The Lies Are Winning
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I would just like to discuss Tucker Carlson's love of spanking. And I don't know if you saw the little speech he gave about Trump, but I felt that it distilled everything about the authoritarian vision for America. The leader is daddy. The need is to punish Trump.

insubordinate women. He actually went on and on about how you need to spank her because she's been a very bad, bad girl. He said hormone adult is how he described her in that scenario. You know, I think that there are going to be a lot of, you know, dissertations written on the weird sexual politics of 2024.

Among the many weird parts of that scene was that his comments then elicited this huge cheer from that crowd.

Apparently they went wild. It was in Georgia, right? Duluth, Georgia. And he also, of course, said, you know, they're tearing down statues of your ancestors. So just a little nod to the Confederacy, just in case you didn't get it. He really was a sort of one-stop shopping, misogyny, Confederacy nostalgia, all in one. Getting the coveted spanking vote, apparently. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

Welcome to The Political Scene, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I am Jane Mayer, and I'm joined by my colleagues Evan Osnos and Susan Glasser. Hi, Evan. Good morning, guys. Hey, Susan. Hey there. Great to be with you.

Great to have you guys at this moment when disinformation has taken over this election in ways we've never seen before. Lies and smears have long been part of the American presidential campaign, of course, but the magnitude of deception this cycle is unprecedented. We've seen disturbing deep fakes, out-of-context clips, and outright falsehoods.

Donald Trump's lies, in particular, have become more egregious than his previous two campaigns. So today, less than two weeks until Election Day, we're taking stock of some of the biggest lies we've seen and heard and talking about the impact that they may have on November 5th. And the big question on our minds is this. Are the lies winning? So...

There's so many false stories about candidates, Evan, that have made the rounds. What struck you the most? Gosh, there are so many to choose from. The one that has caught my attention is something that fuses some of this older lying technology, if you could call it that, with something new. If you remember when Donald Trump started talking about the hurricanes and saying that

that Biden and the federal government and Democrats had been ignoring Republican hit areas. I mean, it was really, in some ways, it's worth reminding ourselves the specifics and how gruesome it really was to be suggesting, not suggesting, stating outright the falsehood that

the president was ignoring places in Georgia, in North Carolina, in South Carolina. It finally took the Republican governor of South Carolina to come out and say, actually, no, the federal response has been, in his words, superb. But what's interesting to me is this then got attached to this very new piece of the technology of deception, which is, of course, AI and the ability to generate images. There was this photo that went around, people may have seen, of a little girl in a rowboat

holding a puppy. And it was almost like the kind of what you would imagine the computer would generate of the most desperate possible image. And it went everywhere. And it was very popular. And there was just a story the other day in which people were called up having circulated this image and told that it was fake. And they said, you know, wherever it comes from, I'll never be able to unsee it, which that idea, wherever it comes from, a kind of

willful disavowal of the origins or of the veracity of something. That is a new iteration on Trump's very old technique. Unbelievable. I did see that Amy Cramer, who I think is the RNC chairman for Georgia, just as you're saying, said, I don't care if it's fake or not fake, it's true. To her, there's something more truthy than actually the fact that it was fake.

And so the truth didn't matter anymore. Unbelievable. What about for you, Jane? What do you think? I was sort of struck by the same kind of dynamic. I mean, I feel like when we look back at this period, the player that at least for me right now is among the most significant in the disinformation realm is Elon Musk, simply because of the unbelievably huge following he's got on the former Twitter that he owns. And

There are many, many, many examples of lies and conspiracy theories, false conspiracy theories that he has spread. So many that you can't possibly name them all in this one show. But there was one, just to give a sort of a simple example, where he was caught out spreading a false –

conspiracy theory that Michigan had more registered voters than it had eligible citizens to vote. And he was corrected by the Michigan Secretary of State who said that's false and gave the actual numbers. And what I thought was extraordinary was that once corrected,

What did he say? He didn't apologize. He didn't change his view. He called her out. He said, shame on you for lying to the American people when he was the one who was lying. And I think what we're seeing now is we've – to me, we've moved from a moment of

alternative facts with Kellyanne Conway to now embracing the idea of lies. The truth no longer has value to people like this. So I don't know. Anyway, Susan, I want to know which of the lies out there has caught your eye. Well, I mean, just to the point about what you and Evan were both saying, I think it's the drug-resistant illness of this campaign that when the lies are repeated in

