Chapter 7: From Birtherism to the Big Lie

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Chapter 7: From Birtherism to the Big Lie

Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If
nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there
is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is
spectacle. —Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny

Ruby Freeman just wanted to count votes.

She wasn’t a politician or activist. She was a sixty-two-year-old grandmother running a small fashion boutique called “Lady Ruby’s Unique Treasures” in suburban Atlanta. In fall 2020, seeking to do her civic duty during a pandemic that kept many older poll workers home, she took a temporary job with Fulton County’s election office. Her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, had worked for the county elections department for a decade, and Ruby was proud to join her in supporting the democratic process, something particularly meaningful to her as a Black woman whose ancestors had been denied the right to vote.

“I’ve always been told by my father how important it is to vote,” Freeman later testified before the January 6th Committee, “and how people before me, a lot of people, older people in my family, did not have that right.”1

On Election Day and the days that followed, Ruby and Shaye worked long shifts at State Farm Arena, processing ballots with care and precision. It was the unglamorous but essential work of democracy.

Then Donald Trump lost Georgia, the first Republican presidential candidate to do so since 1992. What followed was a targeted campaign of lies so vicious, so persistent, and so personal that it destroyed Ruby Freeman’s life and nearly broke American democracy itself.

I’ve seen a lot in my decades as a political commentator and activist, but nothing prepared me for watching an American president use the machinery of right-wing media to target ordinary citizens doing their civic duty. This wasn’t just politics; it was deliberate character assassination with real victims.

Trump’s allies, including his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, seized on surveillance footage from State Farm Arena, falsely claiming it showed election workers committing fraud. The video actually showed normal ballot processing, but Giuliani presented deceptively edited clips to Georgia state senators, alleging workers had pulled “suitcases” of illegal ballots from under tables after observers were sent home.2

State investigators, including those working for Republican officials, quickly determined the “suitcases” were standard ballot containers and all protocols had been followed properly.3 But by that time, facts didn’t matter. Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss had been selected as targets in service of a larger lie, the false claim that the 2020 election had been stolen from Donald Trump.

Trump himself mentioned Ruby Freeman by name eighteen times in his infamous January 2, 2021, phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, calling her “a professional vote scammer,” “a hustler,” and “known scammer” without a shred of evidence.4 Giuliani told Georgia legislators that Freeman and Moss were passing “USB ports” to each other “like they were vials of heroin or cocaine.” The object referred to in this racist screed was actually a ginger mint.5

Right-wing media outlets published dozens of false stories about Freeman and Moss. Online mobs doxxed Freeman, publishing her phone number, address, and photos of her license plate. White supremacist groups sent death threats. Armed “protesters” surrounded her home.

On January 6, 2021—the day of the Capitol insurrection—the FBI called Freeman and told her to leave her home immediately; they had information that people were headed to her address. She didn’t return home for two months.6

“I’ve lost my name, and I’ve lost my reputation,” Freeman testified. “I’ve lost my sense of security, all because a group of people, starting with Number 45 and his ally Rudy Giuliani, decided to scapegoat me and my daughter, Shaye, to push their own lies about how the presidential election was stolen.”7

The trauma was so severe that both women changed their appearances, moved repeatedly, and stopped using their names in public. Moss quit her job. Freeman’s business collapsed. Both became virtual prisoners, afraid to go to the grocery store, to the pharmacy, or even to walk their dogs.

“I don’t want to be a citizen of the United States anymore,” Freeman told the committee. “Now I question everything. All because I did my job.”

This is one small part of what Trump’s lies did.

The Industrialization of Lying

Trump didn’t invent political lying; in all probability, every president has lied at some time. Lyndon Johnson lied about Vietnam. Richard Nixon lied about Watergate. Bill Clinton lied about his affair. But these were defensive lies, attempts to cover up mistakes or misdeeds.

Trump did something fundamentally different, something we’ve never seen in American politics: he industrialized lying, transforming it from an occasional defensive tactic into a constant, offensive strategy.

