[FRIAM] Trump, truth, and politics: Why do we still think Trump is acting with respect to the truth?

[Eric Charles]

CNN's home page is taken to clustering stories. In their big cover story at
the moment, The main headline is that Trump mocks intelligence agencies
over the claims regarding Russian hacking. "Mocks" is a not-egregious
interpretations of thing things Trump has said, so that seems like
straightforward reporting. A subheading says that Assange claims he did not
get at-issue emails he posted to Wikileaks from Russia. This is still
relatively straightforward reporting. What Assange stated was that he did
not get the emails from a state or state actor, which (if true) still
leaves open the possibility that person who performed the hack was Russian
or someone in Russia at the time. The final headline in the cluster is "Ex-CIA
spokesman: Trump believes Julian Assange over the CIA
<http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/04/politics/george-little-trump-tweet-assange/index.html>".


The latter headline (and associated story) ports in an odd assumption not
present in the prior stories: The assumption that Trump's statements are
with respect to the truth of the situation. I'm not sure why that is still
a thing people are thinking.

In contrast with that, I would say - based on the previous stories and
other associated reports, and Trump's general behavior - that
Trump's statements regarding Russian hacking evidences only that he thinks
the best way to play the situation is to not publically blame Russia. That
seems like a reasonable play, regardless of what Trump thinks and who he
trusts. I can't see anything Trump would gain by publicly blaming Russia,
and it is also unclear to me what the U.S. would have to gain by Trump
publicly blaming Putin. If Trump thinks they hacked the DNC, one would
think he would ask the spy communities and the diplomatic communities for
advice about how to handle that behind the scenes, countering spycraft with
spycraft. There is nothing for an incoming president to gain by trying to
call Putin out, in public, with scant evidence, the details of which would
be inaccessible to most of the public anyway. (CNN was recently called out
for running a story about Russian hacking that used pictures for the video
game Fallout 4, presumably because they thought people would connect with
that as a representation of what "hacking" looked like.) Even if the
intelligence community had iron clad proof, that everyone could understand
and believe beyond a reasonable doubt (which they don't), it would only
heighten questions about the legitimacy of Trump's win. At this point, that
wouldn't be a win for Trump, or the country.

Are we really going to get four years of the media trying to treat
everything Trumps says as if it is a factual claim he deeply believes? Was
this ever a viable assumption for any president? Were are the commentaries
we would see if it were any other (recent) president, talking about how he
might or might not believe it, but he's backed into a political corner, and
is probably making the right move?




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Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician
U.S. Marine Corps
<echarles at american.edu>
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