Over and over and over again. It doesn't matter when they're called on them anymore. And so, Evan, I agreed with everything you said, except for one thing. You said the past tense. And I was just looking the other day at the transcript of Donald Trump's FEMA hurricane lies. And guess what? He repeats it over and over again. He was just in North Carolina just two days ago. And he's still saying the same thing, even on stage with some of the Republican officials who have pushed back on

on his false claims about the hurricane response. They still appear alongside Donald Trump and they clap and the guy repeats the lies over and over again. And I think that to me is the sort of toxic evolution, you know, that Jane is talking about. I think that it's not like a sort of whack-a-mole game anymore where they say the lie, it gets hit down, then they say something else. It's just, oh, well, we're going to say this

over and over and over again, regardless of its truth. And it's a chronic condition. You know, if we're going to extend our viral metaphor, which you introduced, which sounds right to me. And I think what's specific about Musk, and I know that the word unprecedented is overused these days, except we've never really had a situation where the richest man in the world also owns a social media platform that can get in front of people's faces at all hours of the night. And yes, of course, we used to have newspaper barons, but

But one of the things that's amazing is he has the largest account, the largest following on Twitter on X. And so as a result, his capacity and his commitment to spreading outright falsehoods is really in a new chapter. We have not developed the –

drug resistance, the emotional capacity to defend ourselves against something. I'll tell you the one thing that I think doesn't work about the analogy to the virus, which I mean is compelling, but the one thing is viruses are sort of accidental. This is on purpose. I feel like it's more like somebody poisoning the water system of democracy on purpose and

And it's like the dam broke this year. That's what I feel like we're sort of – we're dealing with. The other way to think of it, Jane, is that it was – and Republicans love this conspiracy theory. Think of it as a virus that was engineered in a lab to be particularly lethal to the American body politic. OK? This is the lab theory.

This is the sci-fi election. We've gone dark, guys. We're only a couple minutes in. This is impressive. No, you're right. You're right. You're right. And it's been perfected in the lab. I mean that's clearly – social media is in a way with the algorithms that just keep getting stronger and stronger. And you can feel – I think as someone who's been on Twitter for a while, you can feel that Musk and his allies are throttling certain memes that they are slowing down on purpose that is the truth.

and promoting his lies. You can see it all day long. I think that it's not only being engineered and distributed, and we should talk about, you know, the state actors who have already, according to U.S. government officials who are charged with monitoring this, state actors who are

literally spending large amounts of money to amplify these messages. And, of course, must platform is one particularly effective and lethal way of distributing this into the American body politic, and that is Russia, Iran, Iran.

China, all of them are involved in the disinformation campaign. It's not that they're creating these fissures in our society, but I do think it's notable to me. It's almost like people have given up. They hardly even talk about this kind of intervention in our election anymore, which is very notable. But you asked, Jane, about my experience.

pick for lie. And I do think that there are different, we're talking about the lyingest candidate that ever was, right? To a degree that is almost hard for people to process in Donald Trump. 30,000 falsehoods, misstatements, according to the Washington Post, just in his four-year presidency. I saw one NPR fact check of a Trump press conference earlier this year with something like 160 lies. They calculated that it was more than two a minute.

just in one Trump appearance. So it's very hard. So I broke it down almost into different superlatives. Like I loved, Evan's example is a great one. To me, that's the timeliest lie. But what I would say is that I picked here the foundational lie of this election, which is the big lie about 2020 and its corollary lies around January 6th. And the reason I think that's a foundational lie for Trump's campaign this time is because

It requires on the front end all of his supporters to check into a place of disbelief of their own

And to me, this is the most frightening, therefore, of the lies. And he repeats it, by the way, almost every day, along with, you know, corollary and subsidiary lies. Donald Trump doubles down. He not only calls it a rigged election still to this day, but just the other day he called January 6th a day of love, a day of love. So it's not enough to evade or to kind of like talk around this.

but to willfully reinvent the story that we all saw with our own eyes. All the Republicans condemned Donald Trump as well as Democrats, and here they are buying into this foundational lie of the year. I mean, that Day of Love talk, I've seen, and I'm sure you guys have seen too, a number of experts on authoritarianism and on fascism, people who've been reluctant to use the F word previously. Mm-hmm.

