Decoding Trump's Firehose of Fascist Lies
By Kristin J. Anderson and Christina Hsu Accomando
Lesson 10. Believe in Truth.
To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.
—Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
A fascist leader can replace truth with power, ultimately lying without consequence.
—Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works
On Donald Trump’s 79th birthday, military tanks rolled down Constitution Avenue, as his policies have rolled over the US Constitution. The spectacle of this never-served commander-in-chief’s unnecessary military parade came a week after he sent unnecessary military troops to Los Angeles on the pretext of protecting the city from protesters, defying the mayor and governor, whom he falsely claimed had paid the protesters. Scandal-plagued Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared the deployment of troops was lawful, but he was unable to cite the law. Thousands of unwanted armed troops in the streets of LA caused a spectacle of chaos deployed to justify their unjustified deployment.
This performance of law and order comes from a president whose Big Lie about his lost election inspired an actual insurrection—a violent spectacle in which his supporters attacked law enforcement and threatened to hang his vice-president. Over 1,500 January 6 insurrectionists received pardons from their re-elected leader, himself a convicted felon by that point, who referred to the duly convicted rioters as “hostages.”
Days after Trump’s first election, historian Timothy Snyder posted “20 Lessons from the 20th Century,” a brief survival guide for Trump’s America. “Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism,” he writes. “Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.” Snyder’s list, now published in his best-selling book On Tyranny, has only increased in urgency. Lesson 10 is Believe in Truth. “If nothing is true,” Snyder warns, “then no one can criticize power.”
Understanding the link between power and attacks on truth is crucial to understanding how democracy can yield to fascism. Fascism is a hierarchical, right-wing, ultranationalist ideology, and form of government with an authoritarian leader. One of its hallmarks is lies—large and small, consequential and trivial. “Fascist politics exchanges reality for the pronouncements of a single individual,” writes philosopher Jason Stanley in How Fascism Works. “Regular and repeated obvious lying is part of the process by which fascist politics destroys the information space.”
According to the Washington Post Fact Checker (which had to create a new scoring category for this president, the Bottomless Pinocchio), Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims as president in his first term, crowned by his false claim that he won the 2020 election. That big lie inspired an insurrection that he continues to lie about. While we keep hearing the word “unprecedented” for Trump’s actions in his second term, his propensity for lying is not unprecedented. There is a playbook for authoritarians deploying lies with a range of functions, including constructing a mythic past, inventing a scapegoated Other, creating emergencies, suppressing reality, and demonstrating power. The firehose of fascist lies is effective whether it creates true believers or an exhausted populace that doesn’t believe in anything and therefore doesn’t resist anything.
Lies to Invent a Mythic Past
A central feature of fascist politics is the construction of a mythic past—the good old days before they (immigrants, people of color, woke professors, feminists, trans people, etc.) ruined our country. This mythic past being, well, a myth, means that the fascist leader must promulgate lies about our history and the causes of our fall from greatness. “We declare that the United States of America is the most just and exceptional Nation ever to exist on Earth,” pronounces a 2020 “Fact Sheet” titled “Donald J. Trump Is Protecting America’s Founding Ideals by Promoting Patriotic Education.” We’re told that critical race theory has ruined our schools; Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies have ruined our military; immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Making America Great Again by definition imagines a prior era of greatness now lost —and only the leader can bring it back.
Lies to Create a Scapegoated Other
Fascism depends upon what Stanley calls “the politics of us and them.” In “Racism and Facism”, novelist Toni Morrison says that the way to create this division is to “construct an internal enemy, as both focus and diversion.” Falsehoods large and small create a demonized Other—a scapegoated group not like the “real” members of the once pure nation. Dehumanization and criminalization are built on a foundation of lies. Trump descended a golden escalator a decade ago to announce his candidacy, spreading the narrative of immigrants as violent criminals, a lie that undergirds the current mass deportation violence that has spread across the nation. Latin Americans are presumed gang members—proven by tattoos with terrifying symbols like soccer balls, the words “mom” and “dad,” and in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia (illegally sent to a Salvadoran prison), a doctored image with “MS13” superimposed over his fingers. University students exercising their First Amendment rights are framed as threats to our national security. Other groups are dehumanized for Trump, from federal workers to trans kids, so that we blame them for our woes and applaud when their jobs or right to exist are taken away. Our focus is turned toward manufactured enemies as our attention is diverted from the real mission. As Trump signs Executive Orders on biological sex and purges trans people from the military, for example, he’s meanwhile remaking the military by firing competent independent leaders and replacing them with loyalists.
