John Diaz March 19, 2018 Updated: March 19, 2018 1:13 p.m.
The past week was extraordinary in the annals of official U.S. government deception, and not just because President Trump admitted fabricating the falsehood that this nation has a trade deficit with Canada, further undermining this nation’s credibility and relationship with a neighbor and ally.
There is nothing new or surprising about the president or his top aides shading or inventing reality. The Washington Post, which is keeping track, has counted more than 2,100 false or misleading statements in his first year.
The surprise of the week is that two patriotic public servants were willing to risk their livelihoods to insist on telling the truth. Perhaps it is not shocking that each is now unemployed.
Truth prevailed, but at a cost to Schwab’s career.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Steve Goldstein issued a statement that Secretary Rex Tillerson was “unaware of the reason” for his firing and had not heard directly from the president before Trump made the announcement on Twitter. “I spoke for the secretary of state,” Goldstein said, which, after all, was his job. He was promptly fired for contradicting the blurred-focus White House version of events.
So there you have it in the Trump era: Lie or quit. Tell the truth, and you’re fired.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders deflects and deceives on almost a daily basis, but that’s the pact she has made with the devil — and her credibility is near zero. Her predecessor, Sean Spicer, immolated his integrity on Day One, when he accepted marching orders to support Trump’s provably false claim that his inauguration crowd exceeded President Barack Obama’s.
So what does it mean, and does it matter, that this administration has such reckless disregard for the truth?
I could think of no better perspective to tap than that of Leon Panetta, who has devoted his life’s work to ethical public service and whose resume is second to none: CIA director, secretary of defense, director of the Office of Management and Budget, longtime member of Congress, White House chief of staff.
Trump is not the first president to struggle with truth. President Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam come to mind, as does President Richard Nixon and Watergate, and President Bill Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
But make no mistake: the scale and frequency — and toxicity — of the Trump propaganda campaign is unprecedented, and last week’s events suggest it is extending well beyond the president’s protective inner circle.
I reached out to two veteran political spokespeople, a Republican (Rob Stutzman of Sacramento) and a Democrat (Nathan Ballard of San Francisco) to get their takes on the state of disinformation. Each is skilled in identifying and disseminating the most favorable facts for a client. Each found the predicament facing Schwab to be both highly unusual and highly disturbing.
Stutzman, who now runs his own public affairs firm, said that Rule One for his new hires is to tell the truth. He and Ballard made the same point: Their rationale is based on ethics and practicality. Once that trust with a journalist is lost, it is never regained, they asserted.
“If you can’t tell the truth about crowd size, then how can you trust anything else (from the White House) to be the truth?” Stutzman said.
Ballard said there is “nothing wrong with picking your strongest facts and making an argument —that’s a practice as old as Jefferson and Hamilton.” A free press, he added, affords the other side to make its best points.
Schwab quit as ICE spokesman because “I didn’t want to perpetuate misleading facts” that were made locally and amplified at the top by the president and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Schwab is a hero in an era when too few are willing to speak truth to power, but he may not be unemployed for long. Ballard jumped on Twitter to offer him a job.
This nation desperately needs more truth tellers in an administration that is showing no appreciation for the institutions or values that are at the core of an informed and engaged democracy.
Sadly, outrageously, a culture built on what White House counselor Kellyanne Conway called “alternative facts” is oozing downstream through our government.