The climate of fear is self-imposed
I am not generally in the habit of criticizing the editorial decisions of The Washington Post, my employer for 11 years and an institution that continues to do good, important work in covering the unwinding of American democracy. But I think the paper’s assessment of the putative debate over Donald Trump’s signature on the note provided for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday demands some context.
The article’s original headline was “No clear answers on whether Trump signed the Epstein birthday book,” a declaration that was eventually softened to “Is the signature Trump’s? Epstein birthday book feeds speculation.” The article first presents the denials of Trump’s staff and allies that he couldn’t have signed the bizarre, creepy, suggestive document. It then quotes handwriting experts, some of whom who indicated uncertainty about the signature’s provenance. A number of full signatures of Trump’s are shown in an apparent effort to demonstrate variation.
The use of full signatures doesn’t make sense because the signature in the book — created in 2003, before Epstein was on law enforcement’s radar — includes only Trump’s first name. The New York Times compared that signature to other examples of Trump signing only his first name, showing that they are nearly identical. In fact, the Wall Street Journal, which originally reported on the note, also published an article demonstrating why the note was almost certainly from Trump, including similar first-name-only signatures from the now-president.
The Journal did so, it’s safe to assume, because its initial report on the letter was rejected as invented or “fake news” by Trump et al. (Trump even sued, claiming, in part, that no such letter existed.) In other words, it probably assumed that publication of the note would trigger precisely the response that it did, an effort to move the goalposts of claimed fraudulence.
There is absolutely no reason to think that the note was not, in fact, from Trump and no reason to think that the signature is not his own. Even setting aside the obvious-to-any-layperson similarity to other signatures, the idea that someone would create a phony Trump letter as a private gift to someone Trump had praised publicly the year prior doesn’t make any sense.
So why treat the idea that the signature isn’t his seriously? Why treat the assertions of people with demonstrated track records of lying on Trump’s behalf — including Trump, his communications team and right-wing influencers — as offering sincere complaints on this particular issue? Why grant them the benefit of the doubt that they actually think the signature isn’t his?
There’s a marketplace for treating those bad-faith claims as valid, clearly, but there’s also friction for those who call them out as nonsense. One of the developments that’s helped Trump immeasurably since his decision to enter national politics is the right’s streamlining a system for directing public pressure on chosen targets. Evolving from sites like Twitchy to social media pile-ons to simply mainstreaming abusive behavior, it’s now trivial to pollute the media space in which journalists operate with unpleasantness (and worse).
But I don’t think that this system of pressure is what The Post’s reporting is responding to. I think, instead, it is offering grace to bad-faith actors because institutions have internalized the idea that bad-faith actors must, particularly in this moment, be granted that grace. The mainstream media has long been criticized for bolstering both sides of even lopsided debates, but that tendency faded during Trump’s first term in office. After all, both sides used to operate much more obviously in good faith than did Trump and his allies. With Trump’s return to the White House, though, and his imposition of proto-authoritarianism as the new D.C. normal, institutions seem to be willing to treat it as normal, on pain of ostracism.
There is overlap here with the embarrassing and disconcerting situation at Texas A&M. A student in a class recorded herself challenging a professor who was reviewing a discussion of gender and sexuality. In short order, the video made its way to a Republican Texas legislator.
“I’m not entirely sure this is legal to be teaching. Because, according to our president, there’s only two genders and he said that he would be freezing agencies’ funding programs that promote gender ideology,” the student tells the instructor. “…I am not going to participate in this because it’s not legal and I don’t want to promote something that is against our president’s laws as well as against my religious beliefs.”
Facing a firestorm of pressure generated by the aforementioned right-wing outrage system, the university quickly fired the instructor, demoted two officials and announced an audit aimed at ensuring that no similarly transgressive instruction was occurring within its system.
I don’t want to harp too much on the student’s verbiage, since nitpicking the complaints of college students is one of the lowest forms of commentary. But I do think she said something revealing. Not her invocation of “our president’s laws,” which is obviously a wild distortion of the American system, but her insistence that “according to our president, there’s only two genders.”
We don’t need to dig into the science here to understand what’s wrong with that phrasing. We don’t even need to disagree with the assertion. We can simply focus on the idea that she’s pitting the veiws of the president against the views of a faculty member at a college … and the college chose to side with the president. In the eternal human struggle to understand the world, Texas A&M is demonstrating — quite eagerly — that it will defer to politicians on the nature of truth rather than the people it has hired to explore and examine that nature.
You can see the overlap with The Post’s signature assessment. Assertions about reality that are bolstered by evidence and/or examination run afoul of the president and his allies. So the president and his allies are granted the space to object or even simply granted primacy in the debate they invented. Institutions that should be centered primarily on elevating truth instead risk becoming institutions that elevate propaganda.
What could The Post have done? What it has done so many times before: Parse the issue and fully demonstrate the flimsiness of Trump’s claims, even if a just-asking-questions style headline would generate more traffic. What could Texas A&M have done? Stand behind its instructor and defend its role as a truth-seeking institution in court, if it came to that.
It has been observed that individual Americans are putting up more fight than many institutions. Those individuals are also smaller targets for the authoritarian president and his allies. They are less powerful. But that’s obviously why it’s more important for the institutions to engage and not to succumb to the climate of fear.
That climate, after all, only exists if it goes unchallenged. There is no climate of fear without capitulation.
Photo: Sen. Joseph McCarthy. (National Archives)