It was eight weeks ago when The Wall Street Journal first reported on a 2003 birthday album, collected by Ghislaine Maxwell, that apparently included a letter from Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein. The Journal described the letter in detail, including a “bawdy” drawing and a cryptic message from the future president to his longtime friend: “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
Trump condemned the reporting, claimed he never created such a letter and promptly sued the newspaper for having published a report about a document the president insisted was “FAKE.” His Republican allies followed his lead and urged the public not to believe the Journal’s reporting.
Eight weeks later, the story took a rather dramatic turn. My MSNBC colleague Erum Salam reported on the new batch of material from the Epstein estate released by Democrats on the U.S. House Oversight Committee — including the contents of the so-called “birthday book.” From the report:
A copy of the book submitted to Congress (which was not reviewed by MSNBC) included a typed message, inside the outline of a woman’s torso, that read, in part, ‘A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.’ At the bottom of the message is a signature that appears to be Donald Trump’s.
The image looks like the one the Journal described in July.
As the documents reached the public on Monday, the president, his team and his party confronted a serious political challenge. How would the Republican White House and its partisan allies, each of whom had insisted that the original reporting was wrong, deal with the release of information that appeared to confirm that Trump really had sent the convicted pedophile a cryptic letter, with text inside the outline of a female torso?
The party effectively had two choices: acknowledge the legitimacy of the letter or insist that the Trump-signed document wasn’t actually a Trump-signed document.
Republicans went with the latter.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that it’s “very clear” that Trump didn’t draw the figure or sign the letter. Other White House officials pushed the same line, and true to form, several congressional Republicans soon followed, echoing the new party line.
At face value, the pushback was — and is — difficult to take seriously. The signature on the letter resembles other documents from that era that Trump signed.
For that matter, it’s difficult to imagine how the document in question could’ve been fabricated in the first place. As CNN’s Aaron Blake summarized, “The key fact here is that this comes from Epstein’s estate. In other words, for this letter to have been fake, someone would have had to plant it in Epstein’s possessions a long time ago, somehow.”
But that Team Trump and Republicans even thought to push such a dubious claim is itself rather remarkable. Indeed, it’s part of an unsettling pattern.
About a week ago, a curious video circulated via social media showing someone throwing items out of a second-story White House window. Officials quickly confirmed that that the video was legitimate and said the clip simply showed a “contractor who was doing regular maintenance,” but the president himself decided to contradict his own team’s explanation.
Trump said the images were likely “AI-generated,” adding, “If something happens, really bad, just blame AI.”
In other words, as far as the president was concerned, anytime Americans see information that might cast him or his allies in a negative light, the public should necessarily assume it’s fake.
The same thinking, evidently, applies to a letter that appears to include Trump’s signature.
More to the point, however, in our current political environment, the president and his party embrace this approach to practically everything. Job numbers are disappointing? They’re fake. Poll numbers are discouraging? They’re fake, too.
Climate science is fake. Public health information is fake. Election results are fake. Trump’s Russia scandal is fake. Evidence of crimes is fake.
If it’s information that make Republicans happy, it’s real; if not, Americans must reflexively discount it.
There’s a quote that’s often attributed to political theorist Hannah Arendt: “This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.” As it happens, Arendt didn’t actually say this (at least not exactly), but the quote resonates because of its salience:
Trump obviously tries to get people to believe lies all the time, but nearly as often, the president and his allies try to get people to give up on the idea that facts exist. With too many Americans, these tactics are effective, which helps explain why they’ve become so common.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
