Rapids through Grande Ronde basalt at ‘The Devil’s Toenail’ in west Spokane
…in a garden of lies
Barring calamities, pitfalls, and head-spinning disturbances, I typically spend 4 to 5 days gathering and drafting essays for The Daily Rhubarb. The piece for today was going to be about journalism. It would be my best effort to answer this question:
How does a reporter handle a situation where a seemingly authoritative source or elected office holder is clearly lying, and is doing so with the reliable expectation that you will accurately report the lie, or the lies, as they fall from his or her lips?
In normal times, these situations—deliberate attempts to mislead the public through interviews, public events, etc.—happen often enough. The perfidy involved fed into the central complications in many of the major stories I’ve delved into over the years—Hanford’s radioactive secrets, the fraud-riven River Park Square public/private “partnership,” the eastern Washington field burning wars—to name a few.
As a young reporter, one reason I wanted to quickly graduate from daily deadlines to long-form journalism was to avoid having to be passively equivocal. (“Smith says it’s accidental, Wesson says it’s murder”). This trap exists because, all too often, there just isn’t enough time to verify conflicting or suspect assertions in the space of a few hours. If there is a followup story that exposes a pivotal error or outright lie, it often comes days later. By that time—well, you know what they say about how fast a lie travels before the truth finds its shoes.
There’s no question that leaders in both the major American political parties have been dishonest in pushing actions and policies that have done grievous damage to the country and other nations. Lyndon Johnson pulled us into the Vietnam War with the deception involved in the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964. Vice President Dick Cheney (with a credulous assist from a New York Times reporter) pushed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2002 with the false assurances the Iraqis had purposefully acquired “aluminum tubes” suitable for enriching uranium to weapons-grade specifications.
What sets the Trump regime apart is the caliber and unrelenting pace of false statements and accusations, many injected into the text of the more than 150 executive orders Trump has signed already this year. It’s not just the quantity of the lies. It’s the commitment to using lies as social/political brick & mortar, as the very basis for actions whose purpose is to punish critics and further divide Americans by inflaming racial and cultural animosity.
In Trump 1.0 (2017-2020) there was at least some semblance of restraint, at times, from the offices of the White House counsel (i.e. Don McGahn until he resigned in 2018), Attorney General (i.e. Jeff Sessions, until Trump fired him in 2018) , and the Pentagon (Secretary of Defense James Mattis, until he resigned in late 2019; as well as former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, who famously resisted Trump’s push to deploy the military against protestors of George Floyd’s murder.
What semblance of restraint there was is gone now. What we have, instead, is the Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride of daily outrages—from late night “truth-social” insults to pop stars and comedians, to not-ruling out military action to seize Greenland, to the Musk-spawned DOGE teams, arriving like plagues of locusts to occupy federal agencies, unlawfully fire personnel and confiscate records and real estate.
Some extremely important projects get pushed aside in the process. Let’s consider, for example, the fate of the Earth, or at least the fate of the planet’s larger organisms—living things, including humans, who face emerging existential threats due to climate change. The fossil record is compelling; rescuing the Earth’s biosphere seems like something we should work on together.
It turns out some of the worst extinction events in the fossil record are due to surges of carbon dioxide released during enormous, surface lava flows on scales even larger than the Miocene lava flows (~16 million years ago) that, among other things, delivered the glistening, black bedrock for the signature falls in downtown Spokane. In a 2022 interview with physicist Lawrence Krauss, Harvard’s distinguished Earth scientist Andrew Knoll made the compelling observation that the human-caused CO2 emissions of our time are escalating at a sharper rate than the CO2 emissions that delivered the Permian extinction some 250 million years ago—killing off 70 percent of terrestrial vertebrates and an even higher percentage of marine life.
“We’re headed toward something amazingly similar to the largest mass extinction we know of on a timescale that’s even faster than it occurred naturally,” he told Krauss.
It turns out that millions of Americans do actually care about this. A Gallup poll conducted in March found roughly half of Americans—48%—believe the warming climate “poses a serious threat” to their lives or way of life.
But Trump 2.0 doesn’t care, not only rapidly abandoning federal efforts to mitigate climate change but dramatically cutting support for the research needed to better understand and address what scientists like Andrew Knoll warn is a formidable and looming threat to life on Earth.
The proposed Trump 2.0 cuts to climate science research go well into the the billions of dollars and spread among several government agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). A Trump White House spokesperson, Victoria LaCivita, explained the president “is refocusing investments” toward other priorities (i.e. directing the USGS to spend more on efforts to find and extract fossil fuels) “and ending woke science spending.”
Spokane protestors on North Division Street in early April
“Woke science spending”
What a perfectly succinct expression to simultaneously convey Trump’s culture war disdain for higher education and civil rights.
There are so many noxious ingredients in Trump’s MAGA cocktail (in which misogyny and contempt for LGBTQ individuals are also prime ingredients) that we can lose focus on the consistent poison of racism.
It’s a through-line in Trump’s biography—dating back to a federal consent decree the Trump real estate company signed in June of 1975 to settle accusations it discouraged African-American occupancy in its New York housing projects.
