Facts Don’t Matter
November 8, 2024 Donald Trump Kamala Harris Populism Post-Truth Jason Koebler Hannah Arendt
It’s never been easier to get away with hallucinations.
To me, the most memorable moment of this year’s U.S. election was Donald Trump’s claim that Kamala Harris was “flying“ in “tens of thousand” of immigrants into the country on “beautiful jet aeroplanes“.
Trump, of course, is no stranger to wild claims, of which there are too many to name. Still, this one was particularly bizarre and cut through the noise for me. The claim isn’t just outlandish, it is obviously false and clearly ad-lipped. It also didn’t hurt Trump in any way. The man who once quipped that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue without losing voters, who could ”do anything” keeps proving invincible. Facts don’t matter.
A few weeks before Trump hallucinated those beautiful jet planes, Hurricane Helene cut a path of devastation through the Southern USA. At the time, a particular image went viral: It shows a girl in a life vest, clutching a puppy while sitting in a boat. Both are soaking wet. The image, unsurprisingly, is AI-generated—meaning that neither the girl nor her particular fate ever existed.
On 404 Media, Jason Koehler reports that a Republican congresswoman nevertheless shared the image on X. When confronted about it being fake, she responded that she didn’t care: “There are people going through much worse than what is shown in this pic. So I’m leaving it because it is emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living through right now.”
This is the “fuck it” era of AI slop and of political messaging, where AI-generated images are used to convey whatever partisan message suits the moment regardless of truth. For all of the fearmongering about the potential of deepfake-driven disinformation, we have seen time and time again that whatever message is being delivered doesn’t need to be supported with real—or even realistic—photos or videos to convey it.
During and after Trump’s first term, media outlets spent lots of time and money trying to fact-check the president’s increasingly outrageous claims. But remember: Facts don’t matter! Even being proven a pathological liar didn’t hurt his long-term electability. The man can say whatever he wants.1
Increasingly credible fakes play a role here, but I don’t even think the crisis of facts is caused by our current struggle to tell fake from real.
Instead, I find that in this post-truth era, the political discourse relies solely on grievances and pre-held believes. On vibes. People feel a certain way and they adjust their perception of reality to match that feeling, whatever the facts on the ground. It’s what happens when you “start with a conclusion” and bend reality until it fits your preconceived notion.
In his discussion of Citizen Kane on Past Present Future, David Runciman hits upon a related point: That facts never stand on their own but are ultimately just a conduit for feelings.
In a part of the the film2, the newspaper publisher Kane tries to drum up support for the Spanish-American war by constructing newspaper stories about “the outrages committed by the Spanish”. His journalists don’t find anything, but Kane insists they instead make up some stories as pretext for war. Runciman explains:
Now there’s something completely fake and manipulative about this. This was fake news, but the emotions were real. The jingoism is fed by a real sense of outrage on the part of the readers.
When I heard this bit of the podcast, it suddenly started making sense to me how people can rationalize the most outrageous claims: The facts might be wrong, but they feel real. They suit the moment. They confirm the grudge. And currently, that’s more than enough.
Hannah Arendt one wrote: “Constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. People that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong… With such people, you can do whatever you want.”↩︎
Which, I should admit I’ve never seen, but that doesn’t change the point Runciman makes.↩︎