who are saying that that veneration of civic violence is a real crossing of the Rubicon for this country to try to convince people that that was a day of love. And you're right, Susan, I think that, you know, to tell people that what they saw and thought was wrong and their own eyes are lying to them and they need to listen to Trump instead is really extraordinary. And there's something really specific in the effect of watching this

pageant of Republican officials up there next to Trump, nodding along, endorsing it, watching J.D. Vance go through his absurd contortions, eventually acknowledging that he has joined the big lie and rejects the validity of the 2020 election. You know, that has a kind of blanketing effect, I think, on people's consciousness to be constantly surrounded by that

And then, of course, that becomes the predicate for already denying the results of the 2024 election if he loses. I mean, that is where we are now is and it's it's deja vu of 2020. He was doing it in advance. But, you

you know, last time there was something farcical about it. It was four seasons total landscaping. This time it's systematic. It is consistent. It is amplified and executed in part by Elon Musk. And according to the Wall Street Journal this morning, Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin have been in

communication about what we don't yet exactly know. But you put all this together and you already have the Republican nominee saying it was unconstitutional for Joe Biden to be replaced by Harris, saying that there is voting by non-citizens on a widespread basis, which is false. There are all of these elements, these little sort of

pebbles inside this giant mountain of the big lie about 2024 that is already visible. I mean, evidently, CBS did a fact check on Musk's lies about the election and 55% of the things that he's tweeted about it, and he's tweeted about it hundreds of times, are utterly and provably false. So, I mean, and of course, it just undermines faith in democracy. Do you think that this is

being accepted by voters? Are they falling for it? Yeah, Jane, thank you for asking that because I think that gets at the essence of why Donald Trump is doing it, why it is core to his persona because lying, especially when there's nothing that you can do to shame the liar, is kind of a superpower. And I think what people may miss about Trump is that he spent his whole life

essentially kind of studying the media, being a creature of the media, thinking about essentially propaganda and marketing and how it works. And that is at his essence as a political figure. And the reason he does this is because it's effective. It's been effective for him in his life as

as a business person who's, you know, sold, you know, the big dream and the schemes even when they didn't work out. And it has been shockingly effective for him as a politician. You know, the power of propaganda is what we're seeing here fused, as Evan pointed out, with new technology. And I would, you know, in terms of the foundational lie that we're talking about right now, the big lie about the 2020 election, I would point out that four years after Joe Biden defeated

Donald Trump, millions and millions of Republican voters, a majority of Republican voters will go to the polls in this election believing that Donald Trump also won the last election. So,

So that's pretty effective lying. Susan, you remind me when you talk about the early days of Trump studying the media and how to lie. For listeners, this goes way back. Remember, he had a fake persona that he pretended to be someone named John Barron who would call the tabloids.

and give them little scoops. And the scoops were about how great Trump was, including the famous scoop where he claimed that a woman with whom he had had sex said it was the best sex she had ever had. Wife number two. Wife number two. Marla. Yeah. Well, maybe we should take a break at this moment and we'll be right back with more discussion of the big lies this year. The political scene from The New Yorker will be back in just a moment.

Every single aspect of a conflict...

some kind of rationale behind it. You might not agree with it. You might not agree with the methods. You might not agree with the means, but you have to look at it as like a rational actor and make your analysis that way. And Pod Save America's Jon Favreau and Tommy Vitor. I don't think we're going to fact check our way to victory. Follow Wired Politics Lab for in-depth conversations and analysis to help you navigate the upcoming election. Mm-hmm.

So, speaking of sex, some of these lies, of course, go to sexual perversion, which is always an easy way to sort of defame someone. There are an awful lot of lies about Tim Walz that are just completely concocted crap, basically, to put it mildly. Either you guys interested in the fact that some of them seem to have been manufactured in Russia. Yeah, yeah. There's a guy –

a Republican propagandist who lives in Moscow. He was a former sheriff's deputy or something from the United States who was over there pushing this stuff out. And...

And the numbers are kind of astonishing. And I think you mentioned earlier this idea that, of course, we suspect, but it's always hard to know that the algorithm is amplifying certain things on X or pushing other things down. Of course, we know that's happening. And the degree to which it's happening is really profound. I guess I am fascinated by not just the specific lie, but by –

The valorizing of contempt for truth, meaning you remember in the ABC presidential debate that they did some fact checking. Pretty routine, pretty basic. They would step in and say, Trump, you're – whatever. This isn't right. They would correct him. And they were attacked for it mercilessly. I mean it became a full-fledged campaign against them. So there is a way in which –

Truth has become a four-letter word for Trump's people. And that's a very hard thing to come back from, I have to say, without being too bleak about it. That's a very hard – it's harder to rebuild the culture around an even –

of faith in the very idea of verifiable facts. That's something we've been sort of imagining and contending with since he got on the scene, but it is now a fully enshrined piece of reality in this country. It's kind of a piece, isn't it, with rejecting science, rejecting experts, rejecting...