Where previous politicians lied to cover mistakes, Trump used lies as a central governing tool to shape reality itself, to build a cult of personality immune to contradictory facts, and to systematically destroy accountability mechanisms that might constrain his power.

The scope was unprecedented. The Washington Post documented 30,573 false or misleading claims during Trump’s presidency, an average of 21 falsehoods per day, increasing to 39 per day in his final year.8 This wasn’t accidental. It was strategic.

Trump understood that in today’s fractured media ecosystem, with social media’s top-secret algorithms prioritizing engagement over accuracy and audiences self-sorting into ideological silos, lies could serve as a form of tribal identity. By getting supporters to believe obvious falsehoods, he severed their connection to our collective shared reality and bound them more tightly to him. Believing the lie became an act of loyalty, a way of signaling commitment to Trump and his movement.

As historian Timothy Snyder observed, “Post-truth is pre-fascism.”9 By destroying the basis for shared factual understanding, Trump cleared the ground for authoritarian governance, creating conditions where power alone, not verifiable reality, determines what is accepted as true.

And the Republican Party, rather than checking this assault on truth, largely followed Trump’s lead. From elected officials to right-wing media to rank-and-file voters, the party that once prided itself on clear-eyed realism embraced what Trump’s spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway called “alternative facts.”10

The result is a movement built on foundational falsehoods, engineered not to persuade through reasoned argument but to inflame through emotional manipulation, to divide Americans into warring realities, and ultimately to dominate through raw power unconstrained by factual accountability.

This machinery of lies didn’t emerge fully formed. It evolved from a single, powerful falsehood that launched Trump’s political career and served as a prototype for the bigger, more destructive lies to come.

Birtherism: The Original Sin

I remember watching in disbelief in 2011 as Donald Trump, then just a reality TV star and failed casino magnate, began aggressively promoting the false claim that Barack Obama was not a natural-born citizen and therefore held office illegitimately. Though “birtherism” had circulated in fringe corners of the internet since Obama’s 2008 campaign, Trump used his celebrity and media platform to inject it directly into mainstream discourse.

“I’m starting to think that he was not born here,” Trump declared on ABC’s The View, adding falsely that “nobody from those early years remembers him.” On NBC’s Today show, he claimed, “I’m starting to wonder myself whether or not he was born in this country.”11

None of these claims had factual basis. Obama had released his short-form birth certificate during the 2008 campaign, and his birth announcement had appeared in Honolulu newspapers when he was born in 1961. Even the former Republican governor of Hawaii Linda Lingle had confirmed the validity of his birth records.

But Trump wasn’t interested in facts. He was testing a political strategy, one that combined racial grievance, conspiracy thinking, and attacks on institutional legitimacy. Birtherism offered white conservatives a way to express racial resentment toward a Black president without explicit racism, to justify opposition to Obama as based not on prejudice but on constitutional principle.

In April 2011, exasperated by persistent questioning, Obama released his long-form birth certificate. At a press conference, he said, “We do not have time for this kind of silliness. . . . We’ve got better stuff to do.”12

Most politicians would have acknowledged error and moved on but, true to his Roy Cohn training, Trump did the opposite. He claimed victory while continuing to cast doubt, telling CNN, “I hope it’s true . . . but a lot of people have very serious questions.”13

That moment revealed much about Trump’s emerging lie-based strategy:

· Facts don’t end the lie. Even irrefutable evidence becomes just another opportunity to raise more “questions.”

· The liar claims victory regardless of outcome. Whether proven wrong or right, Trump always positions himself as the hero of the narrative.

· The lie’s utility is far more important than its factual status. Whether Obama was born in Hawaii was irrelevant; Trump’s (and the GOP’s) real purpose was undermining his legitimacy and stoking racial resentment.

· Media coverage amplifies the lie. Even when news outlets debunked Trump’s claims, they gave him enormous free publicity which spread the lie even farther.

