A Test for Trump’s Disinformation Operation

Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Rock Hill, South Carolina, on Thursday.  Scott Kinser/AP

During one of the recent frantic, manic, and racist rants Donald Trump has delivered at red-state campaign rallies to boost imperiled Republican candidates, the bloviator-in-chief—in between comments about people’s asses and boasts of his own purported greatness—claimed credit for turning Washington, DC, from a hellscape of crime to a citadel of safety. He brayed:

Nobody wanted to eat out. They were afraid. Even if you were in the restaurant, people would walk in and, like the Wild West, hold it up! Everybody is standing there. Can you imagine? A fancy restaurant. They were robbing the whole restaurant. It’s crazy.

That’s an absolute lie.

Trump is a serial prevaricator who cannot stop spouting falsehoods. During his first run in the White House, The Washington Post cataloged 30,573 false statements that he emitted. (Nowadays, the Post, following billionaire owner Jeff Bezos’ loving embrace of Trump, doesn’t bother to systematically track his deceptions.) But I am highlighting this particular fib because it is so idiotic and so transparently untrue. As a resident of the metropolitan DC area, I can say that folks here were not afraid to go out to dinner prior to Trump’s pointless dispatch of National Guard troops and that “whole” restaurants were not being pillaged by malfeasant marauders.

For Trump, lying is like breathing. It never stops. It occurs automatically, without thinking. Once upon a time, we rebuked politicians if their spin deviated too far from reality. They were afforded much license to hail their supposed accomplishments and policy proposals and assault their rivals’ liabilities and intentions. There was tremendous leeway for stretching the truth. But outright lying was considered a step too far.

During the 1988 GOP presidential primary contest, the campaign of Vice President George H.W. Bush aired ads accusing his main rival, Sen. Bob Dole, of being wishy-washy on tax policy. In an interview, when Dole was asked if he had a message for Bush, he growled, “Yeah, stop lying about my record.” That was considered a big deal.

These days, the lies are far more brazen and blatant, and an accusation of lying barely rates a mention in any news story.

That’s partly—or largely—because Trump has turned the Republican Party and the MAGA movement into one big disinformation outfit. He doesn’t spin. He lies over and over, and his party and cult happily go along with and cheer on his deceit. The GOP’s midterm effort that he’s leading—like his past presidential campaigns—is foremost a disinformation operation. Trump never stops pumping out extreme falsehoods.

He tells the crowd at one rally that “98 percent” of Somali immigrants in the United States “don’t work…because they steal so much. They all have a Mercedes-Benz…low IQ. And they live better than you.” He repeatedly proclaims that the United States is experiencing an economic Golden Age after he “inherited the worst inflation in American history” and that inflation is down to 1.8 percent. The worst inflation in US history was 23.7 percent in 1920, and it was 3.0 percent when Trump returned to the White House last year. Currently, it’s 3.7 percent.

He calls his Democratic foes and critics “communists.” They are not. Even members of the Democratic Socialists of America are not communists. He continues to spread the debunked MAGA conspiracy theory that James Talarico, the Democratic senatorial candidate in Texas, left the campaign trail to be treated for mental illness. He asserts that Democrats are for “open borders” (they are not) and that President Joe Biden allowed 25 million people to “pour across the borders,” including drug dealers, rapists, and 11,888 murderers. These numbers are exceedingly wrong.

Perhaps the most disturbing lie Trump has been hawking is that schools are performing gender transition operations on children without the knowledge of their parents. This is batcrap crazy—but it fuels anti-trans paranoia. Schools these days cannot even dispense an aspirin without the consent of a parent. And there is no evidence to support this claim. Does Trump—and the MAGA devotees he’s trying to stir up—believe there are operating rooms in schools where these procedures are happening in secrecy?

At a rally in Georgia, Trump went deep on this lie:

We got critical race theory and transgender mutilization insanity out of our schools. I mean, we have five states where your child goes off to school as Tim and comes back as Tammy, three or four days later. It’s true. And teachers make—somebody makes a decision. Can you imagine? “Goodbye, Timmy. I love you so much. I’ll see you later.” And you say, “Where’s my son? My son is in the hospital.” Can you imagine? Can you imagine? They don’t even need approval. It’s sick. You’ll have five—I think Minnesota and some others—I think it’s five or six states. You know that, right? 

That’s a bit he regularly injects into his meandering stump speech (which increasingly includes strange sounds that are not words).

