Why Trump and Vance’s strategy is ‘say anything, make up anything’

JD Vance was holding court on CNN’s State of the Union programme. “The American media totally ignored this stuff,” he complained last Sunday, “until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes.”

But it wasn’t just a meme, objected interviewer Dana Bash. The Republican vice-presidential nominee gave a telling response: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.”

If ever there was a case of saying the quiet part out loud, Vance had perfected the art. The cat memes he referred to were prompted by baseless rumours about legal Haitian immigrants in his home state of Ohio eating house pets – rumours that led to bomb threats and evacuations of schools and government buildings in Springfield.

But Vance’s willingness to “create stories” to grab attention before the November’s election hinted at a new frontier in post-truth America, where a lie is no longer slyly distributed but rather brazenly flaunted as a tactic to win political support and stir up social chaos.

Some commentators draw a parallel with Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway’s coining of “alternative facts” when, on another Sunday politics show back in 2017, she sought to defend then White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s false statements about the crowd size at Trump’s inauguration.

Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “It’s a logical continuation of what once was called ‘alternative facts’ by the same camp. It’s obvious that is a long-term mission statement, more than just an offhand comment.

“Their entire strategy is to say anything, make up anything, invent false narratives to try and distract away from the very real consequences of their radical and extreme agenda that is so far out of the mainstream of the American people’s interests. They think they have a better chance of winning by making up insane stories about people eating pets versus having a subsequent conversation about the consequences of their policy agenda.”

Dishonesty in politics is hardly new, from President Richard Nixon’s cover-up of the Watergate scandal to the false claim of weapons of mass destruction used as a pretext for the Iraq war. In 2004, the New York Times Magazine quoted an unnamed official in the George W Bush administration as saying: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

Richard Nixon points to transcripts of White House tapes after announcing during a nationally televised speech that he would turn them over to House impeachment investigators, on 29 April 1974. Photograph: AP

It was fertile soil for Trump, who had spent years exaggerating his personal wealth and charity giving, misleading the public about ventures such as Trump University and even misrepresenting his own height and weight. From 2011, he was a leading promoter of the false conspiracy theory that Barack Obama had been born in Kenya and was therefore not eligible to be US president.

From his inauguration on, Trump made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims during his four years in the White House, according to a count by the Washington Post. He memorably claimed to have presided over the biggest tax cut ever – in fact, Ronald Reagan’s was bigger – and repeatedly downplayed the coronavirus pandemic, telling the public that it would soon “disappear”.

But perhaps the biggest lie of all came on the night of the 2020 presidential election when Trump claimed that he had won. He stuck to this position, arguing that it had been “stolen” from him through widespread voter fraud, ultimately leading to a deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. He has since recast the rioters as martyrs and “patriots”.

Now making his third consecutive bid for the White House, Trump’s mendacity has, if possible, shifted up a gear. He made more than 30 false claims during the presidential debate against Joe Biden in Atlanta, according to a fact-check by host network CNN, but escaped close scrutiny because of Biden’s feeble performance.

In the debate against Harris in Philadelphia, he made false assertions about topics including inflation, immigration, tariffs, House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s role on January 6, Joe Biden’s role in the criminal cases against him and popular support for the overturning of the constitutional right to abortion.

Astonishingly, he also plucked the racist Springfield conspiracy theory from the fever swamps of the internet and gave it a national platform before tens of millions of viewers when he said: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

Not for the first time that night, ABC News’s moderators were forced to step in with a fact-check. There is no evidence for such a claim. The Wall Street Journal newspaper reported that on the day Vance first promoted the rightwing rumours, Springfield’s city manager told his office that they were baseless.

Vance’s team gave the Journal a police report in which a resident claimed her cat may have been stolen by Haitian neighbours. But a Journal reporter tracked down the resident and learned that her cat had been in the basement the whole time, prompting her to apologise to her neighbours.

