Sioux Falls attorney Zimbeck: Trump has ignored the truth, and we are paying the consequences

The term “Truth or Consequences” became part of American culture in the 1940s when a comedy game show was on radio, and later television.

South Dakota’s own Bob Barker hosted the show for nearly 20 years until 1975. The term also became the actual name of a small town in New Mexico in 1950 as part of a gimmick cooked up by Ralph Edwards, the show’s original host.

The term “truth or consequences” has a much more serious connotation when applied to the political environment of the last 10 years. When candidate Donald Trump famously came down the escalator at Trump Tower and declared the immigrants were “rapists and murderers” without an ounce of proof, he started us down a path where the truth has come under an assault unlike no other time in our history. In our democratic republic, the absence of truth has consequences, and they are enormous.

Almost from the start, within a day of Trump’s 2017 inauguration, Kellyanne Conway, a senior advisor to Trump used the phrase “alternative facts” as a way to cloak a lie with a misleading description that it was something that it clearly was not — the truth. From that point forward, having a serious discussion with a Trump supporter is often with responses like “that is just your opinion” when the issue is clearly an objective matter of fact; or “that’s just fake news,” when an unflattering story came out in a mainstream media outlet.

Finding a rational benchmark to have a meaningful give and take between people of differing mindsets has become hard if not impossible most times. Later, in the summer of 2018, Rudy Giuliani, who was Donald Trump’s lawyer at the time, famously declared that “truth isn’t truth” when trying to explain why his client should not testify in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. What does that phrase even mean? 

These are just two early instances where close Trump associates have purposely misdirected the public — and its only gotten worse. The term “gaslighting” is regularly used to describe how Trump and MAGA influencers distort the truth in order to make mainstream Americans question certain events they know to be true.

Trump’s disregard of the truth has been historic. According to fact-checkers at The Washington Post, Donald Trump made well over 30,000 false or misleading statements in the four years of his first term. Rather than going down any of the many “rabbit holes” one can in dissecting a particular Trump statement, let’s look at the long-lasting corrosive effect lies and mistruths have on our society.

The truth of many important events during all of Donald Trump’s time in office can be questioned, yet serious journalists, scholars, and political pundits who are not MAGA-affiliated are unable or unwilling to take issue with a specific statement because there is little appetite to engage with a pugilist who has no regard for rhetorical norms.

The result is that what Donald Trump is doing is a brutal assault on the truth and on our system of government and the rule of law. 

Trump’s assault on the truth is not an original idea. There are historical examples, whether fascists like Hitler and Mussolini, or communist governments like the Soviet Union, North Korea, or China, to name just a few. 

Whether a far-right fascist or far-left communist, both forms of government rely on keeping the populace uninformed, so the people are unable to comprehend what is truth, are weary of the fight to uphold the truth, or they simply fall in line out of self-preservation and blindly follow authoritarian leaders so as not to suffer the consequences. 

One of Trump’s biggest obsessions is his loss in the 2020 election. Since his re-election, Trump has repeatedly insisted that he won the 2020 election, but that it was rigged by sick individuals (mostly Democrats) who hate America. 

Whether it is one of his many social media postings, or his regular impromptu sessions with the press, Trump brings up the subject and unilaterally declares the “everyone knows” that he rightfully won in 2020. Sadly, and remarkably, no member of the press, nor any Republican lawmaker challenges him anymore.  We have reached a real life “emperor has no clothes” moment — actually, we’ve been in this moment from the early days of the Trump administration in 2017.

The point of Trump’s actions is to re-frame the treatment of facts to meet his chosen narrative that he is the victim in one or more “hoaxes” that are trying to destroy the America that he alone is trying to restore after Joe Biden, and the Democrats made it such a disgrace.

Trump has recently declared that America is the “hottest” country these days, but that just a year ago, it was sick. Who knew?

In his 2018 book “How Fascism Works,” professor Jason Stanley discusses how fascistic regimes are created and how they succeed. Stanley explains in his “10 pillars of fascism” the essential elements of how a leader uses various strategies to assume and maintain power.  One of those pillars deals with truth and reality, entitled “Unreality.”

Professor Stanley explains that “by flooding the public space with falsehoods and attacking trusted institutions, fascist politics destabilizes reality and shifts truth from a shared understanding of reality to the authority of a leader.” Clearly, the Trump strategy of “flooding the zone” has taken a toll on the media willingness and ability to hold him accountable for even the most outrageous of lies.

Ideally, when someone in a seat of power is lying, another person, many times a member of the minority party, who although they may have less power has the ability to expose the liar and the leader, would be humiliated and held accountable. This takes a willing person to fact-check the liar as well as an outlet to expose the liar and demonstrate to all the real truth.

As the value of truth diminishes, governance becomes all about power — the power of the leader to exercise power without accountability. I submit that the truth has become almost irrelevant in today’s Republican Party. Simply look at all of the candidates for the 2026 election touting their Trump bonafides. 

Without a commitment to uphold the truth from senators like John Thune and Mike Rounds (who at times earned scorn and “mean tweets” from Trump), the president has been able to contort the integrity of these men and many other members, and bend them to his will so that they will support even his most demagogic (and even illegal) antics for their own political survival and even personal safety.

Truth is central to freedom and equality. If you’re constantly lied to and your belief system is based on those lies, you are not able to make free decisions.  As an example, in a totalitarian regime like North Korea, its leader, Kim Jong Un has something like 95% support of his people, despite that they are oppressed and lied to in almost every way.

Other leaders, like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, have taken the more fascistic approach by demonizing those who don’t share the same viewpoint and gaining control over elements of the media. By demonizing the opposition, he turns the opposing party into “enemies of the state” or “the enemy from within,” a term that Vice President J.D. Vance has embraced in the past.

The truth becomes irrelevant because the leaders of our government have deemed truth sayers as “evil” or “sick,” or people who “hate our country.” When very few Republicans in Congress speak up to question the latest bizarre Trump proclamation and the only reaction comes from the Democrats, the public has been preconditioned by now and is unable to make their own informed judgment.

Repeatedly, Trump and his acolytes refer to enemies on the Left, as it is the Left who pose the biggest threat to the nation, and only allegiance to him and the Republicans in power will preserve the nation. As recently as this past week, the vice president, during an interview on Fox News, implicated the FBI under the previous administration by saying that the broadcast “networks that motivated, inspired, and maybe even funded Charlie Kirk’s murder” should have been investigated.

Without any basis in fact, one must ask how an outlandishly fabricated comment passes the smell test for truth and not be immediately challenged by someone in the media or elsewhere? Remember Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, and that J.D. Vance later admitted making up the story to prove a chosen narrative about immigrants?

The answer is clear that there is no desire to punish members of the administration because the truth isn’t truth anymore. Perhaps Rudy had a valid point after all.

Truth is the foundation on which accountability exists, and without an appreciation for truth as a foundation, there is no way the populace of a democratic society can react and respond to a demagogue. Compounded even further, with a capitulating media there is no real outlet for dissenting voices who may be armed with the truth.

The recent “silencing” of dissenters or critics (whether real or satirical) by President Trump and members of the administration, compounds the difficulty for the truth to gain traction and establish accountability. As a result, without the ability to create accountability through a durable foundation of established fact, democracy is in peril. So, in the absence of truth, there are consequences.

Those consequences are the loss of our 249-year-old democratic republic.

Dave Zimbeck is an attorney living in Sioux Falls.

Photo: public domain, wikimedia commons

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