I know. Complaining about Trump’s lying is like complaining about the weather. Two years ago, as the 2024 campaign was hurtling to its finish, I wrote an article headlined, “Trump Is Running a Disinformation Campaign, Not a Political Campaign.” (“They’re eating the dogs…They’re eating the cats.”) Nothing has changed. Except, it seems, the purveyors of fake facts have expanded in number. Now GOP disinformation is flying in scores of House, Senate, and gubernatorial campaigns.

In Texas, Elon Musk has spent close to $200 million so far to defeat Talarico and elect Ken Paxton, the corrupt GOP attorney general, with much of that money underwriting transgender-related attack ads. And Musk is echoing Trump’s false assertions. “Talarico will vote to take away your children and transition them,” he wrote on X this week. Again, an utterly false statement. Like Trump, Musk catches no flak for lying and amplifying false conspiracy theories. (As of October 25, Republican groups had aired about 217,000 ads nationwide exploiting the trans issue—about one-quarter of those were in Texas.)

I could go on and on about the lies coming from Vice President JD Vance, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, and other Trump wingmen (are there any wingwomen?) who have hit the campaign trail. (You can find some below in Dumbass Comment of the Week.) Cruz claims Michigan Democratic Senate contender Abdul El-Sayed “is Muslim Brotherhood.” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott insists his Democratic opponent, Texas state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, supports Shariah law. This is all bunk—the sort of stuff that in years past would have derailed the campaign of the candidate spewing it.

Now, it’s GOP SOP. With his victory two years ago, Trump demonstrated that a con-man demagogue—who profoundly mismanaged a pandemic—could win back the highest office in the land by running a nonstop and extensive disinformation operation. This year, he’s relying on the same tactic to preserve Republican power on the Hill.

With Trump’s approval rating at a historic low and gas prices remaining high because of the stupid Iran war (which Trump barely talks about when he’s stumping for GOP candidates), selling all this bullshit is a harder task. Yet this election, like the last one, remains a test for the American political system. Can it beat back a political movement predicated on prevarication?

This election will tell us whether democratic backsliding will be reversed, whether voters will punish corrupt grifters, practitioners of plutocratic policies, and proponents of brutality, and whether such political chicanery as racist gerrymandering and big-money politics (see Musk and his hundreds of millions of dollars) can triumph. It will also show whether Trump’s disinformation crusade has stalled and his art of the lie has lost its shine.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

Speaking of tests, there’s a new episode of Stress Test, the midterm pop-up video podcast I cohost with Garrison Hayes. Check it out—and please subscribe at youtube.com/motherjones or wherever you get your podcasts.

A week ago, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)—or someone writing for him—published a column in The Wall Street Journal excoriating Trump for his recent moves to further embrace Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. McConnell (or whoever) punched Trump hard:

President Trump’s gambit to end Russia’s war in Ukraine by pressuring the victim is certain to fail. His approach to the war reveals he misunderstands facts that American voters understand well.

While Vladimir Putin ignores Mr. Trump’s call for an energy cease-fire and continues to murder Ukrainian civilians, the U.S. president claims that Russia “has been fine on Ukraine.” This is factually wrong, strategically naive and morally bankrupt. His obsequious accommodation of Russia, rewarding the aggressor with sanctions relief, won’t persuade Mr. Putin to stop. History shows that such behavior emboldens Russia’s autocrat, who sees it as weakness.

McConnell issued a veiled threat: Trump’s lame-duck legislative agenda could fizzle in the Senate unless he ends “the obeisance to Mr. Putin.”

McConnell got it right. But he was 10 years too late. As I report in How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America, a decade ago McConnell took a significant step that helped Trump pursue this path of appeasement with Putin.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, when it became clear that Russia was hacking the Democrats and releasing emails and memos to hurt the Hillary Clinton campaign and benefit Trump, President Barack Obama reached out to the two top congressional Republicans—House Speaker Paul Ryan and McConnell, who was then the Senate majority leader—and asked them to forge with him a bipartisan response to Putin’s intervention in the American election. The White House goal was to construct a united front against Russia’s information warfare, with Republicans and Democrats together sounding the alarm about Moscow’s meddling.

Ryan was game; McConnell said no. With Trump publicly denying that Russia was interfering in the election, McConnell placed party over country and refused to join Obama in condemning Putin’s assault on American democracy. In a private meeting with White House officials, he accused Obama of playing politics to help Clinton.

With this decision, McConnell assisted Trump’s effort to dismiss all talk of Russian intervention as a hoax—and to turn the matter of Putin’s interference into a partisan issue. Had McConnell partnered with Obama in denouncing Putin’s assault—and led his party in this direction—Trump would have had a tougher time spreading his Russia denialism. And Trump’s complicity in Putin’s attack—his echoing of Putin’s denials—might have become more widely recognized and seen as an act of betrayal. Had any of that occurred, who knows what would have followed?

