Why Donald Trump's sleekit attempts to hide the truth are a warning to Scotland

It was all to no avail. Raffensperger refused to ‘find’ those votes; the mob, after battling for hours with police, eventually left the Capitol; and Joe Biden was confirmed as president. However, the affair prompted leading historian Professor Timothy Snyder, whose books include On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century and The Road to Unfreedom, to tell CNN that “we are now moving dangerously towards the territory of a big lie”.

“The idea that Mr Biden didn’t win the election is a big lie. It’s a big lie because you have to disbelieve all kinds of evidence to believe in it,” he said. “It’s a big lie because you have to believe in a huge conspiracy in order to believe it.

“And it’s a big lie because, if you believe it, it demands you take radical action. So this is one way we have really moved forwards towards authoritarianism and away from democracy.” And, Snyder warned, the effects on American politics could well be lasting.

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Second-term Trump far more radical

Trump’s re-election last November, further undermining his claims the 2020 result was “rigged” against him, put paid to attempts to prosecute him over his actions. However, it is vitally important to remember what it reveals about his attitude towards the truth. There was no evidence of significant election fraud, he simply sought to make it true by the force of his personality.

Since returning to office, Trump has adopted far more radical policies than during his first term, introducing large tariffs on imports from most countries, sending troops into US cities for supposed crime crackdowns, arresting and deporting large numbers of migrants, and pointedly refusing to rule out using military force to take Greenland from Nato-ally Denmark.

But, just as alarmingly, he has also been trying to restrict the flow of accurate information from the government. The most obvious and brazen example was his decision to fire Erika McEntarfer as commissioner of the Bureau of Labour Statistics after it reported the economy had added fewer jobs than expected in July.

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Importance of ‘objective statistics’

Trump wrote on social media that “our economy is booming” and, under the bureau’s incoming new leadership, the figures would be “HONEST and ACCURATE”. As with the 2020 election, he was basically asking the public to believe the report was rigged against him.

Trump’s new commissioner is not yet in post and, undeterred by the firing of their boss, the bureau’s staff drew up an August jobs report showing that employers added just 22,000 new posts – a continuation of the declining figures – and unemployment rose slightly to 4.3 per cent.

The obvious problem with firing government officials for producing statistics that make Trump look bad is that the wider world, including the markets, will stop trusting what does emerge. Republican Senator Rand Paul said: “We have to look somewhere for objective statistics. When the people providing the statistics are fired, it makes it much harder to make judgments that, you know, the statistics won’t be politicised.” Indeed.

Vaccine misinformation

The economy is just one area where trust is being eroded by Trump’s administration, with his Health Secretary Robert Kennedy firing all the members of an expert vaccine advisory panel at the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and replacing them with what Reuters described as “hand-picked advisers including fellow anti-vaccine activists”.

The CDC’s director, Susan Monarez, was then sacked by the White House with a spokesperson saying she was not “aligned with the president's agenda of Making America Healthy Again”, repurposing Trump’s increasingly childish slogan. This prompted a flurry of other senior CDC staff to quit.

"Recently, the overstating of [vaccine] risks and the rise of misinformation have cost lives, as demonstrated by the highest number of US measles cases in 30 years and the violent attack on our agency,” outgoing CDC chief medical officer Debra Houry wrote in her resignation letter.

So, just to be clear, the US national public health agency is, in the view of people who were recently among its top experts, being captured by people who spread deadly misinformation.

Climate satellites facing the axe

Another serious issue that Trump doesn’t want people to know the truth about is climate change. According to reports in the US media, his administration wants to put two satellites that measure global carbon dioxide levels and plant growth out of action.

The Orbiting Carbon Observatories, one of which is attached to the International Space Station, are the only US federal satellite missions specifically designed to monitor greenhouse gases, with the data being used by climate scientists, but also farmers and oil and gas companies.

So, according to Trumpian doctrine, he won the 2020 US election; the US economy is “booming” despite his idiotic trade war on the rest of the world; we should be sceptical about vaccines – as great a scientific wonder as it is possible to find, responsible for saving countless millions of lives; and we should bury our heads in the sand about climate change, despite its potential to become an existential threat to humanity.

Scotland and the UK should beware, for, as the saying goes, “when America sneezes, the world catches a cold”. The return of the sleekit Trump has brought ‘Big Lie’ politics back with a vengeance and it has never been more important to inoculate ourselves against it.