Lies, Damned Lies, and Politics
PolitiFact founder Bill Adair’s honest take on our deepening crisis of political mendacity.
Beyond the Big Lie
The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy
by Bill Adair
Atria, 304 pp., $23
BILL ADAIR BEGINS HIS BOOK ON LYING by admitting to telling a lie—actually, a big one. The occasion was a live interview on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal in 2012. A caller asked Adair, the creator and then-editor of the fact-checking organization PolitiFact, whether Republicans received more “False” ratings than Democrats, as it surely seemed.
“I can honestly say I do not keep score,” he responded, “and asking me that question is almost like asking an umpire who is out at home more, the Yankees or the Red Sox.”
In Beyond the Big Lie, Adair comes clean about that moment: “I was lying.” PolitiFact did have the capacity to tally the rankings, although it did so only privately. And yes, such inquiries found that Republicans fudged facts more than their Democratic counterparts. “A lot more.”
For Adair and his fellow fact-checkers, this is something of an inconvenient truth. PolitiFact was launched in 2007 to check the veracity of claims made by politicians; essential to its credibility is that it do so without favoritism to either party. It adopted politically neutral standards to decide which statements to check and how they are evaluated.
And while its methodology isn’t purely scientific and its analysis can sometimes be limited or inadvertently misleading, in general PoliticFact comes across as admirably fair-minded. Even so, the numbers have long shown that Republicans lied more. And so Adair did what he could—lied, even—to avoid calling attention to the GOP’s profligate mendacity, “even as it crippled our political discourse, enabled the rise of a destructive band of Republican leaders, and fueled a deadly mob attack on our Capitol.”
Now the Knight professor of the practice of journalism and public policy at Duke University, Adair sees political lying as a threat to the nation’s ability to address the problems it faces. And he pegs the party of Honest Abe as having the worst offenders.
“Republicans lied far more often, and they were ruthless and repetitive,” he relates. “Their lies often came directly from party talking points, the scripted lines that elected officials use in speeches and media appearances. Our PolitiFact fact-checkers would notice the same lines used over and over.” One review of 100 PolitiFact fact-checks from early 2013 found that Republican claims were deemed false three times as often as those made by Democrats.
Adair’s book features a “Lying Hall of Fame,” a kind of new home of the whopper. Inductees include representatives of big tobacco and talk radio, Rupert Murdoch, Tucker Carlson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton , and, of course, Trump. Adair recalls how, in 2011, as he was about to go on MSNBC to talk about Trump’s lie that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, the host, Chuck Todd, fielded a call from the birther baron himself. Afterward, Todd told Adair: “Donald Trump really hates you.” Of course he does.
Beyond the Big Lie is not about Trump, even though he is a world-class liar. (At one point Adair calls him “the greatest liar of all time,” which may be a bit of a stretch.) Adair considers Trump “as much a symptom as a cause” of the Republican party’s embrace of dishonesty. Nor does he let slide Democrats’ adventures in truth-bending, notably in their constant alarms about how Republicans want to ax Social Security and Medicare.
Adair asks the question: Why do politicians lie? The answer is: Because it works.
THROUGHOUT THE BOOK, ADAIR WEAVES in the story of Nina Jankowicz, “an expert in foreign affairs, social media, and misinformation” who got ground up in the gears of the right-wing spin machine. It was her great misfortune, on April 27, 2022, to be named head of a new and vitally needed entity within the Department of Homeland Security.
Charged with coordinating disinformation policy across DHS’s component agencies and “ensuring [free speech] protections are appropriately incorporated across DHS’s disinformation-related work and that rigorous safeguards are in place,” this new organization was given the terminally unfortunate name “Disinformation Governance Board.” Republicans (and civil libertarians of various stripes) erupted, declaring the Biden administration was seeking to establish a “Ministry of Truth” to enable the government to dictate what opinions can and cannot be expressed.
Here are some of the chyrons that appeared on Fox News: “DEMS INCREASINGLY HOSTILE TO FREE SPEECH,” “TURLEY: DEMS CALLING FOR OUTRIGHT STATE CENSORSHIP,” “MEET YOUR NEW DISINFO OVERLORD: NINA JANKOWICZ,” and “THE LEFT’S FAR-REACHING CENSORSHIP CAMPAIGN.”
This, mind you, all over a proposed board that had explicit protections for free speech—and never even met. The blowback was so fierce it stopped the idea in its tracks and, after four agonizing months, killed it off completely. Meanwhile, the manufactured hysteria led to a character assassination of Jankowicz—and physical threats. Adair’s anger comes through the page as he tells this part of the story. Lying causes real damage to people’s lives.
Consider the recent lie told by Trump and JD Vance that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs. The harm done to that community is immeasurable. Its schools received bomb threats. Hate groups dropped by to stir up more hate. Pleas from the parents of a young man killed in an accident involving an immigrant to not use this tragedy for political ends were spurned. Neither Trump nor Vance has shown the slightest contrition. Indeed, Vance angrily defended his right to “create stories” to garner media attention.
And then there is the disinformation that has endangered peoples’ lives by complicating emergency efforts regarding the violent hurricanes Helene and Milton. Again, the spreaders of these lies have no shame.
PERHAPS THE MOST ENLIGHTENING SIDE STORY in Adair’s book is his chapter on Mike Pence, who in December 2002 became his down-the-block neighbor in Arlington, Virginia. Both had families with young children and everyone became good friends. Pence, then a member of the House of Representatives, is portrayed as a man of honor and decency, taking it upon himself to make nightly visits to another neighbor who was dying of cancer, “sitting at his bedside for long periods of time and comforting him.”