Let’s have no more than one measly cheer for McConnell finally getting around to criticizing Trump for hooking up with the Russian tyrant. When it truly counted, McConnell took a dive and helped Trump and Putin get away with it.

As he tries—and likely fails—to help Republican candidates in red states by campaigning for them, Trump keeps saying stupid shit, as well as making those weird sounds that are not words. And he can’t seem to stop talking about asses, particularly those of men—or talking about talking about asses. It’s one of the oddest closing messages in American electoral history. As I noted last week, the judges can’t keep up with this firehose of idiocy. But they did catch this Trump head-scratcher.

At a rally in Lubbock, Texas, for GOP senatorial candidate Ken Paxton, Trump told the crowd of MAGA devotees: “You could even come to Mar-a-Lago…The problem is that for $5,000 [the direct payment that Trump is promising voters if the Republicans win], the most you’ll be able to buy is a hamburger and maybe a small dessert. I’m not even sure you could buy that.”

With the economy a top issue for voters, Trump was dismissing the affordability crisis and taunting his followers by showing off the high prices he charges at his private club. That’s neither going to prompt a loyalist to hit the polls nor persuade an independent to vote Republican. His message appeared to be: You can’t afford me, ha-ha.

Speaking of the economy, Kevin Hassett, Trump’s chief economic adviser, continues to blow smoke, claiming, “The inflation story is a positive one.”

He’s the Baghdad Bob of economists.

As the 2026 election season slouches to a conclusion, the GOP is investing heavily in hatred. At a campaign event in Michigan for Republican senatorial candidate Mike Rogers, Vice President JD Vance went full Islamophobe in attacking Democratic contender Abdul El-Sayed and equated him with the rioters in France:

We have to understand what happens when our nation gives in to these kinds of people, to young men with zero attachment to its land or to its history…If those rioters were burning down New York or Detroit, the Hasan Pikers and the El-Sayeds would be right there, leading them and cheering them on. Because what we saw in France—the hatred, the ingratitude, the desire to destroy…that exact same cancer is what has corrupted Abdul El-Sayed writ large. It is absolutely the sort of thing that has taken over the man’s soul…The United States of America belongs to its people.

El-Sayed was born and raised in Michigan, went to medical school to become a doctor, and then was Detroit’s health director and later ran Wayne County’s health department. But Vance was suggesting he has “zero attachment” to the United States. Why might Vance say that? Might it be because El-Sayed is Muslim? By topping off his critique with the declaration that the United States “belongs to its people,” he was asserting that El-Sayed is not one of them.

This is outright bigotry. Vance added that the violence in France is “exactly what El-Sayed seeks to bring to the shores of the United States of America.” Yeah, that must be why he worked in public health all that time.

In another dumb remark, Vance dissed the Middle East as “a region of the world made up of countries whose name I couldn't even pronounce.”

Was he pretending to be ignorant? Is it hard to pronounce “Jordan,” “Egypt,” “Oman”? Maybe he has trouble with “Bahrain”? This guy went to Yale Law School. He’s no dummy. Moreover, his wife’s maiden name was Usha Chilukuri, and her parents are Radhakrishna and Lakshmi Chilukuri. If he can pronounce those monikers, he can handle “Kuwait” and “Yemen.”

Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) combined Christian nationalism with Islamophobia. He called El-Sayed “someone who is an affront to me as an American.” He explained:

This character Abdul El-Sayed can be nowhere near Washington, DC. Do you think that he understands that concept that our rights come from God Almighty, that Jesus came here for our salvation? He should be nowhere near Washington, DC, and Mike Rogers is going to kick his ass on Tuesday.

Moreno seemed to be saying that only believers in the Jesus story should be allowed to serve in Congress. That sounds very establishment-of-religion-ish. This guy needs to take a gander at the First Amendment and the Article VI clause stating that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office.”

By the way, Moreno’s daughter, Emily, converted to Judaism to marry GOP Rep. Max Miller in 2022. (The two have gone through a nasty divorce that yielded allegations of Miller’s misconduct that have jeopardized his reelection.) Should Emily be banned from public service? What about Usha Vance, who’s Hindu?

Moreno came close to nabbing the prize. Yet he was edged out by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. While rallying for Rogers in Michigan, the anti-vaxxer and peddler of multiple conspiracy theories let loose this racist comment:

There's 500 million Arabs in the world. And yet they don't produce science. They don't win the Nobel Prize. They don't win the Fields Prize. They don't win the Wolf Prize. They don't produce literature.

