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Donald Trump doesn’t want us to believe our own eyes | Steven Greenhouse

With Donald Trump back in office for a year, it seems increasingly clear what his motto should be: “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” Whether about grocery prices, January 6, Ukraine or actions by ICE agents, Trump keeps making astonishingly false statements that contradict what we can see with our own eyes.

In recent weeks, Trump has once again sought to bamboozle us into not believing what we saw – the most egregious recent example involved the ICE agent who killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis. Within hours of her death, Trump smeared Good on Truth Social, saying that the 37-year-old mother of three belonged to “a Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate” and that she “viciously ran over the ICE officer”. Trump added, “It is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.”

What Trump said was light years from what we saw. Videos show that Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed Good, not only wasn’t knocked over by her SUV, but walked away after he shot her three times.

With that false version of events, Trump sought to send a message to officials throughout his administration that they should badmouth Good and defend Ross to the hilt. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, rushed to malign Good as a rioter and domestic terrorist, while vice-president JD Vance denounced her as a “deranged leftist”.

Trump’s outrageous assaults on the truth bring to mind a memorable line from comedian Richard Pryor: “Ya gonna believe me or your lyin’ eyes?” In his stand-up act, that was Pryor’s response to his mad-as-hell wife after she discovered him in bed with another woman. Like other brazen demagogues, Trump seems to believe he has a magical power to persuade us not to believe what our eyes are telling us.

Take inflation. In recent months, Trump, who vowed to reduce prices on day one, has said there was “no inflation,” that all grocery prices were “falling rapidly,” and that “every price is down”. But anyone can see that there’s still inflation. It’s running at 2.7%, only slightly below what it was when Biden left office, a rate that Trump derided as way too high.

Anyone who goes shopping can see that many grocery prices have risen. According to the government’s latest inflation report, many food prices have gone down, but, overall, food prices rose by 3.1% over the past year. Coffee prices jumped 19.8%, beef and veal 16.4%, sugar 6.9%, and fish and seafood 4.4%. Not only that, food prices jumped sharply in December by 0.7%, the largest monthly increase in over three years.

It’s not only grocery prices that have climbed. Hardware rose 5.4%, furniture and bedding 3.6%, and electricity 6.7%, even though candidate Trump promised Americans that he’d chop electricity prices in half within 12 months.

Or take gasoline prices. In last month’s primetime speech from the White House, Trump said gasoline prices had fallen to $1.99 “in much of the country”. But that’s not what tens of millions of Americans are seeing. More than 70 million Americans live in states where the average price is over $3 a gallon and the average price nationwide is more than $2.80 per gallon.

When Trump gets criticized for doing little to reduce healthcare prices, he often boasts about persuading several pharmaceutical companies to reduce prices on some of their prescription drugs. But then Trump leaps into fantasy land, variously saying he has cut prescription drug prices by 500% or 600% or by 1,300% or 1,400%, even by 2,000% or 3,000%. Those numbers sound impressive, but anyone with eyes and sixth-grade math skills will realize that Trump is seeking to wow them with absurdities. If the price of a $150 prescription drug is cut by 100%, that means its price will be zero. But Trump’s talk of cuts of 500% or 2,000% makes one wonder how this self-described “stable genius” ever got a degree from Wharton business school.

It’s easy to come up with a long list of Trump’s outlandish falsehoods, with him essentially saying, as the Marx Brothers also did in their 1933 film, Duck Soup, “Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” Trump has preposterously asserted that Ukraine started its war with Russia. In his eagerness to deploy troops, he claimed that Portland, Oregon, was “burning to the ground”. (Portland is still here.) Trump once insisted that Barack Obama had founded the terrorist organization IS. Trump’s White House blames the Capitol police for instigating the violence on January 6.

Explanations abound for why Trump tells such fantastical falsehoods. Sometimes he doesn’t have a grip on the facts. Over the years, he’s gotten accustomed to spouting anything he likes because he lives in a bubble in which his underlings don’t dare challenge his untruths. Trump knows that his lies and falsehoods infuriate his foes, and his Maga base loves to see him “owning the libs” that way.

A better explanation, I believe, is that Trump is convinced that lying, that providing alternate facts, has worked marvelously for him as a political strategy. (Plus, he knows that many in the rightwing media will happily parrot his lies.) Trump is no doubt convinced his lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio eat people’s pets helped get him elected. He has also pushed the colossal lie that he, not Joe Biden, won the 2020 election, and millions of Trump’s Maga followers have bought that lie. (But polls show that Americans haven’t swallowed Trump’s lies that there’s “no inflation” and that “every price is down”.)

Trump often seems to be following the “big lie” strategy the Nazis used during the 1930s. Keep telling and retelling big lies in the hope that people will eventually believe them.

In her 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, the political theorist Hannah Arendt captured what political strategies like Trump’s – of maintaining a constant firehose of falsehoods – are all about. Arendt wrote: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (and the distinction between true and false) no longer exists.”

The danger is acute in an upside-down world where people can’t distinguish between truth and lies, between fact and fiction. That greatly increases the chances that a self-promoting demagogue who spouts hundreds of lies will win election over a truth-teller who is sincere about serving the nation.

Right now, it’s obvious that there is another big danger when prominent politicians flood the world with falsehoods. Seeing how Trump and his administration have vigorously backed Ross, often with lies and deceptions, other ICE agents will grow convinced and confident that they can act with impunity, that even if they kill someone without justification, the Trump administration will rush to defend them 1,000%, if need be, with lies, and they won’t face any accountability.