So-called elites who might be university professors who really know history. In a way, it's an attack on learning and very much on the enlightenment in some ways if you step back. This is kind of a dark ages kind of approach. I have to tell you. I think you're onto something so important. When people try to say like how did this happen? There's this amazing history in the way that the –

early tobacco companies went after science. They discovered that by going after science, they could protect the future of their business because they realized it was going to be doctors. It was going to be experts. It was people in white coats that are going to be saying that tobacco is bad for you. And there is – because of the tobacco legislation, there is all of this documentation that came out later, internal communication where it was a full-on strategy to undermine the idea of expertise. And then you saw a similar thing with oil companies and climate change.

But in some ways, if you want to understand what's happening now, you have to go back to that very well-conceived and well-executed campaign to undermine, as you say, even the enlightenment values associated with truth. Susan, what else has caught your eye about the lies out there? Well, I think Evan is really on to something in terms of how –

strategic this is. The lying has a very particular purpose for Donald Trump. And, you know, some of it is just hurtful. And I'm glad that we brought up Tim Walz because that, to my mind, is a very calculated way of not only attacking somebody in brutal personal terms, but it goes straight to one of the campaign's themes. You brought it up at the beginning, Jane. That's the sort of the gender wars and the idea that Trump is the strong, masculine daddy candidate who's going to, you know, beat the crap

out of those errant women. And the subsidiary, the corollary to that, of course, is to demean and emasculate Tim Walz because he's a version of masculinity that challenges the caricatured, you know, brutish, thuggish version of masculinity that Trump is selling in this. So, you know, those lies about Tim Walz go right to his sexuality and his identity because that's a strategic purpose. So my nomination goes straight

to that aspect of Donald Trump's lying, which is the political strategy behind it. And so when Donald Trump says again and again and again, his economy was the greatest in the history of the world, it's not true. And this is the political equivalent of a foundational lie. And what we've learned as we've watched Donald Trump repeat this over and over and over again is that

It's very effective even among people who don't like him, who don't agree with him necessarily on everything. They accept the frames that Donald Trump sets with many of his lies. And that is widely, widely viewed as like Trump had a great economy.

Biden's is terrible. Obama's is terrible. And, you know, it's the power of saying something that's not true over and over and over again. I think that we're witnessing there are many, of course, corollary strategic lies that Trump is using in this campaign. But if he wins, that's going to be a reason why is because he has managed to give the idea to people that even regardless of what his economic plan is,

Regardless of the fact that economists say that it would be, you know, much more inflationary and deficit busting than the plans being offered by Kamala Harris, it doesn't matter because Donald Trump has said over and over and over again, I'm the great economy guy. I'm the great businessman and opportunistic.

Apparently, that's enough. I hate to go darker than Evan on the tobacco companies, but really before the tobacco companies lies, there was Goebbels. And the big lie hearing Susan talking about it is a big part of it, of course, has always been repetition.

In some ways, I mean, I think the lesson of Goebbels was the more audacious the lie, the more effective it is. It just challenges people's sense of reality and turns their heads. I don't think a lot of this would be possible without the technological changes that we're dealing with here. I mean, there have always been lies, but there hasn't been a means of transmitting them quite like this through social media. And I would—

raise another small example that just I thought was stunning, which was it was a waltz lie, but it involved the creation of a character who claimed to be a victim of sexual perversion at the hands of walls as a student. My name is Matthew Meadow. I'm a survivor of sexual assault. For the past few years, we've seen many powerful men, even many celebrities being held accountable for their social assaults.

Well, in my case, it was my teacher. And there is a real Matthew Metro who was absolutely stunned to discover that his own persona was being used and that a fake version of him was giving false testimony against Walls. And he was like, that's not me. And using...

