teach critical reading skills where and when you can.’” Diamond says, “What frustrates me is that I don’t know how to counter this. If you point out every single lie, it’s all you’ll be reporting. And still people will believe this.”
Trump’s disinformation con, boosted and abetted by a political party, an expansive media infrastructure, and an entire political movement, is a challenge for the United States and a test. Can his all-out war on the truth prevail? That depends on whether other media accurately portrays it, on how the rest of the political system responds to it, and on whether enough voters resist its pull. Trump has gotten far with this campaign, proving that disinformation delivered by the right carnival barker can be highly effective within America. The final vote count—and perhaps what happens afterward—will show if this nation can resolve its political divisions and differences within the realm of reason and rationality.
