Prof Sarah Oates
Professor and Associate Dean for Research at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park (USA). She is the author of Seeing Red: Russian Propaganda and American News from Oxford University Press and you can see more of her work at www.media-politics.com.
Linkedin: sarah-oates-umd
Twitter: @media_politics
Email: soates@umd.edu
U.S. Election 2024
1. Trump’s imagined reality is America’s new reality (Prof Sarah Oates)
2. Trump’s threat to American democracy (Prof Pippa Norris)
3. Why does Donald Trump tell so many lies? (Prof Geoff Beattie)
4. Strategic (in)civility in the campaign and beyond (Dr Emily Sydnor)
5. Can America’s democratic institutions hold? (Prof Rita Kirk)
6. How broad is presidential immunity in the United States? (Dr Jennifer L. Selin)
7. Election fraud myths require activation: Evidence from a natural experiment (Dr David E. Silva)
8. What ever happened to baby Q? (Harrison J. LeJeune)
9. We’re all playing Elon Musk’s game now (Dr Adrienne L. Massanari)
10. Peak woke? The end of identity politics? (Prof Timothy J. Lynch)
11. Teaching the 2024 election (Dr Whitney Phillips)
In the 2024 U.S. election campaign, Donald Trump’s communication strategy evolved from twisting facts to distorting reality itself. By divorcing a leader from any need for truth, the democratic system in which citizens hold leaders accountable is likely to fail.
Disinformation is not new to the Trump campaign, but it entered a new phase of falsehood in 2024, one in which there was not only deliberate lying but the knowledge on the part of both candidate and his supporters that the campaign was not even attempting to reflect reality. Rather, the campaign described an imagined America, by cherry-picking facts or simply inventing stories, such as immigrants eating pets. In this deliberate creation of a landscape often built on lies, Trump’s communication strategy echoes that of authoritarian leaders, especially Russian President Vladimir Putin. It also allowed Trump and running mate J.D. Vance latitude to both frighten voters with depicting a nation in which the White majority was threatened by unrest and projecting an attractive imagined reality in which citizens would enjoy order and prosperity.
While Trump’s disdain for facts and use of disinformation had increased significantly since his first campaign and administration, the new era of Trumpism that emerged in the 2024 campaign is qualitatively different. In his first administration and beyond, Trump often lied and pursued “interactive propaganda” with friendly media outlets such as Fox in an attempt to legitimize disinformation such as fake cures for COVID or – even more significantly – that the 2020 election results were rigged by Democrats. Trump’s propaganda often featured a constellation of supporters, such as disgraced former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former lawyer Sidney Powell, who made extensive media appearances to support Trump’s false claims. Both have since been found guilty of election interference.
By the end of the 2024 campaign, however, Trump and Vance were no longer attempting to legitimize statements that were untrue – and that they knew to be untrue. For example, Vance justified using what he knew was a fake story about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating pets in Ohio by saying he was willing to “create” stories to get media attention.
There is nothing novel about politicians using propaganda or lying intentionally, as Democratic President Bill Clinton did when he claimed he had not had sex with an intern in the White House (he had). Throughout American history, journalists have uncovered the many ways that leaders have lied to the American public. However, politicians have generally been held to account for those lies, with the expectation that the American public deserves the truth.
The 2024 Trump campaign’s approach is significantly different, in that the creation of an imagined reality has become much more important than the traditional campaign approach of trying to persuade voters on issues and feasible solutions. It does not matter that statistics show that violent crime has fallen or that gun ownership does not keep people safe or that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than U.S. citizens. The Trump campaign relies not on facts or even logic, but on the emotional conviction that owning guns, ending immigration, and ousting Democrats are necessary to preserve American democracy. Trump, Vance, and his supporters are particularly motivated by conspiracy theories – such as immigrants eating pets or the U.S. government withholding support from hurricane victims in North Carolina – rather than by consuming reputable news and judging situations based on facts.
In his book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, Peter Pomerantsev told the story of Russians who were embracing Putin’s reality in the “surreal heart of the new Russia.” As the title of the book suggests, when you separate yourself from a fact-based reality and embrace illusion, you no longer have limits. Thus, if you are struggling to make ends meet as union jobs disappear in the United States and the wealth gap grows wider, there could be logic in embracing a leader who makes promises that are rooted in fantasy rather than reality. The danger is that when this fantastical imagined future fails to materialize, leaders may have to employ more extreme measures – such as launching a foreign invasion – in order to remain in power.
It also begs the question of whether the classic electoral game, as American candidates, journalists, academics, and voters, have understood it has shifted from a model of informed citizen to that of convicted citizen. Trump’s second election victory demonstrated the triumph of dreams and conspiracies over reality. We may never be able to return to a time when mere facts can compete with imagined desires.