Facing the truth in our new political climate

[BloombergOpinion]( [Early Returns]( [Jonathan Bernstein]( If you are at all like me, you’ve barely begun to process what we’ve just lived through in the last week in [Jeffersontown, Kentucky](; in [Pittsburgh](; and in the [attempted assassinations]( of a number of prominent Democrats. Single episodes of hate or madness are, alas, something we’ll always have, but this feels different — because it really is different. We can’t specifically connect individual actions to the overall political atmosphere, just as we can’t specifically conclude that a specific hurricane is the consequence of climate change. Perhaps the bigots in Kentucky and Pittsburgh would have acted anyway; perhaps in a different political climate, the attempted bomber would have found other targets. What we can do, however, is face the climate honestly. And the truth is that people who watch the news within the Republican-aligned media, and listen to Republican politicians including the president of the United States, are being fed a nonstop diet of crazy conspiracy theories and phony scare stories. Adam Serwer has a good piece detailing exactly [what the Fox News audience was hearing]( about a migrant caravan making its way through Mexico. And a lot of people believe that those crazy conspiracy theories and phony scare stories are true. Why wouldn’t they? Most of us grew up in a media atmosphere in which programs that looked like the news mostly told the truth. We didn’t all grow up believing that presidents told the truth, of course, but we’ve never had a president who has such a total disregard for the truth. We certainly haven’t had a president — at least not in the modern communications era, when you can see and hear him saying it — call the news media “enemies of the people” and encourage the idea that his political opponents should be locked up. Dahlia Lithwick is [quite correct](: “The point is that people who hate Jews and immigrants and minorities believe that when they commit violence against these people, they are behaving as the followers their president wants them to be” (and see too [Rick Hasen](and my Bloomberg Opinion colleague [Cass Sunstein](). Donald Trump bears the greatest responsibility for the political atmosphere right now, because after all, he is president. Whether because he [deliberately wants to stir up hatred]( or if it’s just the way he is, presidents have more to do with how all of us think about politics than any other individual. It’s a huge mistake, however, to think this is just about Trump. The strain of this kind of politics goes back within the Republican Party to Joe McCarthy, to Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, and most decisively to Newt Gingrich, who explicitly trained an entire generation or two of Republican politicians to emphasize division and animosity, and is still at it today. Even worse, it’s institutionalized and [spread by the Republican Party-aligned media](, so much so that I suspect a lot of perfectly sane, perfectly well-intentioned Republicans at the elite level wind up believing a lot of garbage because it’s constantly being talked about by everyone around them as if it were real. The impulses toward conspiracy theories and hatred know no political or ideological affiliation. There are plenty of crazy conspiracy theories circulating among Democrats and liberals now, just as there always have been. What’s different is that for the most part, most of the time, Democratic Party leaders shoot those stories down or ignore them. There were crazy conspiracy theories about, for example, both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush and various nations in the Middle East. But there were no House special committees to fan the flames of those phony stories. Nothing like the (multiple, seemingly endless) investigations of Vince Foster’s suicide or the disaster in Benghazi. There were no nutty theories when Bill Clinton and Barack Obama met normal resistance from the bureaucracy that it was all a Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson plot. Well, there probably were — but the Democratic Party-aligned media (much less the “neutral” media) and leading Democratic politicians mostly ignored them, at least in public. They certainly didn’t obsess over them for months or years without evidence or even logic to back them up. Trump, to be sure, is an outlier even among Republicans. He’s personally responsible for amplifying dozens of phony stories: Just last week, outside all the craziness about the caravan, he also claimed that there were riots in California having to do with sanctuary cities. There were, of course, no riots. His recent slogan is “jobs not mobs” — there are, of course, no mobs. I could go on. None of this is to hold Donald Trump or the Republican Party or any party actor specifically responsible for the terrible events of the past week. Only those who committed those acts bear that responsibility. What Trump and his allies are responsible for, however, is what they’ve done and said. 1. Dan Drezner uses one seemingly boring Trump tweet to explain [quite a few important things]( about how he goes about his job as president. 2. Norm Ornstein is correct: The time to [plan for a disrupted election]( is before it happens, not after. 3. Dave Hopkins sees [uncertainty going into the 2018 elections](. 4. Richard Skinner at Mischiefs of Faction on [Trump and celebrity candidates](. 5. Brendan Nyhan notes one Trump effect: Americans are now much [more likely to favor immigration](. 6. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Kara Alaimo on [how not to reward sexual harassment](. 7. David Leonhardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick on [corruption in the Trump administration](. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click [here]( to subscribe. Also subscribe to [Bloomberg All Access]( and get much, much more. You’ll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. Bloomberg L.P. ● 731 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10022 [Web]( ● [Facebook]( ● [Twitter]( [Feedback]( ● [Unsubscribe]( If you believe this has been sent to you in error, please safely [unsubscribe](.