When Donald Trump seized control of the Republican Party and the White House, the aghast Western establishment decided that his ascendancy had to be a mistake or a foreign trick. Enter the disinformation specialists: the journalists and academics who devote themselves to checking the internet for bad facts and bad actors — and especially for the malevolent impulses of Trump.
Some of their efforts have been useful, including their fact-checking of Trump’s more frenetic flights of fancy. (Your inauguration crowd was larger than Barack Obama’s? Um, sure, Mr. President.) But the larger effort has been repeatedly marred when the disinformation experts have acted as censors, suppressing information that turned out to be true and spreading information that was false.
Think back to the years the American public spent on the verge of finding out that Trump was a Russian plant. Recall when it was “misinformation” to suggest the pandemic might have started in a Wuhan lab. Recollect how a bevy of putative experts assured us that Hunter Biden’s laptop was probably a “Russian information operation” rather than … Hunter Biden’s laptop. If these memories have faded, remember that just a couple months ago, we were hearing that videos of President Joe Biden’s obvious decline were actually expert-certified “cheap fakes.”
After each embarrassment, I thought, “Aha, this will teach the disinformation experts some humility.” And each time, they have reemerged, unchastened. Most recently, when Elon Musk announced that he would interview Donald Trump on an X live stream. European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton sent and then published (on X, no less) a huffily worded and, as it turned out, unapproved letter warning that X might face consequences in Europe unless Musk took “effective mitigation measures” to ensure against “the amplification of harmful content.”
The episode sums up all the ways in which the “disinformation” specialty has gone wrong with Trump: the arrogance, the confusion of opinion with legal or empirical fact, the destroy-the-village-in-order-to-save-it attempts to shore up democracy by clamping down on political speech.
Not to mention the ineffectiveness of it all.
For Breton’s interference made no difference; Musk quite rightly went ahead with his show, and what followed was more dangerous to the Trump campaign than it was to democracy.
Listeners who tuned in Monday night heard … well, actually, they heard nothing for the first 41 minutes, as the feed immediately crashed. Those who persevered were rewarded with a couple hours of soporifically familiar Trump talk.
Oh, there was some interesting back-and-forth in the first few minutes, as the former president spoke about the experience of getting shot. But he quickly switched to his golden oldies: wild and often scurrilous claims about immigrants, complaints about lawfare, and so forth.
Did he say things that were untrue? Yes, from trivial exaggerations of bacon price inflation to major misstatements about immigration. Were some of the lies morally reprehensible? Indeed they were.
But none of what he said was new, especially not to the million or so people listening alongside me. This was an event for political obsessives who already know how they’re going to vote.
In two hours, I learned something about Musk’s evolving views on immigration, crime and regulation but nothing about Trump. He merely confirmed that he is constitutionally incapable of acting in his own best interest, much less that of the country, because he is too fond of his greatest hits, too mired in grievances and wounded self-regard to effectively make a case for himself or against Kamala Harris. Time and time again, as Musk gamely tried to get him to say something interesting about public policy, he instead veered into his familiar litany. And as is often the case, familiarity bred contempt: The shtick seemed exhausted, and so did he.
It’s an excellent illustration of why the whole disinformation movement has proved so misguided. Letting Trump talk was healthier than trying to shut him up, and the impulse to panicked censorship, rather than sober counterpoint, does more to discredit the disinformation mavens than to improve our politics.
The movement’s implicit promise has been that falsehoods can be measured scientifically, like the speed of light, and then eliminated from the information ecosystem, like unwanted pollution. This was always a pipe dream, as the disinformation experts themselves kept demonstrating. They made too many errors themselves, and their errors showed a suspicious tendency to all run in the same political direction, giving credibility to conservative complaints that this was less about altruistic truth-telling than about insiders borrowing the credibility of their institutions — news outlets, universities, the European Commission — to undercut a politician they didn’t like.
Whether or not you think this was a legitimate use of that institutional power, it’s hard to argue that it was an effective one. After eight years of all-out disinformation warfare, Trump’s approval ratings are holding up better than public trust in academia and journalism. And this fact, not Trump’s rambling, is what the disinformation brigade ought to be worrying about most.