Lies to Create an Emergency
Related to lies about the mythic past and demonized Other are fabricated foreign invasions and national emergencies. Trump invoked at least eight national emergencies in his first 100 days, including an invasion at the southern border, energy emergencies in order to cut environmental regulations, and economic emergencies to impose, remove, and re-impose tariffs. In June he federalized the National Guard in California, declaring the need to “take all such action necessary to liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion.” These manufactured urgencies are not just rhetorical flourishes—Trump is granting himself emergency powers by generating these emergencies.
Lies to Suppress Reality
In addition to spreading lies, fascists must also suppress access to the complex true stories about our past and about members of our communities. When you depend on lies, what do you do with the truth? Fascists discredit the institutions best equipped to discern truth and challenge lies, such as universities and news organizations. Undermining expertise and experience endangers the public and weakens society’s ability to resist. Trump has served as an accelerant for the anti-intellectualism that was already rampant within the Republican Party. His administration has attacked institutions of inquiry, aggressively going after teachers, students, and journalists. Trump and his supporters have banned books from diverse perspectives and outlawed critical race theory. Trump has undermined the function of agencies like the CDC, FDA, NIH, and NSF. His executive orders have assaulted keepers of history, such as the Smithsonian and the National Park Service.
Anti-intellectualism leaves only propaganda and conspiracies. Stanley explains that the real point of spreading conspiracies is not so much to get people to believe fake stuff, but to get people to stop believing legitimate sources of information (because they don’t validate the lies), making the public easy to manipulate. People can be simultaneously cynical and gullible, Snyder reminds us, drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism. Gullibility is directed toward authoritarian lies that offer easy answers, whereas cynicism is directed at legitimate sources (which are complex, nuanced, and don’t offer easy answers).
The Power Lie
In Surviving Autocracy, journalist M. Gessen writes of the Trumpian lie: “It is the power lie, or the bully lie. It is the lie of the bigger kid who took your hat and is wearing it while denying that he took it. There is no defense against this lie because the point of the lie is to assert power, to show ‘I can say what I want when I want to.’ The power lie conjures a different reality and demands that you choose between your experience and the bully’s demands.”
Lies serve to demonstrate the power of the authoritarian leader, who dispenses with truth, demands fealty, and silences critics. “A fascist leader can replace truth with power,” writes Stanley, “ultimately lying without consequence.” The power lie—the expansive, ridiculous, obviously false lie—is about generating a spectacle of power. This type of lie is not meant to deceive or persuade. It’s meant to dominate and to force others to accept this false reality as a show of submission. Trump declared Ukraine started the war that Russia started by invading Ukraine. Trump blamed diversity policies for a tragic plane crash offering this evidence: “I have common sense. OK?” Trump spread a conspiracy narrative that Joe Biden was murdered in 2020 and since then the Biden we’ve seen is a robot.
The power lie produces another layer of “Us and Them”: those who commit to the lie are “Us” and anyone who points out the emperor has no clothes becomes the Enemy. In an autocratic political system, historian Anne Applebaum says, a demonstrably false lie helps the autocrat “establish who’s loyal, who’s on our side, and who’s not.” It’s a loyalty test: “If you promise to believe in the made-up story, then you can work for the government . . . and if you don’t, you’re out.” Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen has certainly functioned as a loyalty test, but his demanding loyalty to lies predates “Stop the Steal.” Trump won the 2016 election but still spread lies about it. Gessen writes, “Trump was splitting the country into those who agreed to live in his reality and those who resisted and became his enemies by insisting on facts.”
