And now we have a little more light shed on the heart of the Russian sabotage of the 2016 U.S. election to consider, this time from former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. This light will not shine into the dark recesses of President Trump’s mind, or the minds of the people who gathered around Trump to protect him from accountability. As Clapper puts it, Trump has consistently shown “aggressive indifference” to the known facts of Russian sabotage. (Except, of course, when he publicly bleated for their official help. Lest we forget.)
Trump’s defenders are now feverishly trying to protect him by mounting simultaneous attacks on the facts and anyone who seeks or reports them, and Clapper has a thought or two on this as well. “I don’t believe our democracy can function for long on lies, particularly when inconvenient and difficult facts spoken by the practitioners of truth are dismissed as ‘fake news,’ ” he writes, and “I know that the Intelligence Community cannot serve our nation if facts are negotiable.”
Neither can a free press operate properly if facts are negotiable. Lesley Stahl has just revealed that Trump actually told her why he attacks the press: “He said you know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.” No one will believe you. Take THAT, First Amendment. As Clapper notes, “Getting its target audience to conclude that facts and truth are ‘unknowable’ is the true objective of any disinformation campaign. . . . If someone actually believes the falsehood, that’s a bonus, but the primary objective is to get readers or viewers to throw their hands up and give up on ‘facts.’ Do vaccines cause autism? Maybe. Was Senator Ted Cruz’s father involved with President Kennedy’s assassination? Anything’s possible. Is Hillary Clinton running a child-sex ring out of the basement of a DC pizza parlor? Who knows?”
Who knows? Well, in this twilight era of facts, and the subsequent twilight era of the American democracy that depends on facts, let’s not lose sight of a main one. Russia sought to destroy our democracy and put in its place a disinformation society that can’t tell a fact from an alternative fact. We have perhaps one last chance to orient ourselves to truth, and to accountability to truth.
Trump is aggressively indifferent. America, if you’re listening, we need to be aggressively responsive.