AI and deceptive sort of techniques, you can actually create a fake person to give false witness against a real person. It's just unbelievable how twisted and how effective technology is in convincing people that what they're seeing is real when it's completely fake. I think the role of technology has changed from 2016 too in the sense that you'll remember that

After the 2016 campaign, when it turned out that Russian propagandists and bots were using Facebook with some effectiveness, that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook came out and said, you know, we're going to do things to try to prevent disinformation. And then they ended up

getting in their minds demonized by the right for doing that. And there was a piece recently that described Zuckerberg's personal political evolution as having now said, I don't want to get involved in that. I don't want to be policing the facts anymore, essentially saying I'm out. I'm paraphrasing here, but saying, you know, we're not going to do political stuff. And so in a way, there is this profound shift that has happened in Silicon Valley that you have some of the

major figures, not just financially, but in influence terms, people like Musk. And then you have others who are just saying, we're not going to get involved. And so it's a

We are really right now running in the wild west of information technology. Evan, you did a profile of Zuckerberg. Are you surprised? How do you understand this? Why is he stepping back and not taking any responsibility at this point? You know, I'm not surprised in a sense because I think what I saw in writing about him was somebody who had –

The ambition to make an enormous machine and to operate it at the largest possible scale, but then this real discomfort, a kind of fitfulness and almost an allergy to the idea that with that would come this range of responsibilities that he felt, well, wait a second. I'm just building the machine. It's a classic trope of don't blame me for where the bullet goes. I'm just the guy who builds the gun. And in a way, I think –

In the end, there's been such a shift in the culture around technology that people who used to say, you know, we see ourselves as the heirs of a responsible class in this country now say, no, actually, we're sort of receding into our own libertarian world.

self mythology and that's that's really become a much more I mean I was I was in touch with a friend yesterday who works in technology and is frankly appalled by what he sees among some of his peers and it's a change

Because there used to be at least the aspiration to be perceived as stewards of the system. And now there's this belief. Wasn't there a saying, don't be evil? It's a long time ago. The Google guys have left the building, as they say. You know, I look at those pictures, Evan, of Zuckerberg's, almost his physical evolution, the broification of Mark Zuckerberg. He's dressing up in almost a weird facsimile of a Roman heirloom.

emperor. And, you know, this idea that we've unleashed this technology on the world and it's not that they're not going to be involved in the election. They're shaping the election and refusing to acknowledge playing any constructive role in it. And what we see now is actually going even further. And many of them actually aggressively giving money to shape the

Washington to shape the Trump campaign, for example. And I think it was really illuminating for me doing that reporting on Trump and his billionaires to see how much the crypto industry, for example, decided, well, rather than just

sit back and watch Democrats regulate our unregulated industry, we're going to proactively jump into it, give millions and millions and millions of dollars in the hopes of influencing a prospective Trump administration. That's something new that we haven't seen. I think it speaks to why is this happening? So many Americans, they might not agree with it, but they are essentially victims. And to go back to our illness metaphor,

No one's given them any inoculation against this. We are all incredibly vulnerable to this technology, this new information environment, and the very people who might be in a position to shape it in a different way are vulnerable.

throwing up their hands saying we're not going to be involved or they're actively getting on the side of the people promoting the disinformation. Yeah. And to just extend your analogy, the few people who have stood up and said we got to do something about this and said we need regulations, we need to review what the laws are here.

are being treated very much the way Fauci was treated for trying to inoculate the population, which is they're being demonized. And so the people who Biden administration brought in to try to deal with this information and fight it and talk about it have been sent packing out of Washington. I actually, I fear as someone who's been in Washington watching sort of these wars that the regulators are being completely overpowered here.

The political scene from The New Yorker will be right back. Hi, I'm Nicholas Bleckman, The New Yorker's creative director. We've designed a collection of stylish and fun products for all seasons and ages, from beach towels and umbrellas to T-shirts and baby onesies. These and other items, including limited edition tote bags, are available only in The New Yorker store, carefully crafted and featuring work by the magazine's celebrated artists.

Visit store.newyorker.com and enjoy 15% off with the code NEWYORKERPOD at checkout. That's store.newyorker.com. We've spent a lot of time talking about Trump's extraordinary unprecedented lies and how far it's gone from George Washington's fable of I cannot tell a lie to basically he cannot tell the truth.