Lies Poison the Populace
The relentless inundation of authoritarian lies makes some people into true believers—fervid supporters who will buy any story in support of their leader, even if it contradicts their own experiences, and who will block out voices that challenge their beliefs. Evidence and inquiry are replaced by faith in the leader. This is the phenomenon of the MAGA base. For many others, the lies serve to overwhelm and exhaust, leading much of the populace to give up searching for the truth, or even give up believing in anything.
Living in the barrage of lies is stressful and dangerous. “One way out of that anxiety is to relieve the mind of stress by accepting Trumpian reality,” writes Gessen. “Another—and this too is an option often exercised by people living under totalitarianism—is to stop paying attention, disengage, and retreat to one’s private sphere. Both approaches are victories for Trump in his attack on politics.”
The damage of disengagement is not just personal. In Autocracy, Inc., Applebaum writes, “If you can’t understand what is going on around you, then you are not going to join a great movement for democracy, or follow a truth-telling leader, or listen when anyone speaks about positive political change. Instead, you will avoid politics altogether. Autocrats have an enormous incentive to spread that hopelessness and cynicism.”
The firehose of constant lies, in addition to demonstrating power, functions to get people to lose hope, to lose faith in democracy, to give up on the truth. Exactly what Snyder asks us not to do.
Believe in Truth
Snyder urges us to learn from our 20th-century predecessors and not give up on truth. What can believing in truth look like today, when the blinding lights of authoritarian lies flood our screens and our streets?
Support local, national, and global news organizations brave enough to tell the truth. Snyder tells us to actively sustain local media in particular, so we can know what is really happening in our communities. If Trump says there is an insurrection in your town, or that immigrants are eating pets, you can know when he’s lying. Do not cede your community to national propagandists.
When sharing news, make certain it’s not just emotional clickbait or intentional disinformation. Be thoughtful about who you follow, and check sources before hitting Like and Share.
Take part in local politics. Attend protests and share information, not just chants, with fellow activists.
Support librarians, students, and teachers. When librarians receive death threats, students are arrested, student journalists are intimidated, and educators are fired, members of the public must show up to defend the right to read, write, and teach.
Read banned books. Bans reveal the fascist fear of truth. People are not stupid, but fascism seeks to enforce ignorance. When we buy, read, and share banned books, it not only supports authors whose livelihoods are under attack but also fosters community-building, critical thinking, and new ideas.
Visit museums, murals, youth art exhibits, film festivals, community theater, historical monuments, national parks, etc., and talk about what you are learning. If you encounter government signs telling you to report “negative” content, report instead your commitment to truthful history. Sign up for community art classes, writing workshops, and radical book circles. If you can’t find any, start one at your local library.
Defend science. Push back when people spread medical misinformation. Get life-saving vaccines (and tell your friends you are doing so). Thank your doctors, nurses, and pharmacists for what they do.
Get off your devices and talk with people at the farmers market, the DMV, the bus stop. Chat about an article you just read in the local paper, or the banned book you are sharing with your kids. One of Snyder’s lessons is to make eye contact and small talk—not just to be polite but to recognize each other’s humanity and to figure out who your allies might be when things deteriorate.
Engage in mutual aid—collaborative efforts to meet local needs in solidarity. If you can’t find any such networks in your community, create them. These might be phone trees to let people know about ICE raids, bail funds, mobile crisis intervention teams, community gardens, carpools to help folks get to medical appointments. Create and nurture a small community of people you know you can trust when the unthinkable arrives.
About the Authors
Kristin J. Anderson, Ph.D., is a social psychologist and professor at the University of Houston-Downtown. Her book Enraged, Rattled, and Wronged: Entitlement’s Response to Social Progress is available from Oxford University Press (2021).
Christina Hsu Accomando, Ph.D., is a professor of English and Critical Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cal Poly Humboldt in Arcata, California, and a founding member of the Eureka Chinatown Project. She is the editor of Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Intersectional Study (Macmillan, 2024).