Trump and the tribalism of political lying
Elections are vulnerable because chaos has become the perfect means to erode trust, evidence, and democratic systems. Vulnerabilities are not just theoretical nor are they interested exaggerations; they have been exploited worldwide, from South Africa to Ukraine, Bulgaria, and the Philippines. Hacking voting machines remains too easy. But it is even easier to build narratives of distrust and emotionality. Playing with minds and fragmenting realities to erode democratic processes.
This is what the President of the United States did in his State of the Union address on July 16. Donald Trump appeared in prime time to unfold a confusing narrative that mixed figures, risks, and suspicions to build a conspiracy theory about the alleged electoral theft he suffered in 2020: an alleged 220 million American voter registrations in Chinese hands, "extremely exposed" voting machines, 278,000 foreign citizens listed on electoral rolls... But none of the documents he made public confirmed these suspicions.
Trump revived his old obsessions, from accusations against Beijing to attacks on the press, to invoke foreign interference and, incidentally, fuel suspicion about the midterm elections to be held in November, and about a possible Republican defeat announced in the polls. The President of the United States has been speculating about the midterm elections for a whole year, first talking about a possible cancellation – a mere joke, according to his collaborators – and then defending the idea that Republicans should nationalize them – a stance he later qualified by saying it was about strengthening the federal government's "involvement" in the process.
Trump speaks of conspiracies to hide his own interference in a system, according to him, "so deteriorated and so vulnerable that it is impossible to defend." A system, in fact, damaged by presidential kleptocracy. Trump has dedicated himself to using federal power to put voters, workers, and institutions under permanent suspicion, weakening the legitimacy of the next count long before it begins. The goal is to eliminate rational debate and the importance of evidence, while his administration governs with contempt for the legal order.
From Russian suspicion about his 2016 electoral victory to accusations against China in the 2020 defeat, there is a whole geopolitical narrative built outside the concerns of American voters. The Chinese threat is not electoral, it is a challenge to the global hegemony of the United States.
The Pew Research Center has just published a new international survey revealing that Beijing has been gaining ground on Washington in terms of attractiveness in much of the world. This is a significant shift in public opinion amidst the bipolar confrontation between the two powers. The study shows that China enjoys more sympathy than the United States in 25 out of 36 countries surveyed between February and May of this year. According to experts, this is the first time in the two decades that this opinion center has conducted the survey that China has surpassed the United States in the majority of countries analyzed.
Chinese “soft power” is prevailing over the unpredictable and coercive transactionalism of Trumpism.
It is no coincidence that the Chinese threat is now appearing, once again, in the White House's conspiracy narrative. If there is one storyline that has crossed from the first Trump administration through the Biden years and this second Republican term, it is Beijing's challenge. Trump is now playing on the hyper-emotionality of alleged electoral vulnerability, built on exaggeration, lies, or trivialization of facts.
American journalist David Roberts was already talking in 2017, after Trump's first victory, about “epistemic tribalism” in which what matters is not objective truth but the reinforcement of group identity. An identity that Trump has painstakingly tied to distrust in a system that he himself has worked to weaken.
Sociologists are increasingly warning about the costs of “truth fatigue,” the necessary mental effort involved in living permanently obliged to verify any statement – be it a health tip, a job offer, or a news item.
Truth fatigue is not just informational, it is emotional. We believe what fits our tribe because it saves us energy. And Trump has made distorting the truth and constructing an alternative narrative his main weapon of political survival.