And I just want to say that it's not only the technological leaps that have made this possible. I would like to call out Fox News. It's a standby, of course, by now. But Rupert Murdoch's organization is a source of endless lies to the public. And there was one in particular I saw recently that just I thought was stunning, which was after General John Kelly, the chief of staff to Donald Trump when he was president, four-star Marine general, said,

said that he heard Trump say that soldiers who gave up their lives for this country were suckers and losers. After Kelly was reported to have said that,

Someone on Fox and Friends in the morning came out, Kayleigh McEnany, one of the hosts who used to be a spokesman for Trump, said, that's a lie. He never said it. I know better, she was saying, than what Kelly said himself about what he'd heard. And Kelly had just reconfirmed these comments in The Atlantic magazine.

monthly to Jeffrey Goldberg, and in the New York Times to Mike Schmidt. Yet you've got someone on Fox News telling all their viewers in the morning it's a lie and she knows better than what Kelly himself said.

Unbelievable. I mean it's just – it's disgraceful and Rupert Murdoch – you remember that it wasn't very long ago that Trump was on Fox and Friends in the morning and he said, you know, I have a really important date. I'm going up to see Rupert Murdoch after I talk to you guys. He's in there visiting with Rupert Murdoch. Rupert Murdoch's name should be in this campaign every day and he too should be held accountable.

Do you think in the end we discovered that the Dominion suit, all that stuff, really just didn't change their behavior at all? Well, it's had one little effect. Even Musk brought up Dominion recently, and when he was called out, he stopped talking about it. You can make a few specific topics too hot to touch.

But, you know, it doesn't stop this sort of endless cascade of lies from these people. Yeah. And Jane, just an addendum to your Fox example, which I think is an important one on that same segment. You know, the issue with Kelly was that he confirmed reporting that was first in The New Yorker and as an excerpt from our book.

that Donald Trump had admired Hitler's generals. And he said, why can't you effing generals, meaning American generals, be more like the German generals? And Kelly then confirmed this on the record to Jeff Goldberg in The Atlantic. He said, I asked him, do you mean Biznark's generals? No, of course not. Donald Trump doesn't know who Biznark is. Do you mean the Kaiser's generals? No, of course not.

Do you mean Hitler's generals? Yes, that's what I mean. Why can't you be more like them? So confronted with this information, one of the other hosts on that Fox morning show, what he said was not accurate.

Oh, that's not true. I don't know. What he said was essentially it doesn't matter. And that's what really scares me about the moment that we're in. Again, it goes to the theme of this conversation, which is that Fox is creating an environment in which you have permission to believe anything.

The untruth that you prefer to the truth that you don't like. And I have to say that I never thought that even Rupert Murdoch's Fox News would have people on the air justifying admiration for Adolf Hitler from Donald Trump. I really never thought so. To me, that's a barrier that's been crossed this week, Jane, that I think is really unbearable.

mind-blowing. I think we owe it to ourselves and to our listeners in some ways to say, all right, guys, let's look through the darkness here towards the conceivable terrain of light. Like, where is there any reason for confidence? I'll give you one that comes to mind. I saw a story this week that says that Rudy Giuliani has been ordered by the judge to give his apartment, his cars, his possessions, and so on

to the election workers in Georgia who he was found to have defamed. Now, that's an example of – you see Rudy Giuliani in the 2020 campaign saying the most wretched things about these people and you think, God, we live in a world without consequences. But actually, no. If you follow it to the end of the line that there is still the power to punish that individual actor in that way and talking about it and amplifying the effect on him –

is important. Another example, InfoWars is right now up for sale or will be soon. This is the remnant of Alex Jones's empire of disinformation. He was sort of one of the early pioneers. And the fact that it is possible to pursue these guys down to the end is

is something that needs to be recognized and talked about. But Evan, I mean, I agree. It is fantastic to watch Giuliani having to turn over his penthouse or whatever it is to these election workers from Atlanta. But at the same time, what you're talking about is, and then maybe we should explain, that we live as journalists with very strong

strong rules about lying. We know that if you lie, you can be sued for libel and defamation. And those are the rules and we respect them and we want to try to tell the truth.

Not just for legal reasons, but that's our profession. But those laws apply to journalism and in many ways the platforms that are spreading the lies are off the hook. That's the problem. But if you're the next Giuliani, the next lawyer who imagines, you know, I'm going to make a name for myself by getting up there and attacking people and I'm going to get away with it. In fact, I'll probably just end up getting, you know, a TV contract and everything else. Actually, no. You know what? Turns out that your little empire can come unraveled.

