Truth Isn’t Truth
It was the “moment” of Sunday’s political interviews. Rudy Giuliani, former Mayor of New York and present attorney for President Trump, responded to questioning by NBC’s Chuck Todd on Meet the Press about Prosecutor Mueller interviewing the President. Todd said, “truth is true.” Giuliani retorted, “Truth isn’t truth.”
{click here to see the interview}
Todd stopped, credulous, and asked Giuliani if he meant that. The Mayor went on to try to explain that he meant that Mueller’s truth in an interview with the President might not be the President’s truth, and therefore Mueller would charge the President with perjury.
Later on Meet the Press, I listened to conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt summarize an earlier interview with former CIA Director John Brennan. Hewitt stated that Brennan had “…taken conspiracy off the table…” in regards to President Trump. I listened to the Brennan interview myself, and heard Brennan specifically say that while the President had committed “…collusion in plain sight,” Brennan was waiting for the Mueller investigation results to see if there was a conspiracy, creating criminal liability. There was nothing said about conspiracy charges being, “off the table.”
In ten minutes, Meet the Press summarized the pivotal problem of our politics and our government today. We hear what we want to hear, we determine “truth,” not on some objective standard of validity, but on what we choose to believe ought to be true. We have made “truth” into some squishy concept no longer black and white, but varying shades of gray.
It has always been a tenet of modern propaganda: if you can control “the truth,” you can control what people believe and what they do. From the reality of Nazi Germany to the fiction of Orwell’s 1984, the control of what is considered “truth” is critical to authoritarian government.
And “truth” has always been “flexible” is some situations. In 2009, the Republicans believed in the “truth” that the government had to step into to support the economy to avoid a massive Depression. While that was “truth” then, by 2012 they blamed Democrats for the national debt growing by trillions of dollars because of it. And Republicans have always argued their “truth” that universal health care would lower health standards for the majority of Americans.
There is a difference between ideological views and truth, and there is a difference between truth and blame.
There is a “truth;” a factually valid item. Either the President knew about his campaign’s collusion with the Russians, or he didn’t. Either he fired FBI Director Comey because of Russia (as he said in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt) or he didn’t. Either he asked Comey to take it easy on former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn, or he didn’t.
These aren’t “squishy” concepts.
This is why the Mueller report, when it comes out, will begin to determine “truth.” And this is also why it is the task of the President’s men, like Giuliani, to destroy the credibility of Mueller’s conclusions before we even get to see them. The Trump Team’s goal: pre-determine the “truth” and the “un-truth” of Mueller to control the outcomes.
There is room for questions: does the President have the ultimate right to fire any member of the executive branch, or did the campaign’s interaction with the Russia somehow not reach the threshold of illegality or is the Special Counsel law itself Constitutional? These are questions of legal interpretation, not of fact or truth.
As hard as the President and his men, try to change the subject (why aren’t they investigating Hillary) or try to discount the outcomes (seventeen angry Democrats on the Mueller team) or try to make the “truth not the truth”: we will have facts, the truth, to make a determination of what should occur. There will be a Mueller report, and an opportunity to see reality.
“You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free –
but Trump’s team is afraid the truth will take their freedom”
– John Meacham, American Historian
