As bad as you think things are, they’re worse.
How do I know? I mean, besides that I am Jewish and this bleak worldview has been inculcated in me since growing up in the tiny shtetl of Summit, New Jersey.
I know because while this administration has waged war on the First Amendment and is the least transparent in history, while it is erratic and chaotic and the goat rodeo to end all clusterf–ks, there is one thing about which we can be absolutely certain.
It lies.
The president lies. His soon-to-depart press secretary lies… and so will her replacement, no matter who that is. His director of communications lies. His Cabinet secretaries lie.
When economic data is released, it is no longer reliable. When casualty counts for military actions are announced, they are wrong. When new policy initiatives are announced, what we’re sure of is that the ones that might help us will never happen and the ones that appear crazy or ill-conceived will surely turn out worse than we can imagine.
When big deals are announced, we know that there are side deals we will never hear of—while we are shocked by how much Trump corruption is out in the open the one thing we know is that there is even more of it taking place in the shadows, in the demi-monde of crypto, Russian oligarchs, the children of Steve Witkoff and Howard Lutnick and of course the whole Trump clan.
Did DOGE save us money or enhance government efficiency? No. Will the Make America Healthy Movement make us healthier? The opposite. When the insanity of RFK Jr. and his quack clack leads to disease outbreaks, contaminated food and viral misinformation, the only thing we know for sure is that these unqualified nutcases are lacing their announcements with science they read off a tile over a urinal at an 1-95 rest stop.
Wherever possible, mendacious goons kill or pervert or attempt to coopt reliable sources of government data, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to the National Weather Bureau. Look out your window; do you see a baked landscape? Shriveling crops? Europe in flames from wildfires? Well, try to find information about climate change on a government website—it’s not there. There is no climate change, folks. That’s the BS being fed to you via the droopy info teats of Trump and Stephen Cheung.
It’s an election year. Trump has the lowest approval ratings of his presidency. Republicans seem headed for historic losses. And what kind of predictions do you hear from the White House, the Keebler Elf serving as Speaker of the House, or the confederacy of dunces in the GOP caucuses? That it’s all gonna be great! Prosperity is around the corner. (It must be. Scott Bessent said it would be.) Peace is around the corner. (It must be. Marco Rubio said it would be.) Big victories are coming. (They must be. Because Dear Leader says so and he is never wrong.)
How do we know the lies will keep flowing? Because they seem more and more compelled to lie about smaller and smaller matters. If they are going to lie about the actual role being played by the president’s… amanuensis Natalie Harp, or the state of the Trumps’ Potemkin marriage, or the causes of bruises on his hands or his golf scores, you know that they are going to lie about the big damaging realities we face.
You know, the really big ones, like the exploding budget, the cuts to healthcare, the depletion of our military stockpiles, the Iranian victory in Trump’s illegal war, their plans to steal the elections in November or to end democracy thereafter, the destruction of our institutions, the ending of our vital alliances, the strengthening of our enemies and Trump’s involvement with the most notorious sex-trafficker of our time.
In fact, although our government has lied to us in the past, just as almost all governments do, we are now in an entirely new era in which smart information consumers know not to believe anything the White House says. (It is really something that we don’t believe anything about the Iran war unless it is confirmed by Tehran.)
Worse, we also know that behind their lies are malevolent intentions, incompetence, pathological personalities, ignorance and corruption.
They are not just unleashing a never-ending torrent of falsehoods, but they are doing it to hide a destructive agenda in which the people of the United States are very often the intended victims. Other nations know that they too are being lied to by the U.S. government.
Were the government the only contributor to the tsunami of lies, deceptions, and misrepresentations that washes over us daily, we might hope to remain afloat on planks of truth. The problem is that the media on which we have depended in the past to search for the truth has largely been coopted by oligarchs with a political agenda or hacks who misunderstand their mission and seek ‘balance’ rather than simple facts. (It is compounded by the fact that new media is dominated by opinion, conjecture, conspiracy theories and, increasingly, AI slop.) Meanwhile academics who seek to speak truth to power often find themselves undermined, silenced or fired by spineless trustees and administrators who are being pressured by the administration to teach the MAGA party line.
In short, in what is undoubtedly the moment in human history when we have the greatest abundance of mechanisms by which information can be delivered to us, we are presented with more distortions, falsities and what a recent president would have called “malarkey” than ever before.
This could be a golden era of informed lives and good, transparent governance. Instead, we are entering a new dark age in which we ignore or misuse the tools of insight and wisdom all around us and choose immersion in bulls–t. It may be high-class, high-tech bulls–t, scented with a faint whiff of a misunderstood truth, but it is bulls–t nonetheless.
The only path out is that each of us, individually, makes seeking the truth our top priority, and skepticism our constant ally. We must seek out reliable sources of information and reject those who deliver anything less.
For voters, it is also essential we become intolerant of liars in government, media, the corporate world, academia—anywhere. The argument that “they all lie” is one proffered by liars to excuse deceptions not yet unleashed on the world. So is the nonsense that we are each “entitled to our own truth.” Demand proof. Demand evidence. Make people work for your trust.
We entered into this Trumpian bulls–tocracy because we stopped giving proper value to the character of our leaders, and like a virulent epidemic, the flaws of those we elevated then spread so rapidly that they now threaten the very life of our republic. That’s no exaggeration.
In the best case, if we reject lies and demand truth again—starting with November’s elections—it will still take many years to restore trust in the U.S. government at home and abroad. But if we fail to, if we allow the lies to triumph yet again, we may well live the rest of our lives in this new grim, unnecessarily, tragically dark age, and with the fear that must carry with it.