What do you think, Susan? No, I mean, I just I love to think that there's, you know, OK, in the end, the good guys win. But, Evan, you know, listening to you, it's painful to me because the lies have won already. They have created a situation in which Donald Trump not only is rehabilitated after all

lying to the country in such a gross and distorted way about the foundation of our democracy, but is on the brink of potentially winning reelection. And whether he wins or not, millions and millions of Americans have believed the lie that Rudy Giuliani helped him create. And I was just listening to you and thinking, you know, living in Russia and recalling, you know, what was the sort of signature reaction

theory of the case of Stalin era communism in the Soviet Union. Well, if you want to make a revolution, if you want to make an omelet, you've got to break some eggs. So, OK, so Rudy Giuliani has to give his apartment, you know, to these two Georgia election workers. Donald Trump is more than happy to have, you know,

One Rudy or a thousand Giuliani's be roadkill along the way to the victory of his lies. And that's how it works, is that they sacrifice whoever needs to be sacrificed. But to say that there's accountability in our system right now for these lies, they are metastasizing. They are convincing millions of Americans that.

It's OK to believe your preferred version of truth. It's OK, as J.D. Vance said on national television after Donald Trump said they're eating the dogs. He said, well, these stories are powerful in effect, whether they're true or not. So, Susan, but here's the thing, because you know this in a weird way. We're not actually saying something all that different. Here's the fact, you know, having lived in societies like that, I've lived in societies like that.

That if everybody basically just says, as sort of the implication of what you just described is, that, you know, there's nothing we can do. The brutes are going to win. There's no point in even bothering to try to keep them in check. That's what, in a sense, the question becomes, what would you have us do? What would you have us do? Like, give us a constructive suggestion. I don't think that one...

case against one liar at a time after four years is going to be effective way to kill this in our society. And to the point about what do these lies do, I would say,

Let's look at Russia today. The war in Ukraine, the invasion of Ukraine is the product of a lie. It is the product of a blood libel on Ukrainian society by Vladimir Putin. He has literally launched a war on the basis of a lie about his neighbor that millions and millions of Russians, maybe they don't believe every word of the lie, but they've chosen to

And need to go along with it in the system that is built and a society that Donald Trump wants to build is a society built on a foundation of lies in which people will follow the leader wherever he takes them, including to very, very dangerous places. And I think what we've seen is the inadequacy of our system. I mean, to me, the story of the Biden era writ large is the failure to hold to account the

political party and a leader of that party who has gone rogue in our society, who has chosen to flaunt the foundations of our constitutional system. And we've shown that we are not able to impose accountability on that, that our constitution did

Didn't work. Just to come in between the two of you, I think that the verdict is not in yet. We don't know how the election comes out yet. It is entirely possible that Donald Trump will be facing a trial in Washington if Harris wins this election, and we don't know the outcome yet. But –

Jane, but wait a minute. I got to ask you, do you really believe that our system has shown that it can protect itself against these lies? Well, I think that's a false standard. I don't think that's exactly what we're talking about. What we're saying is, are there avenues by which you can have a demonstration effect in public to show that there is a consequence for lying? And that's not saying that that solves everything. But if you say, well, that doesn't matter. I didn't.

I think we are desperately in need of reforms on social media that will impose consequences for the lies. I think the platforms need to be held liable just as Susan and Evan and I and The New Yorker are held liable if we lie. I think there has to be a way to hold people who are making billions of dollars off of these lies accountable. And it's desperate that we take it on now.

Okay, so bottom line, guys, are the lies winning? I think the lies are clearly winning. But I would also say—

that that doesn't mean that we should abandon the tools that are available like holding people to account individually in court when you can. And the reason why I say this is those cases, those campaigns, those efforts to try to hold people to account like Giuliani, like the Dominion case against Fox, those are expensive to bring. They take a lot of coordination and dedication. And if you sort of just wipe it away and say it doesn't matter,

then you're undermining one of the few tools that we have at our disposal to try to do that. Susan, I think I know the answer from you, but are the lies winning? Yes, Jane. Yes, they are. Well, on that note, this has been The Political Scene from The New Yorker, and I am Jane Mayer. We had research assistance today from Alex D'Elia. The episode was produced by Julia Nutter and Sheena Ozaki. Our editor is Gianna Palmer.

Mixing by Mike Kuchman. Stephen Valentino is our executive producer. And Chris Bannon is Condé Nast's head of global audio. Our theme music is by Alison Leighton Brown. Thanks so much for listening. My name is Madeline Barron. I'm a journalist for The New Yorker. I...

focus on stories where powerful people or institutions are doing something that's harming people or harming someone or something in some way. And so my job is to report that so exhaustively that we can reveal what's actually going on and present it to the public.

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