Six big lies that won the election: How Donald Trump gaslit America

Nine days before Election Day, Donald Trump delivered his closing argument at a Madison Square Garden rally that drew comparisons to a 1939 pro-Nazi rally in the same arena and characterized by similar anti-democratic themes: demonization of immigrants and political enemies, invocation of strongman leadership, threats of violent retribution, denunciations of the press.  

Responding to criticism of this self-evident hate-fest, Trump characterized it as “a lovefest.” He wasn’t just lying. That’s too simple an explanation of how Trump behaves in general, and what he’s doing here. Lying is deceiving people about the state of the world, and Trump routinely does that too. But simply tallying up the lies gives no insight into their purpose. Bulls***ting is deceiving people about one’s motives — using true or false claims indiscriminately — and is a more accurate description of his routine behavior. But calling that rally calls a “lovefest,” is doing something more: That's gaslighting, an effort to undermine people’s entire sense of reality and impose an invented reality in its place

Trump was saying, in effect: The hate you saw was really love, and if you can’t see that, you’re the hateful one. It’s the kind of upside-down logic commonly found in abusive relationships, whenever the abuser is challenged. They may lie all the time, but when the chips are down, they gaslight. 

Trump’s reliance on gaslighting was flagged repeatedly in his 2016 campaign. That May, Emily Crockett wrote at Vox about Trump’s gaslighting in response to Megyn Kelly’s questions about misogyny during the first Fox News primary debate. In May, Andrea Grimes wrote at the Texas Observer about the Trump campaign’s gaslighting in defense of Melania Trump’s plagiarism of Michelle Obama in her convention speech. And in September, Brian Beutler wrote at the New Republic about Trump's attempt to disavow his role in pushing birtherism, and shift the blame to Hillary Clinton or her aides.

I cited all of those examples in a story here that October, highlighting a brilliant Twitter dissection (archived here) by Leah McElrath of Trump’s pseudo-apology for the "Access Hollywood" tape. "Trump's statement is an eerie replica of psychological manipulations made by abusers after episodes of abuse," she began, breaking it down in a series of 15 numbered tweets, starting thus: 

1. "I'm not perfect" = Your expectations I behave like a human being are unreasonable
2. "I've never pretended to be someone I'm not" = You fell in love with me so it's your fault
3. "This more than decade old video" = It was a long time ago, why the fuss? You're so unreasonable.
4. "These words do not reflect who I am" = The reality you just experienced didn't actually happen.
5. "I said it ... I apologize" = Get over it already — I said I'm sorry, you're being hysterical.

Four dynamics are highlighted here: self-excuses, blame-shifting, gaslighting and normalizing aberrant behavior. But “gaslighting” also describes the cumulative effect and the purpose of the whole interaction. That's what gaslighting looks and feels like on an intimate level, while for Donald Trump it takes on a much more public character.

There's another level where Trump operates as well: He's a conman, and conmen are all about gaslighting. His whole career has been based on conning people, and his entry into politics was no different. He used birtherism to puff himself up as a potential presidential candidate in 2012, but never bothered with the details of birther conspiracy theories and never abandoned the “just asking questions” pose that allowed him to fool two different audiences simultaneously. On one hand, he played to a red-meat base increasingly disillusioned with Republican leadership in the Obama era. On the other, he posed as an open-minded truth-seeker. 

Like the conman in the original film “Gaslight,” Trump spun elaborate fictions, claiming that Obama had come out of nowhere, demanding to see his college transcripts and inventing a team of investigators sent to Hawaii (who did not exist). That got the anti-Obama base fired up, while presenting a pseudo-serious facade to the broader public. This is how he gaslights routinely in politics, rarely engaging directly with the right-wing mythologies he taps into, but freely improvising his own fantasy extensions.  

In this election, Trump relied on five key themes of gaslighting in various different ways, all of them adding up to an overarching sixth theme: Democrats are the real threat to American democracy, and Donald Trump is its savior. 

Trump did not originate any of these, and they've always involved elements of gaslighting. But Trump took them to a different level. As with birtherism his casual indifference to policy details, along with his made-up fantasy narratives, makes the gaslighting involved far more central. When he tells stories about windmills killing birds as a way of evading the climate crisis, he creates a shared space of bonding with his followers where any criticism only bonds them further, obliterating any contact with the reality of the harm being done. When the media just accepts this as normal political discourse, or observes that Democrats sometimes make false claims too, they do an enormous amount of work in enabling Trump's gaslighting, and leading us to what happened this past week. 

