By Peter Baker

WASHINGTON — Born amid made-up crowd size claims and “alternative facts”,  the Trump presidency has been a factory of falsehood from the start, churning out distortions, conspiracy theories and brazen lies at an assembly-line pace that has challenged fact-checkers and defied historical analogy.

But now, with the election two days away, the consequences of four years of fabulism are coming into focus as President Donald Trump argues that the vote itself is inherently “rigged,” tearing at the credibility of the system. Should the contest go into extra innings through legal challenges after Tuesday, it may leave a public with little faith in the outcome — and in its own democracy.

The nightmarish scenario of widespread doubt and denial of the legitimacy of the election would cap a period in US history when truth itself has seemed at stake under a president who has strayed so far from the normal bounds that he creates what allies call his own reality. Even if the election ends with a clear victory or defeat for Trump, scholars and players alike say the very concept of public trust in an established set of facts necessary for the operation of a democratic society has eroded during his tenure with potentially long-term ramifications.

“You can mitigate the damage, but you can’t bring it back to 100% the way it was before,” said Lee McIntyre, author of ‘Post-Truth’ and a philosopher at Boston University. “And I think that’s going to be Trump’s legacy. I think there’s going to be lingering damage to the processes by which we vet truths for decades. People are going to be saying, ‘Oh, that’s fake news.’ The confusion between scepticism and denialism, the idea that if you don’t want to believe something, you don’t have to believe it — that’s really damaging, and that’s going to last.”

Indeed, the very idea of truth is increasingly a fungible commodity in a political environment that seems to reward the loudest voices, not the most honest. In a recent poll for Newsweek, 54% of Americans agreed that lying has become more acceptable in US politics in recent years, while only 13% said it was less acceptable; the rest said it was about the same or did not have a view.

Nancy L. Rosenblum, a Harvard University professor emerita who wrote ‘A Lot of People Are Saying’ with Russell Muirhead, said that may not change even if Trump leaves office after one term because he proved the advantages of truth-bending politics and helped build up an information infrastructure where reality is like an à la carte menu from which Americans can pick their favourite variant.

“Conspiracy charges and a certain amount of lying have proved to be good weapons in political fighting where you have deep, deep divisions, and there’s no reason to think other parties won’t take it up under desperate circumstances,” she said. “So we can expect it to go on but without the same effect.”

The lasting impact may be most evident in terms of the coronavirus pandemic that has already killed more than 230,000 people in the United States. Even as the outbreak surges to new peaks, Trump has been falsely insisting that it is “rounding the corner” to an end, telling Americans not to worry rather than urging them to take precautions.

The disconnect has tangible consequences. Republicans who support Trump are more likely to dismiss the threat of the virus in surveys and less likely to wear masks or maintain social distance. A poll last week by Axios and Ipsos found only half of Americans could correctly respond to six factual questions about the virus, indicating how far misinformation linked to reckless behaviour has pervaded the public.

Scientists have concluded that 130,000 lives could be saved in the United States in the coming months if there was universal mask wearing. But Trump mocks facial coverings and disparages medical experts, undercutting their credibility with the public, most notably Dr. Anthony Fauci, the federal government’s chief epidemiologist who now has to have a security detail after vilification by the president and his allies. With views of the virus increasingly falling along party lines, many Americans express distrust over a possible new vaccine, which could lead to widespread resistance to inoculation.

Beyond the health crisis, Trump’s successor, whether next year or in five years, could face a broader crisis in faith, challenged to re-establish credibility with overseas allies and adversaries, while presiding over a country where truth has been broken down into tribes and much of the public has been conditioned to distrust institutions of all sorts.

Trump has spent four years telling Americans not to trust anyone other than him, whether it be public health experts, scientists, journalists, judges, career government officials, investigators, generals, intelligence agencies, election officials and even mail carriers.

“Just remember,” he told a crowd one summer, “what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening.”

Trust, once lost, is hard to restore.

“We know a lot about the delegitimation of democratic institutions over the last two centuries,” Rosenblum said. “But we know nothing about how you relegitimate institutions that have lost their main value and authority for an awful lot of people. That’s the real question.”

Dishonesty has been a defining hallmark of the Trump presidency. The sheer volume of untruths, both petty and profound, has been catalogued and quantified time and again, the subject of a shelf full of books and endless hand-wringing over the “post-truth” world.

This is a president who casually accused a television anchor of murder, who spread the claim that Osama bin Laden is not actually dead and that President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden had the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 killed, who literally took a Sharpie to a map to create his own fake weather forecast and reprimanded meteorologists who dared to correct him.

Campaign rallies have been chock-full of specious claims and fan-fiction narratives. He has renewed his assertion that Mexico is paying for his border wall, declared that he won the women’s vote in 2016 and claimed credit for restoring order in Minneapolis, none of which is true. The New York Times tabulated 131 false or misleading statements in a single rally in Janesville, Wisconsin. The Washington Post counted more than 22,000 false or misleading statements over nearly four years, including 189 on a single day in August.

When challenged, Trump simply brushes it off. After a reporter in August asked “do you regret at all, all the lying you’ve done to the American people,” the president sought to clarify the question and then once he understood it called on another reporter without replying.

It is often left to aides to try to reengineer what he says to fit the facts or dismiss facts altogether, often simply turning the tables by complaining about biased nitpicking by the media.

“The American people never have to wonder how the president feels about a particular topic, which is one of the many reasons they chose to elect him over the same, old, recycled politicians who just use the poll-tested talking points,” said Judd Deere, a White House spokesperson. He asserted that “the media routinely manipulates the president’s words and takes him totally out of context, but that will never stop him from unapologetically calling out their biased reporting, raising important questions or suggesting common sense ideas to solve problems.”

There is, of course, a long history of presidential prevarication. Franklin D. Roosevelt was hardly straight with the American public before World War II, nor was Lyndon B. Johnson during the Vietnam War. Richard M. Nixon lied about a burglary and was forced to resign. Ronald Reagan conflated movie memories with real life and regularly spun out favourite stories with no apparent basis in fact. Bill Clinton was impeached for lying under oath about his affair with a White House intern. George W. Bush went to war based on false intelligence even if he did not actually know it to be false.

Biden, now the Democratic presidential nominee, has had his own misadventures with misstatements, caught on several occasions during his career in politics puffing up his own record. His first presidential campaign blew up in 1987 after he lifted lines from another politician’s speech without credit, overstated his academic accomplishments and was revealed to have been accused of plagiarism in law school. Biden, unlike Trump, admitted the errors, while calling them innocent mistakes. Still, he has been prone to exaggeration since then as well.

But as with so many things, Trump takes matters to his own Trumpian extremes. Many of his falsehoods may be minor, but others would have created days of headlines under any other president. And when other presidents got caught, there were corrections or consequences or at least an effort to avoid repeating the misstatements. Not so with Trump.

-New York Times