It would seem like a parody if it weren’t on the website of the White House.
Over Thanksgiving weekend, President Trump’s administration unveiled its latest stunning online innovation, the White House’s bias tracker, designed to call out the supposed lies of the mainstream media.
Please, I beg of you, look at this website.
Mostly, the White House has been targeting well-respected news outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and, of all sources, the Associated Press. These venerable organizations are supposedly peddling lies and misinformation to stoke “anti-American sentiment,” which is apparently the job of journalists, who have somehow managed to hoodwink Americans into believing that they are, in fact, well-educated professionals who follow a rigorous code of conduct, and not the bloodthirsty sharks that President Trump knows them to be. The lies themselves are, of course, of the most egregious kind, such as professional, ethically created works of journalism that present the Trump administration and its allies in an unflattering way.
President Trump has made no secret of his disdain for the media. It’s pretty much his thing. The Guardian recently described far-right British politician Nigel Farage’s attacks on the media, in retribution for credible allegations of the most disgusting sort of racism, as coming straight from “Trump’s populist playbook.” You know you’re famous for something when your name becomes attached to it, and that’s where President Trump is these days when it comes to his war on journalism.
There is a sort of stunning hypocrisy to the bias tracker, though. According to the Washington Post, President Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims in his first term of four years. The man was indicted by a criminal grand jury in 2023 for “false statements and representations.” His propensity for lying has a Wikipedia page. Four, actually. One in general, one for his first term, one for between terms and one for his second term. They are gargantuan in scale, and their citation lists seem to stretch on forever. Reading through them is a strange combination of amusing and horrifying. Amusing, because remember when President Trump claimed that the 2018 California wildfires could have been prevented if we “raked” leaves the way Finland does? Then, of course, you get to his lies about E. Jean Carroll, and that’s where it gets horrifying.
Really, there’s a good case to be made that Donald Trump, a sort of Pinocchio figure, is the most prolific liar to ever live.
All of this is to say, for a cheap online gimmick, the White House’s bias tracker represents something greater. President Trump has made widespread a sort of festering disdain for professionals who are trying to serve the American public in the most democratic, freedom-oriented way possible, which is to inform them of the truth of the moment. This sort of righteous approach to reality has been replaced by something more self-serving, which is to make the truth whatever it needs to be. In essence, lie to the American people, and then don’t apologize or retract anything, even when it’s obviously untrue.
Just recently, President Trump responded to a question about his relationship with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein by saying to the reporter, a woman, “Quiet, piggy.” Blatant misogyny aside, insulting journalists to their face was something that just wasn’t done before he came onto the political scene a decade ago.
The idea that we used to demand basic human decency from our elected officials is somewhat laughable in the face of the atrocities our politicians have committed on foreign shores and domestically – the Jim Crow South comes to mind – but we did once demand basic politeness from our presidents. There was a certain standard they were held to. They could be funny, though they often weren’t, but they had to at least be polite to reporters and foreign visitors. We believed in dignity. It was part of what allowed us to handle this staggering democracy – we respected each other, or pretended to, anyway.
More than anything, the White House bias tracker is a sign that respect and truth are on their way out. Hypocrisy and disdain are in, and it looks like they’re here to stay.