The climate crisis

This is the overwhelming challenge facing humanity, and Trump’s gaslighting — dismissing it as “a hoax” — has been astonishingly effective in keeping it off the political stage. For all our scientific and technological capacity, we simply have no way to comprehend how the climate crisis will damage human civilization over the long term. More immediately, tens of millions of people are already climate refugees, and hundreds of millions more surely will be.

Climate is arguably the main reason that Central Americans have replaced Mexicans as the largest population seeking entry to the U.S. since Trump first took office, so gaslighting on climate change was essential to making his “immigrant crime” narrative work. Hurricane Helene presented the perfect opportunity for bringing the climate crisis into the campaign. The damage done was almost 1% of U.S. national GDP, far exceeding annual government spending to combat climate change. It was the moment for a supremely important public policy discussion, but Trump’s gaslighting helped keep it entirely off the agenda. 

There are thousands of pages of documents making clear that the fossil fuel industry has known about the dangers of climate change for decades, and lied about them. But Trump of course claims the exact opposite: the scientists, or perhaps the Chinese, are pulling off “a hoax.” It’s classic gaslighting. 

The Great Replacement

This so-called theory has several variants, some explicitly antisemitic and others less so. All are effectively fantasies built on white supremacy. I wrote about this here at length in 2019. "The great replacement is very simple," French conspiracy theorist Renaud Camus, who coined the term, has said. "You have one people, and in the space of a generation you have a different people." This formulation equates immigration with genocide, which logically invites genocidal violence in response, and has been cited in mass murders across the globe. This replacement is allegedly enabled by weak or malicious cosmopolitan elites,  often identified as Jewish. 

As I wrote then, this conspiratorial worldview provides a new framework for the right:

If "invading hordes of immigrants" are the enemy, and falling white birthrates are key to the problem, then the right's misogynist agenda and its xenophobic agenda are much more tightly linked than ever before. 

Connections with Christian nationalism — an Old Testament-based worldview fusing Christian and American identities — are similarly strengthened. [It] "draws its roots from 'Old Testament' parallels between America and Israel, who was commanded to maintain cultural and blood purity, often through war, conquest, and separatism." 

In short, all the major electoral facets of American conservatism are more tightly unified ...  in the days of William F. Buckley or Ronald Reagan. What's more, the practical need to suppress voters of color becomes a central ingredient. 

In his tenure at Fox News, Tucker Carlson was a prime disseminator of Great Replacement narratives, particularly those connecting it the next key element of 2024 gaslighting: the voter fraud myth. As with birtherism, Carlson and those he relied on did the intricate conspiracy-tracing spadework, which Trump mostly ignored in favor of his sweeping claims about hordes of criminals and mental patients being shipped to the U.S. and his delusional narratives about "the late, great Hannibal Lecter" or Haitian immigrants eating pets  

Of course reality is radically different: Immigrants have much lower crime rates than native-born Americans, and are a net boon to the economy. It’s pure paranoid fantasy that blocks out the complex reality of a world in which the climate crisis will inevitably increase migration pressures. But it’s a simple story for a conman to tell, and the media’s willingness to normalize it radically shifted political discourse in Trump’s favor.

The voter fraud myth

This has been around at least since the 1960s, when former Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist was involved in “Operation Eagle Eye,” a Republican voter suppression operation in Arizona. Decades of election data shows that individual voter fraud is extremely rare and organized voter fraud, beyond a single Republican example in North Carolina, is simply nonexistent. But through endless repetition, Carlson and others have made it a right-wing article of faith that Democrats are encouraging undocumented immigration and registering the undocumented to vote in significant numbers. This serves as the background rationale for a wide range of voter-suppression efforts and extra-legal intimidation tactics. For Trump, this mythical fraud serves to vindicate his self-image as a defender of American democracy, who’s sometimes forced to ask election officials to find him several thousand votes. Again, he doesn’t concern himself with the elaborate details of this or that discredited election-fraud conspiracy theory. He's just trying to sell the big con and gaslight the public into viewing him as the great defender of democracy. 

