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On Balance | As 2024 looms, the world hasn’t seen the last of Donald Trump’s fact distortion field
- Support for the former US president may be dwindling, but in an era when hostility is more important than coherent policy, we cannot assume this decline is irreversible
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No one should have been surprised by the gargantuan distortions of facts that former US president Donald Trump lobbed out as he announced his re-election bid from the ballroom of his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida last week.
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As with the assertions that no one ever paid any duties on Chinese imports before he took office – “No president had ever saw [sic] or received one dollar for our country from China until I came along” – and that he prevented the Chinese economy from overtaking the US by 2019, veracity has no place in Trump’s world.
His core supporters are inoculated against any challenge that verifiable reality might present in saner circles. And keeping fact-checkers in the press corps that he despises so much working late into the night to refute just about every line in Trump’s one-hour speech would only make them more satisfied.
Proving that he has the comedic chops of an eight-year-old and remains indifferent to the violence that racialised rhetoric can cause, he not only referred to the “China virus” in his speech but also observed on social media that the family name of Glenn Youngkin, the Virginia governor and a possible opponent in the 2024 election, which he spelled “Young Kin”, “sounds Chinese”.
But if he was happy to put the lives of his vice-president Mike Pence and hundreds of police officers in danger on January 6, 2021, why would Trump restrain himself for the sake of an Asian-American community that’s seen a sharp increase in attacks since the Covid-19 pandemic started?
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No matter that nearly all of the Senate, secretary of state and gubernatorial candidates backed by Trump for key swing states in the US midterm elections – many pushing false claims about the 2020 election being stolen from Trump – lost. The former president still managed to suggest that his political brand remains red-hot because the majority of his picks won, never mind that the fact that those wins were mostly in races that were no contest to begin with.
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Donald Trump announces 2024 presidential bid despite Republican misgivings after US midterm polls
Donald Trump announces 2024 presidential bid despite Republican misgivings after US midterm polls
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