This was the birth of what would later be called “Trumpism,” a political approach centered not on policy or ideology, but on grievance, tribal identity, and the systematic replacement of factual reality with empowering fiction combined with a cult of personality worthy of Jim Jones.

Birtherism was Trump’s test case, and America failed it. The Republican Party didn’t forcefully denounce him. Mainstream media treated his claims as worthy of debate rather than immediate dismissal. A substantial portion of the electorate proved willing to believe a transparent falsehood that validated their preexisting biases and resentments.

It established the template for what would eventually become the Big Lie about the 2020 election and the 2025 Big Lie about Venezuela “invading” the United States: both were racism dressed as constitutional concern, conspiracy wrapped in patriotism, and truth treated as entirely optional in service of political power.

The Trump Disinformation Engine

When Trump entered the White House in January 2017, he brought with him a sophisticated machinery for manufacturing and disseminating falsehoods at industrial scale. Since his reelection in 2024, he’s upped the game by eliminating any of the dissenting voices that characterized his first term and threatening the media in a way that would make Orbán or Putin proud. His tool kit is straightforward:

· Trump himself as the primary source, with his uncanny ability to dominate news cycles and capture attention through provocative, often false statements

· Social media, particularly Twitter (now X), Truth Social, and Facebook, which allow Trump to bypass traditional media filters and inject falsehoods directly into the public discourse

· Right-wing media ecosystem, led by Fox News but expanding to include Breitbart, One America News Network, Newsmax, 1,500 right-wing radio stations, podcasters, and numerous online outlets that amplify and elaborate on Trump’s falsehoods

· Republican Party officials who, rather than correcting the record, often repeat and reinforce Trump’s false claims

· Foreign and domestic disinformation networks, particularly those based in Russia, that recognize Trump’s utility as a chaos agent and work to amplify his most divisive messages

Each lie serves specific strategic functions:

· Deflect blame for failures onto others, including Democrats, the media, China, immigrants, and even his own appointees when they’re no longer useful.

· Rally the base by confirming their biases and resentments, particularly against “elites,” defenseless minorities, immigrants, and Trump’s perceived enemies.

· Attack critics and institutions that might constrain his power or hold him accountable.

· Distort reality to create a world where his claims of success seem plausible to his base and low-information voters despite contradictory evidence.

For Trump, truth wasn’t a value to be respected but an obstacle to be overcome in the pursuit of power. As journalist M. Gessen wrote, “Lying is the message. . . . It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.”14

This approach has had devastatingly corrosive effects on American democracy. By flooding the zone with falsehoods, Trump has created confusion and exhaustion that made many citizens simply give up on determining what was true. By attacking sources of factual information as “fake news,” he delegitimized America’s independent press which, as our Founders intended, serves as a crucial check on power. By promoting conspiracy theories from the Oval Office, he normalized fringe beliefs and brought them into mainstream discourse.

Perhaps most dangerously, he’s created what former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt called “alternate realities” for his supporters: hermetically sealed information ecosystems where inconvenient facts can’t penetrate and where loyalty to Trump is measured by willingness to believe and repeat his falsehoods, no matter how absurd or easily disproven.15

The Psychology of Mass Deception

What made Trump’s lies so devastatingly effective wasn’t just their volume or the platforms amplifying them; it was how they exploited fundamental vulnerabilities in human cognition. Cognitive scientists have long understood that once humans adopt a belief, they tend to prioritize information confirming that belief while discounting contradictory evidence, what psychologists call “confirmation bias.” Trump’s Big Lies tap directly into this psychological tendency, creating what social scientists term “cognitive closure,” where the mind becomes impervious to new information.

This explains why showing Trump supporters factual evidence often reinforced rather than corrected their misconceptions, a phenomenon called the “backfire effect.” Each attempt to debunk the lies was interpreted as further evidence of an establishment or “deep state” conspiracy, strengthening rather than weakening the false belief. As decades of research into cults shows, when identity becomes fused with a falsehood, challenging the lie feels like an attack on the person’s very sense of self.