Yet still Trump and Vance persisted with the knowing falsehoods at rally after rally on the campaign trail, undeterred by warnings from the White House that they could stoke an ugly backlash against Haitians in Springfield. Then came Vance’s shocking admission that he would make stuff up and be proud of it.

Days after the CNN interview, Vance continued to defend the comments while admitting that he had not fact-checked residents’ claims about the pets. “The media has a responsibility to fact-check,” he said at a rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in an effort to shift blame.

An ad for Trump on the side of an automotive business in Springfield, Ohio, on 16 September 2024. Photograph: Jessie Wardarski/AP

Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “What JD Vance is saying is that the facts don’t matter and that I am completely unashamed to have peddled a false story.

“It underlines the degree to which Trump and Vance and the Maga movement are addicted to these fake online internet memes and unshakeable in their attachment to them. Even when they are refuted, they stick with them, which is a dangerous thing because it means that no matter how much evidence you can provide, no matter how dangerous the lies turn out to be, they’re not going to back off.”

Sykes warned: “They’re going to keep pushing. Extrapolate this to what’s going to happen in November and the election results. Extrapolate it to anything.”

On Saturday, Vance is due to appear with conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson on the former Fox News host’s live tour in Hershey, Pennsylvania. This is despite Carlson having recently hosted Nazi apologist and Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper on his podcast, a decision roundly condemned by Jewish members of Congress.

Trump, meanwhile, has been joined on the campaign trail by far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer. She turned up at the debate and then a day later in New York to commemorate the 23rd anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Loomer, who commands a following of 1.2m people on the X social media platform, has previously suggested that 9/11 was an inside job. At a rally in Las Vegas, Trump said he had heard that Harris had used a secret earpiece during their debate, a baseless conspiracy theory that Loomer has promoted on X.

Loomer also posted on X that if Harris, who is of Indian descent, wins the election, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center”. Even far-right Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene denounced the comment as racist.

Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, regards Loomer as a symptom rather than a cause. “Run through a list of all the conspiracy theories that Donald Trump has embraced or pushed and it’s lengthy,” he said. “It’s not as if Laura Loomer is making Donald Trump into a conspiracist. Donald Trump has been one for years. He’s now finding people who will stroke and validate his darker impulses.”

There is another reason for Trump and Vance’s sense of impunity. Their lies originate from and are legitimised by a rightwing media ecosystem that now includes X, formerly Twitter, owned by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who has endorsed Trump, hosted an interview with him and sought to portray his critics as enemies of free speech.

Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at the watchdog Media Matters for America, said: “This is a rightwing media ticket. Donald Trump and JD Vance are both people who are fully immersed in the information ecosystem of the far right and they’ve adopted its complete lack of standards and willingness to use any means necessary to achieve their ends of political gain and political victory. What we’re seeing here is how these lies can spiral totally out of control. Springfield, Ohio, is experiencing some real chaos right now.”

Heading into the final sprint of the election, where he could face prison if he loses, Trump is surpassing himself with a blitz of falsehoods. On Thursday, CNN’s fact-checkers produced a list of “12 completely fictional stories” that he has told in the last month, including Harris reintroducing the military draft, schools sending children for gender-affirming surgeries without their parents’ knowledge and Harris negotiating with Russian president Vladimir Putin in 2022 in an effort to prevent the invasion of Ukraine.

Michael Steele, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, said: “There’s nothing worse than a desperate man. There’s nothing worse than a desperate racist man who cannot control the woman in front of him who happens to be African American. Cannot control the conditions around him that have changed – the tightening of the political race for the presidency.

“Cannot control what people are saying about him, the fact that Republicans are now coming out and speaking against a second Trump term and are creating lanes in which we are willing to support the Democrat over Donald Trump because he is that bad and that dangerous. When he cannot control that, he becomes even more dangerous and more desperate and you need to be aware of that because there’s more of this coming between now and November.”