America Needs The Presidential Propaganda Prohibition Act
Synopsis:
- Repetitive, objectively false presidential declarations are a form of propaganda utilized globally by authoritarian regimes.
- Donald Trump has demonstrated that this form of propaganda is effective in America.
- As America’s systems of checks and balances have failed to mitigate this form of propaganda, we need to consider limitations on Presidential speech.
President Donald Trump has made more than 20,000 objectively false statements and has demonstrated that if the President repeatedly states a lie as if it were a fact, eventually a significant fraction of the American public will believe the lie is an incontrovertible truth. This form of propaganda, known as the big lie, is having a pernicious influence on the health of Americans and our. democracy. For the sake of both, we must prohibit the use of the big lie.
There are innumerable examples of Trump employing the big lie as a propaganda technique:
- He has repeatedly belittled the severity of the coronavirus pandemic. Despite the death of more than 1 in 1,000 Americans and the world’s highest per capita coronavirus death rate, one-third of Americans believe that the coronavirus is not a serious health issue nor does it warrant any mitigating public health initiatives.
- By repeatedly impugning the integrity of the 2020 election, he has convinced 77% of Republicans that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
- Trump has used the big lie to convince a significant fraction of the public that the Mueller report “was an Illegally Started Hoax”, his impeachment “was evil, it was corrupt, it was dirty cops, it was leakers and liar”, his convicted Executive Office associates (Messrs Flynn, Manafort, Stone) were innocent, global warming is a hoax, etc.
The United States Office of Strategic Services explained Hitler’s propaganda methodology, in part as “…people will believe a big lie … and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.” Hitler repeatedly told the German people that they lost World War I, not as a result of their military’s failure, but because German’s Jews sabotage Germany. Ultimately this led to Hitler’s concentration camps, the death of 70–85 million people, and WWII.
Lest some believe that I am being hyperbolic, the eminently rational political analyst and bipartisan Presidential advisor to 4 presidents, David Gergen said that Trump’s propaganda technique is “following in the footsteps of Adolph Hitler.”
Although one might have expected that our systems of checks and balances (Congress, free press, independent judiciary) would have reigned-in a President who brazenly employed authoritarian propaganda techniques, we have discovered, unfortunately, that those checks and balances are inadequate in addressing this form of propaganda.
American politics has now entered a new era, in which politicians employ the big lie with impunity. On 12/24/2020 former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich penned an op-ed in the Washington Examiner in which reframed many objective lies as truths and thus he began his 2024 Presidential campaign.
America’s democracy cannot survive if the President of the United States, the person with the largest megaphone in the world, is permitted to employ the big lie propaganda technique.
The US Supreme Court has acknowledged that unfettered free speech is not in America’s best interest. The Court has limited free speech by prohibiting people from falsely shouting fire in a theater, making false and malicious public statements about another individual or business, and proscribes hate speech because the societal harms that are engendered by these types of speech outweigh the societal benefits of unfettered free speech.
It is time that America’s judicial, academic, and political institutions begin to assess the societal risk and benefits of allowing the President to have the unfettered right to free speech.
Assuming it is concluded that some restrictions on Presidential speech are in the best interest of America, one potential solution (among many) would be to create, by Federal law, the Commission on Presidential Speech, which should logically fall under the auspices of the Supreme Court. The Commission would need to be composed of highly respected Americans as an unimpeachable moral fabric will be essential to its ability to function. It would be tasked with assessing the legality of objectively false and politically significant Presidential statements. The Commission would be empowered to define some Presidential statements as propaganda that is contrary to the public interest and thus illegal and would need to have the authority to reprimand, personally penalize and make recommendations of. impeachment against a President who repeatedly violated the Commission’s rules.
Despite the fact that Trump will be removed from the Oval Office in January, permitting future Presidents to use the big lie, under the guise of free speech, will ensure that an authoritarian-inclined political leader will eventually rise to fill Trump’s political void. And once an authoritarian-inclined politician is in the Oval Office, he/she may move so fast in taking control of our three branches of government (as Trump nearly did) that they could permanently end our 244-year experiment in representative democracy before the subsequent election.
In 1787, Mrs.Elizabeth Willing Powel reportedly asked Benjamin Franklin “… have we got a republic or a monarchy.” To which Franklin supposedly replied, “A republic if you can keep it.”
If we hope to preserve our democracy for future generations and the health of all Americans, we must be willing to “think outside the box” and do what is logically necessary even if politically challenging. We must create a mechanism that will prevent the President of the United States from using the big lie propaganda technique before it is too late.
