Former President Donald Trump's supporters have developed a worldview that is essentially the polar opposite of reality, argued political scientist Brian Klaas in a new Substack article examining the results of a new survey. These results, argued Klaas, give insight into a "warped bizarro world reality" that supporters of the former president has created for himself, even as he is facing criminal prosecution on several fronts.
But even more than that, Klaas said, the survey shows how dangerous it is for journalists to simply act as stenographers, detachedly reporting on claims politicians make without offering value judgements about their veracity — something that some political pundits have insisted is the best way to go about covering Trump and the GOP.
"The Brightline Watch survey compares answers across two waves, one from October 2022 and another from June/July 2023. That way, you can see how some attitudes have changed across time," wrote Klaas.
While some 90 percent of experts in the survey agreed Trump committed a federal crime in the documents case, just 10 percent of Republicans did. Similar numbers were true in reverse for whether President Biden committed a crime — and Republicans were most likely to agree that things Trump has been accused of, like hush money and involvement in January 6, aren't crimes at all.
Some people might argue that this is just partisanship over relatively subjective statements — but it goes even beyond that, Klaas pointed out. Republicans are also rejecting established facts.
"Astonishingly, only 52% of Republican voters surveyed indicated that they believed that Trump ever brought classified documents to Mar-a-Lago, even though Trump himself admits doing so. There have even been countless widely publicized photos of those documents in various places around his private club," wrote Klaas. Also, "Do you believe that 'Trump showed documents' to others? We have a publicly available audio recording of him doing exactly that, but only 34% of Republicans believe it’s true."
The problem with all this, he wrote, is that "when one political party looks at the world through a funhouse mirror that distorts the most basic truths, when partisan identity becomes a dystopian 'choose your own reality' world of splintered politics, and when voters aren’t disagreeing on normative opinions of how the world should be, but rather are divided over basic facts about how the world is," you can't solve the problem just by electing good leaders.
Rather, "the only lasting solution to a fracturing democratic system lurching toward authoritarianism is to do everything we can to ensure that the information pipeline to voters is pristine rather than polluted with toxic lies." And that means journalists and political commentators have to step up and frame lies as lies.