that one of the main characteristics of the post-1970s American political system was the emergence of the media as organizer of political campaigns.47 According to Burnham, the activities of the media are better described by what Sidney Blumenthal called “the permanent campaign.”48 Under this system, campaigning and governing are no longer two separate moments in American politics. Campaigning is the permanent activity of the President, even when he is governing. Donald Trump exemplifies “the permanent campaign.” As President, he often energizes his base in campaign-style rallies, addressing his supporters as if he were campaigning, seeking their approval and consolidating their support.
For decades, the mass media, especially television, has played an important role in US politics. Since the first televised presidential debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, candidates have used TV as their main instrument for sending messages and attract voters. Today, however, TV has a rival: social media. Twenty years ago, Marion R. Just declared that the “World Wide Web exhibited more potential than impact during the 1996 campaign.”49 Two decades later, the power of social media is no longer in question. Donald Trump became the wizard of social media, tweeting his message directly to the American voters. “Today,” asserted Joe Keohane in 2016, “@realDonaldTrump [has the] force of newsmaker, an agitator, an American political phenomenon that combines the highest profile of a presidential candidate with the reach and velocity of social media. It has more than 7.5 million followers. It [his twitter account] has tweeted more than 31,000 times.”50 A Spanish journalist went even further, declaring that Trump “promotes great initiatives through social networks as if the United States were living in a twitterocracy.”51
Despite the relevance of social media and the important role it played in Trump’s campaign and presidency, TV continues to be a main source of information for American voters. According to a survey conducted by Pew Research Center, from November 29 to December 12, 2016, 54 percent of the voters said that they obtained most of their election news from television. Of the Trump voters, 40 percent mainly relied on Fox News, while Clinton supporters relied on varied sources.52 For Thomas E. Patterson, news coverage was fundamentally “negative in tone and light in policy,” confirming a pattern first established in 1984. Trump received more coverage than Clinton did, maybe because of his sensationalist statements or because “his words and actions were ideally suited to journalists’ story needs.” The 2016 election confirmed the post-1970 tendency for “the horserace” to outweigh policy coverage: 42 percent of news reports were about the horserace; 17 percent about controversies; 24 percent other and only 10 percent about policy.53
For global and domestic audiences, the spice of the 2016 election was Donald Trump. His outrageous statements, his vulgar language, his aggressiveness, his ignorance, and his constant lies made it difficult to turn off the TV or ignore the election. Trump captivated audiences. His behavior was provocative, his arguments debatable, and his campaign-style was a gift to the media. TV, social media, blogs, radio, and newspapers were always ready to report, to exhaustion, Trump’s latest polemic statement or scandal. Of course, Hillary Clinton contributed her own controversies and scandals to the reality show. The candidates’ policy programs were almost meaningless—mentioning the subject but not how properly execute the policy. All this made the election as much about entertainment as a political event. Sensational journalism and scandalous candidates were a perfect match. A Leslie Moonves, the Chief Executive Officer of CBS, said in 2016 when talking about Donald Trump’s presidential run, “it may not be good for America, but it is damn good for CBS.”54
The 2016 presidential election did not present a positive or inspiring image of the United States to the world. On the contrary, it helped to reinforce negative stereotypes, as many of the contributors to this volume attest. Trump’s propensity to lie, for example, captured the attention of people all over the world. PolitiFact declared, “70 percent of Trump’s statements during the campaign were false with only 4 percent completely true, and 11 percent mostly true.” It found that 26 percent of Hillary Clinton’s statements were false.55 The media reported candidates’ statements even when they knew they were untrue. In the 2016 election, lying often seemed to be simply a tool to arouse emotion, generate passionate feelings, and produce approval.56
Trump’s constant lies in the 2016 campaign shocked observers all over the world. In September 2016, the cover of the British Magazine, The Economist featured the headline “The Art of the Lie.” The accompanying editorial underscored Donald Trump’s constant fabrications, calling him “the leading exponent of ‘post-truth’ politics—a reliance on assertions that ‘feel true’ but have no basis in fact.” The magazine defined “post-truth” as when “truth is not falsified or contested, but of secondary importance.” In The Economist’s view, Trump’s falsehoods are not typical political lies, but some of a particular kind, “they are not intended to convince the elites … but to reinforce prejudice.”57
For Italian Fabio Chiusi, Trump’s ceaseless lies were and continue to be part of a general policy strategy. The Trump administration, argues Chiusi, invents “alternative facts to justify its immigration policy…. Trump’s lies are part of his strategy to repress dissident” and delegitimize the media. According to Chiusi, Gary Kasparove understood this very well when he asserted: “If you are able to convince people that true news is false, it becomes much easier to convince [them] that your false news is true. If what matters is to protect your propaganda narrative from reality, again, the priority is to destroy the real, and turn it into story.”58
For Chiusi, current American politics is incredibly confusing because it is difficult if not impossible to understand a world in which “true and false are deliberately manipulated from above, even from the White House.” The French press also expressed its uneasiness with Trump’s lies. After the 2016 election, Liberation highlighted some of the most egregious “lies and absurdities pronounced by the billionaire.”59 In Mexico, Rafael Alvarez argued that to reach the presidency, the “unpresentable businessman, ignorant and mendacious, lied again and again, establishing lies as a way of acting, and creating a new words in English: fake news, false news, which in fact are vile lies….”60
Trump’s constant lies and the complicity of other politicians are a serious threat for American democracy and global security. For a democratic system to work properly, citizens need to be informed and have a clear view of what the government is doing. To distort reality, to misinform the public conflicts with the aspiration of any democratic system to be transparent, objective, and clear, and to inform its citizens and allow them to make well-versed political decisions. Lies create a political fiction in which voters live in what Umberto Eco has called hyper-reality, a world in which the “logical distinction between Real World and Possible Worlds has been definitely undermined.”61 In this world, reality becomes fantasy, distortion veracity, and misrepresentation unobjectionable. In this world the critical media, one of the main institutions of any democratic system is marginalized