Roe v. Wade and abortion

Trump's gaslighting on this issue has been particularly brazen. He was elected in 2016 thanks to support from anti-abortion evangelicals, based on his pledge to appoint anti-choice Supreme Court justices from a pre-approved list. That support proved particularly vital in surviving the "Access Hollywood" tape. The anti-abortion movement has built itself on decades of organized deception, but Trump’s added twist is to take credit and reject blame at the same time. He tells anti-choice supporters, “I got rid of Roe,” while telling everyone else, “It’s back in the states, where it belongs.”

His claim that “everyone” wanted this all along is, by itself, spectacular gaslighting, as is his claim that women have nothing to worry about. “I will be your protector,” he says, one of the creepiest gaslighting lines that women in abusive relationships often hear. “You will not be thinking about abortion” may have even more sinister undertones. This example of gaslighting was particularly effective, in that state initiatives to protect abortion rights passed almost everywhere, with large numbers of Trump voters voting for them.

The great Trump economy

This outrageous fiction builds on decades of GOP puffery and media complicity. Republicans have long been trusted more on the economy, despite generations of evidence that the economy does better under Democrats. Job growth offers a particularly striking example: Nearly all of it since 1989 has occurred with Democrats in office. But Trump takes this gaslighting to new levels, and the media’s abysmal treatment of Joe Biden’s remarkable record offered him a big assist.

In the closing days of this year's campaign 23 Nobel economists issued a letter calling Kamala Harris’ agenda “vastly superior to the counterproductive economic agenda of Donald Trump.” But that assessment (echoing an earlier letter when Biden was the candidate) caused barely a ripple, compared to the widespread media echoing of Trump’s ludicrous claims that Democratic governance would bring on economic disaster.

Trump’s an old hand at gaslighting where money is concerned. The Trump University fraud was a classic example, as are his seemingly endless string of business failures: a startup pro football league, an airline, his Atlantic City casinos. But he's highly skilled at was exploiting weaknesses in the press, creating his own reality and getting just enough people to project it to the public at large. That reached a peak with "The Apprentice," the reality show whose producers built a set of fake Trump offices, because the real ones were far too shabby.

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Coming into office in 2017, Trump inherited the longest economic recovery in U.S. history. “Yeah, it was pretty good because it was my economy!” as Barack Obama recently quipped. Trump left office as the first president since Herbert Hoover to lose jobs rather than gain them. Despite his repeated claims about having the “best economy” ever, economic growth was sluggish even before COVID hit. What Trump did was to brag constantly, and the media ate it up, producing the illusion of much better performance than actually occurred. 

Biden, like Obama and Bill Clinton before him, was faced with the challenge of rescuing an economy that his Republican predecessor had left in shambles. Given the constraints, he was wildly successful. Under Biden, U.S. GDP has grown twice as fast as Canada's, the next nearest G7 nation. Inflation was a problem — a worldwide problem, overwhelmingly caused by supply-chain issues.

Here again the media collaborated, consistently painted a gloomy picture for Biden. University of Wisconsin political scientist Mark Copelovitch, who tracks media coverage alongside real-world economic trends, reports more than 10,000 media mentions of "inflation" since Biden took office, compared to 1,226 of "recovery." Even though inflation is now down to normal levels, there have still been 1,017 mentions of it since Aug. 1, compared to just 16 for "recovery."

“Even in 2024, continuing into the general election season, media coverage of the U.S. economy has overwhelmingly and disproportionately focused on covering inflation and the (nonexistent) recession,” Copelovitch told me, “while barely mentioning the fact that unemployment remains incredibly low or the fact that we've experienced an unprecedentedly rapid and complete economic recovery from the pandemic during Joe Biden's presidency." 

Is it any wonder that even after Harris made early gains as the Democratic nominee, Trump still retained an advantage on the economy? In this case, he benefited from decades of skewed pro-Republican economic reporting. But the press largely echoed his other gaslighting claims as well. With the media’s assistance, Trump’s bottom-line gaslighting claim — that Democrats are the real threat to American democracy, and he's its savior — seemed far too credible to far too many voters. 

There are certainly many other factors to consider in unpacking what happened in the 2024 election, including that it was just one element in a global trend of incumbent losses. But gaslighting is a central factor in the operation of fascism, and the failure of media in liberal democracies even to recognize its existence, much less to fight it, puts the very survival of liberal democracy at risk.