Kennedy, no surprise, did not have his facts straight. In 1988, Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in literature. In 1999, Egyptian scientist Ahmed Zewail won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Last year, Omar Yaghi, a Jordanian-Palestinian scientist (who also holds American and Saudi citizenship), received the same award. Both Zewail and Yaghi won the Wolf Prize in chemistry. Michael Francis Atiyah, the British Lebanese mathematician won the Fields Medal in 1966.

This racist statement was another reason for the Kennedy family to be ashamed and to resent Junior for tarnishing the memory of the original RFK. In Trump’s GOP, it’s quite an accomplishment to out-racist the president and his rat pack. Kennedy managed to do so. The ghost of his father must be weeping—again.

This is not quite inspirational. But imagine if hosts on Fox, Newsmax, or OAN ever felt compelled to do this.

A reader in North Carolina reacted to the recent issue on Elon Musk’s intervention in the midterms with this comment:

It is very frustrating to be barely able to feed the family and have that Musk asshole spend billions on the election.

We will soon see if there’s any voter backlash to Musk’s attempt to buy a Senate seat in Texas and influence elections elsewhere with his historic level of political donations. Armed with his trillion or so dollars and willing to spend hundreds of millions, he poses a long-term problem for Democrats and the political system.

Raymond Forcenco had a strong response to the issue on Trump’s recent capitulation to Putin:

When are you people going to tell the American people the truth? Trump is a Russian agent. Putin has something on him and has used that power to make Trump an agent. All Trump is doing now is assisting Putin to win the Ukraine war. Hopefully the Democrats win control of Congress in the upcoming elections and throw Trump out before he damages our country more.

I've much discussed this subject, and I urge you to buy and read How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America. In short, as I've said before, I don't believe Trump is being blackmailed by Putin. He has long demonstrated a disturbing psychological affinity for Putin. Certainly, Russian intelligence surveilled him on his various trips to Russia in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s—when he engaged in, shall we say, playboy-like activity—and recorded Trump in action. But Trump's affection for authoritarian thugs—especially for Putin—has been on display for years. Putin has exploited that and manipulated him, likely without resorting to extortion or pressure. His man-crush on Putin is not coerced.

John Welliver sent in this much-appreciated piece of fan mail:

I just finished reading your new book, How Russia Won, and would like to thank you for your incisive analysis of the Trump-Putin era. Although I remember many of the events, statements, discussions, and investigations of the past 10 to 15 years, your careful exposition put them all into perspective for me. The danger posed by troll farms—and social media platforms—spreading disinformation cannot be appreciated highly enough.

Sue McDonald complimented my recent appearance on The Daily Show to promote How Russia Won.

It was one of the funniest, most substantive interviews I’ve seen. Stewart is so funny, but also so smart, and you were a great match for him. It just made me literally laugh out loud when you two fell into sync on the “big-BLEEP-small” thing. If you watched it on demand, as I did, that’s what we heard. But it was still funny as hell. [Editor’s note: What was bleeped was “fucks.”]

We cannot avoid the obvious bond between Trump and Putin. I’ve always assumed Putin had something on Trump that we hadn’t learned of yet, but maybe it is just Trump’s yearning to be in his good graces? Is there some transactional tie (besides all the cash) that has yet to be revealed to us? Again, the Jon Stewart interview was wonderful. Thanks for making such awful stuff so entertaining. Can SNL be far behind?

Sue, if there were millions of Americans like you, I'd have my own show! I have yet to hear from SNL. As for Trump and Putin, see the reply above.

Monica Beck emailed:

Congrats on your TDS appearance. It was great. I want to emphasize additional context that should appear whenever and wherever Putin is mentioned: the thousands of children, including babies, abducted from Ukraine by Russia. Sadly, I think the US public is so inured to the horrors of the war. Mentioning this specific, depraved reality reveals exactly who Putin is. And where, pray tell, is the “pro-life” movement when it comes to saving those babies? Crickets.

Thanks, Monica. I usually mention the Russian kidnapping of Ukrainian children when discussing Trump, Putin, and the Ukraine war. Not doing so on The Daily Show was an oversight. 

“Why are all the leaves on the ground?”
“It’s fall, Moxie. Don’t you remember? The leaves die and fall from the trees.”
“Then what happens?”
“New leaves grow back.”
“So it’s like nothing died.”
“Yes, just like nothing died.”