Liar, Liar, Credibility on Fire

How the political class lost the public’s trust

Thanks to her nationally-televised abuse of the truth, Senator Katie Britt, Republican from Alabama, has become the most glaring current example of the fact-bending – you could call it lying -- so common in today’s politics.

 If you aren’t up to speed on Britt's scandal – Hey you there! Under that rock! --  let me fill you in.  Britt was tapped to offer the GOP response to President Biden’s recent State of the Union address. Aiming for Biden’s faltering immigration policy, she told a story of a girl named Jacinto Romero who had been sex-trafficked by a Mexican drug cartel. Britt’s inference was clear. Thanks to Biden, girls are being trafficked. But for those who missed the point she said, “…human trafficking has gone up under President Biden."  

In fact, trafficking decreased between 2021 and 2022 (the last year of reliable data). Also, the tale Britt told happened twenty years ago during the Bush administration and did not involve a cartel. And, finally, the traffickers never sent Romero to the US, this was all in Mexico. All of this came out when journalists investigated the story.

The fact-check that revealed Britt’s distortions highlighted her personal dishonesty, but little has been said about why this way of playing politics occurs so often, and how it is done. As someone who spent a decade inside the lie/distortion/misdirection machine, I have some insights to share.

Although Katie Britt’s case is a bit extreme, its elements have been used, with increasing frequency, as Republicans and Democrats began to disagree on the very idea that facts exist. This dynamic was first described in 2004 when a journalist quoted an aide to then-president George W. Bush deriding “the reality-based community.” This phrase encapsulated how politicians had begun to present non-facts with greater abandon.

Republicans haven’t been alone in peddling lies, and we need to be honest about this. When I first ran for Congress, in 2010, the incumbent Debbie Halvorson’s supporters attended one of my events and held up signs calling me a Nazi. The operative behind this was fired but Halvorson and her aides suffered no consequences when they smeared me as a servant of the Chinese government because, reasons.

After I won the election, I found that while members of my party didn’t use the word “Nazi” to brand the Democrats, some called them communists.  Members of the extreme Freedom Caucus were most likely to brandish this slur, and they were vastly more likely to distort the other side’s position to make a point as they addressed a hearing, the press, or colleagues on the House floor. But fortunately, they occupied the political fringe (at the time).

While the super-partisans dabbled in distortions, the rest of us were guided by frequent emails noting issue-specific “talking points,” which we were supposed to use in public statements. In all but a few cases these stood up to fact checking. Of course, the “points” were not nuanced arguments that took into account the Democrats’ positions and reporters could flummox us with challenging questions.

Unfortunately, our talking points, while brief and pithy, didn’t come with additional facts to help us deal with follow-up questions from Reporters. (The Democrats were better at this.)  This meant that reporters could pierce our arguments and make us look shallow and uninformed. As time passed I used talking points less and less.  In the meantime, the more combative members of the GOP caucus, who steadily increased in number, crossed the line between truth and fact, more and more often. Then came Donald Trump who normalized lies and deceptions. Today only the most old-fashioned politicians fight fair, and many have thrown up their hands and resigned. (Ken Buck of Colorado is the latest reality-based GOP member to quit. He won’t even stick around to finish his term.)

The distortionists' method ranges from issuing deceptions in such rapid fire that no one would be able to fact-check them all. Given Mark Twain’s axiom --  “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”--  a torrent of lies will reliably influence voters while corrections fall on deaf ears. Similarly, as Britt demonstrated, liars tell humanizing stories because they attach to listeners' brains with far more intensity than mere facts.

My rule is that whenever a politician claims that he or she met someone who told him a tale, there is no tale-teller. They are a figment conjured for argument’s sake. Britt went a step further, spewing this lie in prime time, hoping that no one would look for her. In this case, reporters located Jacinto Romero who picked apart Britt’s story. NBC News then discovered that Britt, having told the story five times before, is a serial offender

The case of Katie Britt demonstrates the larger fact that office-holders and campaigners – perhaps the majority – habitually distort and deceive even as they pose as moral people. (Britt wore a conspicuous cross around her neck when she gave her address.) No wonder nobody seems to trust the political class.