To the Citizen Who Expects Better,
A republic asks something difficult of its citizens. It asks us to govern ourselves.
That requires disagreement. It requires argument. It even requires tolerating a considerable quantity of political nonsense. Presidents have exaggerated their accomplishments, minimized their failures, attacked their opponents, polished inconvenient facts, and occasionally said things so absurd that history has been kind enough to preserve them for our amusement.
Political dishonesty is not new.
But there is a difference between a politician attempting to persuade the public and a president repeatedly attempting to replace reality with whatever version of events best serves him at the moment.
President Donald Trump has made false and unsupported claims a persistent feature of his public communication. Elections he dislikes become fraudulent. Unfavorable statistics become false. Judges who rule against him become corrupt or partisan. Journalists who contradict him become dishonest. Institutions that resist him become enemies. Failures become successes, criticism becomes conspiracy, and evidence itself becomes suspect whenever it proves inconvenient.
One falsehood does not endanger a republic.
A thousand repeated often enough may.
The Constitution contains no clause requiring the President to be truthful in every public utterance. Such a provision would be both impossible to enforce and rather optimistic about human nature. The greater safeguard was supposed to be structural: divided power, an independent judiciary, a free press, elections, congressional oversight, and citizens capable of judging those entrusted with authority.
Yet all of those safeguards depend upon something the Constitution never bothers to say aloud.
Facts must remain possible.
Congress cannot meaningfully oversee an administration if every unfavorable finding can simply be declared fabricated. Courts cannot retain public confidence if every adverse ruling is characterized as corruption. Elections cannot settle political disputes if defeat itself becomes proof of fraud. Journalism cannot inform the electorate when inconvenient reporting is dismissed not by contrary evidence, but by declaring the reporter an enemy.
Eventually the citizen faces an impossible burden.
Before deciding whether a policy is wise, she must first determine whether the policy has been described truthfully. Before judging an economic claim, she must find the underlying numbers. Before accepting an accusation, she must locate the evidence. Before understanding what her own government has done, she must independently investigate the person whose constitutional office gives him unparalleled power to tell her.
This is where presidential dishonesty becomes more than a question of character.
It becomes a problem of government.
The presidency carries an authority no private citizen possesses. Presidential words are examined by markets, foreign governments, military leaders, federal agencies, journalists, courts and millions of citizens. A statement made from that office does not cease to carry institutional weight merely because it appears on social media.
The office follows the man into the room.
And with greater authority ought to come greater responsibility.
Franklin understood something about information that remains remarkably modern. He was a printer before he was a statesman. He lived in an age of pamphlets, partisan newspapers, anonymous essays, political gossip and magnificent public quarrels. He certainly did not inhabit some golden age of perfectly objective journalism.
He nevertheless understood that self-government requires citizens who can reason from evidence rather than surrender judgment to faction.
That may be the greater danger before us now.
Repeated falsehood does not merely persuade people to believe things that are untrue. Eventually it teaches them that truth itself is partisan.
Once that happens, correction becomes nearly impossible. Evidence contrary to one’s preferred leader becomes evidence of conspiracy. The court cannot be trusted. The newspaper cannot be trusted. The scientist cannot be trusted. The election official cannot be trusted. The civil servant cannot be trusted.
Only the leader remains trustworthy.
That arrangement has a name, but it is not republican government.
The remedy is not censorship. Nor should government establish some official ministry charged with deciding truth for the citizenry; such a cure would be more dangerous than the disease.
The remedy is the harder work of citizenship.
Demand evidence. Read beyond the headline. Consult original documents when they are available. Distinguish accusation from proof. Support journalism that corrects its mistakes rather than conceals them. Apply the same standard of evidence to politicians we favor that we apply to politicians we despise.
And perhaps most importantly, stop treating political falsehood as harmless simply because it comes from our own side.
No party possesses a constitutional exemption from reality.
A free people must be willing to say to any president, Republican or Democrat, conservative or progressive:
You may ask for our vote.
You may ask for our confidence.
You may ask us to follow your policies.
But you may not demand that we surrender our judgment.
The Constitution gives extraordinary power to the presidency. It gives something greater to the citizen: the authority to decide whether those entrusted with that power deserve to keep it.
That authority is useless if we abandon the habit of distinguishing what we wish were true from what the evidence demonstrates to be true.
So perhaps the question before us is not merely whether a president lies.
Politicians have done that since politics acquired politicians.
The more consequential question is this:
What constitutional damage occurs when Americans must routinely fact-check their own president before they can determine what their government is actually doing?
A republic capable of asking that question has not yet lost its bearings.
A republic that stops asking it may have.
I remain, in expectation,
Prudence C. Wilder
Letter's From Prudence 