In 1989 Trump thrust himself into the infamous Central Park 5 case by funding full page ads in New York newspapers ads encouraging the death penalty for five African American teenagers (falsely) accused of assaulting and raping a young woman jogger in Central Park. The five are now suing Trump for defamation in federal court, for remarks he made last year defending his initial accusations, even after the men had been exonerated by DNA testing that led to the identification of the actual rapist. Trump has never apologized.
There is then, of course, Trump’s years-long campaign—leading into his eventual presidential run in 2016—repeatedly pushing the falsehood thatPresident Barack Obama’s election was illegitimate because of suspicions (fomented in the usual right-wing fever swamps) that Obama was born in Kenya and not in Hawaii. Trump persisted even after the White House released the long form of Obama’s birth certificate in April of 2011. The media followed along, eagerly reporting Trump’s announcement that he’d be sending private investigators to Hawaii to dig into the authenticity of the certificate.
Even after Trump refused to make public the investigators’ supposed findings—Trump’s racist campaign to undermine Obama’s legitimacy to hold the office persisted, for years. This how The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer described it in a major piece for the magazine in 2020:
“Birtherism was a statement of values, a way to express allegiance to a particular notion of American identity, one that became the central theme of the Trump campaign itself: To Make America Great Again, to turn back the clock to an era where white political and cultural hegemony was unthreatened by black people, by immigrants, by people of a different faith. By people like Barack Obama. The calls to disavow birtherism missed the point: Trump’s entire campaign was birtherism.”
Serwer’s examination underscores a flaw in American journalism and, more ominously, a flaw in us, as a people who regress into bigotry, to locate scapegoats for problems inflated by pearly white, right-wing media.
What Trump has done is to remove the subtlety. As he came down the Trump Tower escalator to announce his candidacy in 2015 he had this to say about Mexican immigrants.
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Trump was talking about people who in many ways hold our local economies together, harvesting our crops, changing the linens in our motels, cooking and serving in our restaurants, etc. And the American government response, under Trump, is to bring terror into their families and communities. Because they’re not white; because English is their second language.
If they’re white, they’re eligible for the treatment offered to the Afrikaner immigrants who arrived at Dulles Airport earlier this week, warmly greeted by a deputy Secretary of State. If not white, they can expect what the Haitian immigrants to Springfield, Ohio experienced last September when Trump and his vice presidential pick, JD Vance; repeatedly voiced the lie that Haitians in Springfield were capturing and making meals of their neighbors pets. In a testy interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Vance admitted the story was concocted to get the media’s attention. In the interview, Vance asserted the Haitians were in Springfield illegally. This was also untrue.
Today’s post is free to all readers, but please support this project with an annual paid subscription to the Daily Rhubarb at the link above…
But back to the Afrikaners who arrived at Dulles.
They are a singular exception because—soon after Trump took office—his administration put a hold on all other refugee immigration petitions [https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/05/23/trump-ramaphosa-afrikaners-refugees-south-africa/]. The basis for making an exception for the Afrikaners is what Trump alleges is a “white genocide.” He voiced this allegation publicly on Wednesday as he hosted a South African delegation—led by South African president Cyril Ramaphosa.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa (left) during the Wednesday meeting in the Oval Office that spun wildly out of control when Trump launched into false accusations of an ongoing “white genocide” in South Africa, (Screenshot from White House video)
One description of Wednesday’s Oval Office gathering is “bizarre.” But that alone doesn’t capture the absurd spectacle of the President of the United States chastising a visiting head of state with allegations that—at the least—implied President Ramaphosa was either complicit in white South African murders or failing to stop them.
Among other things, Trump asked the lights be dimmed so he could show Ramaphosa and his delegation a video of what he said were 1,000 or so actual graves markers of murdered white farmers. The video and the broader claim of a “white genocide” in was quickly debunked by numerous reputable new outlets, including the New York Times, The Guardian, Reuters New Service , and the Politifact team at the Poynter Institute.
Among those invited and looking on during this confrontation was perhaps America’s most famous South African immigrant. Elon Musk.
There is more to say here than the rules have changed under Trump 2.0. It’s one thing to shape political arguments with your best facts and downplay the worst of them. It’s quite another to maliciously denigrate people by race or creed and subject them to ritual humiliation, deportation or worse.
The America that Spokane’s Pulitzer Prize winning author Tim Egan describes in his 2023 book A Fever in the Heartland should be required reading in our schools. It is a vivid account of how the Ku Klux Klan acquired extraordinary political power more than a half century after the Civil War, not just in the south but especially in the upper Midwest and even the Pacific Northwest. The Klan was selling white racism, and brokering politicians—its rise finally interrupted by a horrific rape and murder committed by a top Klan leader in Indiana. Speaking for countless others of my generation it was our hope this dark history was in our rear-view mirror, that the hard work and sacrifices of the civil rights movement, involving people of all races and creeds, was an endowment we could deliver to generations to come.
We’ll have to work all the harder for it now, and if our opponents in MAGA swag and smirk complain that the truth is just too “woke” for them—so be it.
—tjc
