The "alternative facts" of Donald Trump's first term as president has given way to an "alternative reality" of his second term as a way to push forward his controversial policies according to experts.
In Trump's first, term, former adviser Kellyanne Conway used "alternative facts" in an interview to defend Trump, and now that he is back in the Oval Office the president has created his own "reality" that has him making outrageous claims over and over despite rigorous fact-checking.
According to a report from the New York Times' Peter Baker, "In the first month since he [Trump] returned to power, he has demonstrated once again a brazen willingness to advance distortions, conspiracy theories and outright lies to justify major policy decisions."
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With Baker noting the president is now immersed in "a whole alternative reality in his second [term] to lay the groundwork for radical change as he moves to aggressively reshape America and the world," Princeton history professor Julian E. Zelizer suggested, "We have seen repeatedly how President Trump creates his own reality to legitimate his actions and simultaneously discredit warnings about his decisions.”
He added, "Opponents end up arguing about his narratives regardless of how grounded they are in fact. This has put President Trump in a perpetual position of advantage since he decides the terms of debate rather than anyone seeking to stop him.”
Authoritarian expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat added that is by design.
“Trump is a highly skilled narrator and propagandist,” she explained. “Actually he is one of the most skilled propagandists in history.”
Case in point, she cited Trump's insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him which Ben-Ghiat called an "easily refutable lie” which she claims was remarkable because he pushed it while “working not in a one-party state or authoritarian context with a controlled media, but in a totally open society with a free press.”
Historian Benjamin Carter Hett offered, "The kind of propaganda and disinformation that we see now is not particularly new and not dependent on the internet. Exactly the same kind of thing happened in the very diverse and lively German press of the 1920s and 1930s.”
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