Trumpism depends on the fog of incomplete information

On Thursday morning, multiple major news outlets published analyses of videos from the killing of Renee Good by federal officials in Minneapolis. The New York Times. The Washington Post. CNN. Each neatly dispels the narrative offered by the Trump administration immediately after the shooting, establishing clearly that Good was not trying to run down ICE agents and, in fact, does not appear to have even injured any as she sought to escape.

This was obvious soon after the shooting. The videos analyzed by the news outlets were available Wednesday afternoon, showing precisely what the annotated and professionally edited presentations do. But the standard of evidence used by news outlets is stricter than the one used by a layperson, so it took longer for them to formally reach the same, obvious conclusion. It took longer for them to dismiss the White House’s presentations as false than it did for external observers, in part because they have an obligation not to be wrong that isn’t shared by regular people or, it seems, the president.

A gray zone emerges. As media outlets push to confirm what happened, people with access to much of the same information have already reached conclusions. Bad-faith actors — again including Donald Trump — are able to make flat assertions about what occurred that their loyal and/or incurious supporters accept. Critics of the administration coalesce around their own, more accurate understanding of events, at times chiding the media for being so slow in joining them.

In the days when news was published in daily newspapers or precisely at 6 p.m., this was less of a problem. Not only because there was no expectation of immediacy but because there didn’t exist independent systems by which regular people could view the same information as professional news-gatherers. But now there is, and an awful lot of framing and debate occurs in the space between an event and its being cemented as objective fact.

It’s a bit like election results, an analogy that I draw intentionally. Votes are cast on Election Day and, often, in the weeks prior. In some places, vote-counting continues for hours or days, creating a similar gray area. Initial results might suggest one thing and final votes another; voters and politicians are urged to wait for the latter instead of making assumptions about the former.

Sometimes, though, those voters and politicians know that waiting is disadvantageous. In 2020, Trump knew that, as more votes were counted, it was likely to mean more votes for Joe Biden. There was a plan in place to take advantage of the gray zone — to insist not only that initial information was correct but that subsequent information (that is, more votes) were suspect. Not only did Trump attempt to establish an election result before vote-counting was done, he tried to position the finalized vote totals as fraudulent because they differed from the premature story he’d presented.

We see this following news events, as well. As mainstream media slowly figures out what happened, Trump and his allies (particularly but not exclusively) rally around a story that comports with their politics. As more information comes out, that information isn’t used to adjust their position; instead, it’s used to demonstrate the bias and untrustworthiness of the media. If the final conclusions of the press don’t comport with their story, it’s the press’s fault, not the story’s.

We’ll see how the Good shooting evolves over the next few days. Recent history, though, suggests that Trump and others who are (grotesquely) attempting to blame Good for her own death are much more likely to decide that reality is inaccurate than that they themselves are.

Photo: Trump at a press conference shortly after the 2020 presidential election. (White House/Flickr)