Donald Trump and the tyranny of the uninformed

The Democrats’ finger-pointing about why Donald Trump won the presidential election continues. Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, thinks it’s because Democrats are out of touch with the economic issues that matter to working-class Americans.

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” he said. That’s a pretty patronizing take for someone who claims to be a champion of workers.

Sanders believes that Kamala Harris lost the election because Democrats didn’t speak to the working class with enough empathy and concern. But these voters aren’t five-year-olds who have to be cajoled into behaving themselves. When you respect people, you also hold them responsible for the choices they make.

This election wasn’t about policy. It was about fundamental principles, and voters knew exactly what they were voting for. This was a clear choice between a candidate who pledged to defend America’s founding values, democracy and the rule of law and a populist demagogue who pandered to a sense of grievance and promised to bring down the price of groceries.

It’s infantilizing to assume, as Sanders does, that the working-class voters he champions aren’t or shouldn’t be interested in things like America’s democratic traditions. America’s founders were largely self-educated farmers and tradespeople. George Washington had almost no formal education at all. The Federalist papers — there were anti-federalist papers, too — were debated by ordinary people in coffee houses, homes and public meetings. It’s often said that the working class built America, but they also helped lay its intellectual foundation.

We’ve remained true to that tradition for much of our history. The generations that fought two world wars to defend democracy would have booed a candidate like Donald Trump off the stage. They certainly would never have elected him president.

Now, things are different. Voters elected an authoritarian because they were upset about the price of eggs. That is unsustainable. If a majority of Americans are willing to trade democracy for the promise — especially the illusory promise — of a little economic security, then the American experiment is over.

Nonetheless, there may be hope. I said earlier that voters knew exactly what they were voting for. They certainly could have known if they had made a little effort to find out. But maybe they didn’t.

In a recent survey, despite two years of often-spectacular growth, 56 percent of voters believed we were in a recession. Half of voters thought the unemployment rate was at a 50-year high when, in fact, it is at a 50-year low. Half of voters thought the stock market was down for the year even though at the time of the survey it was up over 25 percent.

In other words, Americans live in two different worlds complete with different facts.

Why is this? If you are a news junkie, it’s possible to compare multiple sources online and ferret out the truth. But most people get their news from just a handful of sources. One recent study found that more than half of Americans get their news from social media. Even worse, 20 percent of Americans get their news from social media influencers. But even more traditional outlets curate the news to keep their viewers happy. News is now just another form of entertainment.

If, for example, you watch Fox News, you will have a very different view of the world than if you watch MSNBC. In the case of one story — the trial in which a jury found Donald Trump civilly liable for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll, MSNBC mentioned the controversy 440 times in the first five months of 2023, in the run-up to the May 2023 verdict. Fox News mentioned it seven times. This pattern is repeated for a whole range of issues.

And when negative stories about Trump are discussed on Fox, it is often in the context of attempting to explain them away. In some cases, the network simply lies to its viewers in pursuit of ratings. Famously, Fox News paid $787 million to settle a defamation claim that arose out of its false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from Donald Trump.

So, as incredible as it may seem, it may be that many voters, especially in rural areas that have fewer news outlets to choose from, may not fully understand what Trump has said and done. The data bear that out. Just one in five voters, for example, knew that Donald Trump had said his claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election were grounds for him to terminate the Constitution.

As dire as this is, it’s also good news, because it is something we can fix.

If you voted for Donald Trump this November and you understood that he plans to undermine the rule of law and wreck American democracy, then you are the problem. In one survey, one in four Republicans said that if Trump were to lose the 2024 election, he should declare the results invalid and do whatever necessary to take office. That’s un-American. If you are one of these voters, you can dress yourself up in red, white and blue and wave the flag all you want. But you are not a patriot. You are a danger to everything this country stands for.

But if you’re simply confused or unaware, you’re not irredeemable. And if there are enough of you, then, perhaps, there is hope that Trump’s victory is not the death knell for the American experiment that it appears to be at first glance.

There’s no easy fix for this. Our commitment to freedom of the press is one of the things that makes America exceptional, so whatever the remedy is, it’s not censorship.

But something needs to be done before the rot becomes untreatable. To borrow a phrase from the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), we can all live together happily in a country where everyone has their own opinions. We cannot live together in a country where everyone has their own facts.

Chris Truax is an appellate attorney who served as Southern California chair for John McCain’s primary campaign in 2008.