This psychological manipulation has deep roots in what political theorist Hannah Arendt observed about totalitarianism: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” Trump doesn’t just lie; he systematically destroys Americans’ ability to distinguish truth from falsehood. And in that epistemic rubble, democracy itself cannot stand.16

The Big Lie and January 6th

When Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, he did what he had done throughout his career when faced with failure: he denied reality and claimed victory.

“We have won this election,” Trump falsely declared at 2:30 a.m. on November 4, with millions of votes still to be counted. “Frankly, we did win this election. . . . This is a fraud on the American public.”17

What followed was the most sustained and dangerous assault on electoral truth in modern American history. It was, unambiguously, a coordinated campaign to delegitimize a free and fair election through false claims, groundless lawsuits, and ultimately, incitement to violent insurrection.

Like most Americans, I watched in horror as this unfolded, but still found it hard to believe an American president would go so far as to try to overturn an election he’d clearly lost. The components of Trump’s campaign were unprecedented in American history:

· False claims of fraud in key states, all repeatedly debunked by election officials from both parties, independent experts, and dozens of courts

· Baseless lawsuits, with over sixty filed, almost all dismissed for lack of evidence or legal standing18

· Pressure on state officials, including Trump’s infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, asking him to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn Biden’s victory in the state19

· Conspiracy theories about voting machines, including wild and utterly false claims that Dominion Voting Systems machines had changed votes from Trump to Biden

· Alternative slates of “electors” in seven states Biden won, where Trump supporters created fake Electoral College certificates declaring Trump the winner20

None of these claims were true. The 2020 election was, as Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security called it, “the most secure in American history.”21 Hand recounts, machine audits, court reviews, and independent analyses all confirmed the same reality: Joe Biden won the election fair and square.

But truth wasn’t the point. The point was to create enough doubt, enough confusion, enough anger to justify unprecedented actions to overturn the election results. Or, at a minimum, to so thoroughly delegitimize Biden’s presidency that Trump could maintain his grip on the Republican Party and then return to power in 2025.

The Big Lie about the election of 2020 worked because Trump had spent years preparing the ground. He had spent years systematically attacking the media, had undermined institutions throughout his first term, and had conditioned his supporters to believe that only he could be trusted. We should have seen it coming: in 2016, he’d repeatedly claimed that any election he lost must have been “rigged,” establishing his fraudulent narrative before any votes were even cast.22

On January 6, 2021, as we all watched live on TV, the lie turned violent. Thousands of Trump supporters, convinced the election had been stolen, stormed the US Capitol to stop the certification of Biden’s victory. Five people died in connection with the riot. Approximately 140 police officers were injured, many seriously.23

All of this violence—unprecedented in modern American history—­was driven by a lie. Interviews with arrested rioters consistently revealed they believed they were responding to a stolen election, fighting to “stop the steal” and restore Trump to his rightful position. Many expressed shock when confronted with evidence that their beliefs were based on falsehoods.24

For hours, Trump watched the violence unfold on television, refusing to call for the rioters to stop despite urgent pleas from allies, staff, and family members. When he finally released a video message hours into the assault, he told the rioters, “We love you. You’re very special,” while continuing to claim the election had been stolen.25

Even after the Capitol was cleared and Congress reconvened to complete the certification process, 147 Republican lawmakers—including eight senators—­voted against certifying Biden’s electoral victory in at least one state, effectively endorsing the lie that had just inspired a violent attack on their own workplace.26

The January 6 insurrection represented the logical culmination of Trump’s yearslong assault on truth. When lies become the foundation of political identity, when falsity is elevated over fact as a governing principle, violence becomes inevitable. People who believe an election has truly been stolen, who believe their country is being taken from them through fraud, who believe they are fighting for democracy itself can justify almost any action.

After all, wouldn’t you or I do the same or something close to it if we truly believed an election had been stolen? Isn’t that notion of illegitimate representation what the American Revolution was based on?