But Pence did not lack for ambition, and as he rose up the ranks of the GOP, he earned Truth-O-Meter scores of “False” and “Mostly False” more often, in most cases for “regurgitating inaccurate Republican talking points.” In 2011, Pence moved back to Indiana, where he ran successfully for governor. The two families stayed in touch and would on occasion get together, but Adair said that something about Pence seemed to change. “He was aloof and seemed caught up in the trappings of being governor.”
By the time he was tapped to be Trump’s running mate (“It was more of an arranged marriage than a love affair”), Pence’s embrace of mendacity was complete. He began making such fact-free claims as that agents on the southern border were apprehending “seven individuals a day who are either known or suspected terrorists,” which earned him a “Pants on Fire.”
While allowing that Pence “stood up to Thump when it mattered most,” in refusing to violate the Constitution to overturn the 2020 election, Adair presents his political career as a case study in how the willingness to tell lies leads to power and advancement in the GOP. In a party that is willing to excuse any lie, no matter how big, politicians come to lie about everything, no matter how small. The public accepts it. The right-wing media abet it. Aside from the Truth-O-Meter, there are no consequences. Lying works.
Pence, Adair notes, “did not reply to several emails” seeking his input on the book. Let’s trust he sent him a signed copy.
AS FOR THE QUESTION OF WHY Republicans lie more than Democrats, Adair consults The Bulwark’s own Tim Miller, formerly communications director for Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush, among others. And Miller chalks it up to differences in the culture between the two parties:
The type of person that’s drawn to Republican political campaigns is much more nihilistic, much more of a person that just wants to win at all costs, does not care that deeply about the issues. And the type of person drawn to Democratic campaigns is almost, sometimes to a fault, earnest.
Adair tells a story about Romney that underscores how fundamentally things have changed with regard to lying in politics in just a few years. On October 25, 2012, less than two weeks before the election, Romney took the stage in Defiance, Ohio, a big manufacturing hub, and said: “I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep—now owned by the Italians—is thinking of moving all production to China.”
This was a deliberate lie. The truth was that the company decided to open a plant in China to meet the strong demand from the Asian market while maintaining its Defiance plant. No jobs were being moved. But Paul Bedard, a columnist at the Washington Examiner, inaccurately reported that Jeep “is considering giving up on the United States and shifting production to China.” Others repeated the claim. Chrysler issued a flat denial: “Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China,” adding that a little digging would have “saved unnecessary fantasies and extravagant comments.”
Alas, Adair relates, “Bedard’s fantasy was too good for the Romney campaign to resist.” Romney was looking for ways to rejuvenate his image among auto workers, which was badly damaged in 2008 when he opposed the federal government’s bailout of the auto industry. (“Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” was the slightly sensational headline on his New York Times op-ed.) But his claim about the Jeep plant fell flat.
“Romney cites incorrect auto-manufacturing claim in Ohio,” declared CBS. Said the Detroit Free Press, “Romney Repeats False Claim of Jeep Outsourcing to China; Chrysler Refutes Story.” MSNBC host Ed Schultz began his show by saying, “Mitt Romney tells his biggest lie to date.” There were more such reactions.
Yet, Adair writes, “despite the blowback, the campaign decided to go even bigger with the Jeep lie.” Stuart Stevens, a senior strategist for the campaign, put out an ad with the message: “Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy, and sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China.”
Kevin Madden, a Romney campaign spokesperson, saw a preview of the ad and warned that it would backfire, leaving Madden to deal with the mess. But Stevens wouldn’t yield. Madden was incensed: “I can’t defend this ad,” he said. “I’ve got to go fucking eat this shitburger.”
Reaction to the ad was severely negative. Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post fact checker, deemed the ad “clearly misleading.” PolitiFact said, “It strings together facts in a way that presents a wholly inaccurate picture” and awarded it a “Pants on Fire” rating. During a campaign rally in Youngstown, Ohio, then–Vice President Joe Biden asked, rhetorically, “Ladies and gentlemen, have they no shame?” Obama won Ohio on his way to re-election. PolitiFact picked Romney’s motor mendacity as its 2012 “Lie of the Year.”
In fact, the lie told here by the Romney camp was, by present-day standards, almost quaint. (Stevens, now an MSNBC regular, still defends it.) And yet Romney got pummeled for it; he paid a price for his dishonesty. Would anyone give such a misleading claim a second thought today? Or even a first?
To curb the epidemic of political lying, Adair says, fact-checking should matter more. “A politician’s score with fact-checkers should be as much a part of their record as how they voted on key issues,” he argues. He even suggests that social media companies could “raise or lower ad rates depending on the politician’s record with fact-checking organizations.” Good luck with that.
In truth, cracking down on politicians’ lying would be a lot easier if they didn’t do so much of it—more even than when PolitiFact began. Adair acknowledges the difficulty of coming back from this abyss:
Solving the lying problem—even putting a substantial dent in it—is a massive challenge. It’s not just a matter of getting fact-check journalism accepted by an audience that has been conditioned to reject it. We also need to persuade politicians to change a behavior that has paid them dividends for years. We need to convince them that if they lie, there will be consequences.
Maybe the problem is not just that politicians, Republicans especially, are lying more; it’s that they get away with it so regularly.
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