The Human Cost

Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss weren’t the only individuals whose lives were shattered by Trump’s machinery of disinformation.

Election workers all across the country faced threats, harassment, and intimidation in scenes reminiscent of a third-world banana republic. In Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, and other battleground states, officials who had done nothing more than accurately count votes and report the results found themselves targets of online mobs, social media doxxing, protesters at their homes, and explicit death threats.

Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, a Republican, received messages threatening his family after he defended the integrity of the city’s election results. “You lied. You brought fraud. Your kids are now gonna suffer,” read one message.27 Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson had armed protesters outside her home while she was decorating for Christmas with her young son.28

Gabriel Sterling, a Republican election official in Georgia, made an emotional public plea in December 2020: “Mr. President . . . Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone’s going to get hurt, someone’s going to get shot, someone’s going to get killed.”29

Capitol Police officers suffered both physical and psychological trauma from the January 6 attack that Trump provoked. Officer Harry Dunn, an African American who faced racial slurs and physical assaults during the riot, told interviewers that he struggled with depression and emotional distress as a result. Officer Michael Fanone, who was beaten and tased by the mob, suffered a heart attack and brain injury. Four officers who responded to the attack later died by suicide.30

When truth is erased and replaced with politically convenient fiction, people become collateral damage. When facts become optional and “alternative facts” gain currency, the most vulnerable bear the heaviest burden. When violence becomes the enforcement mechanism for lies, democracy itself is in peril.

The GOP’s Faustian Bargain

In the immediate aftermath of January 6, it briefly seemed Republican leaders might finally break with Trump and reject the Big Lie.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said on the House floor, “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters.”31 Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell declared, “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people.”32

But this moment of clarity quickly evaporated. Within weeks, McCarthy was at Mar-a-Lago, posing for photos with Trump. The Republican Party as a whole recommitted itself to the Big Lie.

Why? Because the lie worked.

It worked as a fundraising tool, bringing in hundreds of millions from grassroots donors convinced they were fighting election fraud.

It worked as a base mobilization strategy, keeping Republican voters engaged and angry.

It worked as a pretext for voter suppression legislation, with Republican-­­controlled legislatures in nineteen states passing thirty-four laws restricting voting access in 2021 alone, all under the guise of addressing “election integrity” concerns that their own lies had created.33

It worked as a loyalty test, allowing the party to purge dissidents like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger who dared speak truth about the election and the insurrection.

This wasn’t driven by a genuine belief in widespread or even actual fraud. Multiple investigations by groups from the FBI to the media told us all that many Republican officials and right-wing media figures privately acknowledged Biden’s victory while publicly claiming otherwise. Fox News hosts like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham ridiculed Trump’s election fraud claims in private text messages at the same time they brazenly promoted those same lies on the air, costing Fox hundreds of millions in successful lawsuits.34

This embrace of the Big Lie—across the GOP, conservative media, and even the tepid reporting on mainstream venues—showed the world a coldly calculated political strategy worthy of Goebbels: the Republican Party’s elders and elected officials concluded that truth was less valuable than raw power, that facts were less important than maintaining an intense, emotion-driven tribal loyalty, and that the sacred integrity of American elections was an acceptable sacrifice on the altar of political power.

Why It Matters

The biggest lesson we can carry away from this horrific experience is that the greatest threat to American democracy isn’t some random foreign interference, any particular procedural weaknesses in our electoral system, or even the voter suppression policies promoted by the GOP.

Instead, it’s the very real threat of an authoritarian domestic movement built on lies, funded by billionaires, enabled by cynical political operators and right-wing media, and believed by millions of Americans who’ve been systematically cut off from factual reality and instead live in media and social media bubbles.

From birtherism to the Big Lie, Trump and his enablers constructed, brick by dishonest brick, an alternative reality so powerful that millions now inhabit it fully, unreachable by fact-checkers, judicial rulings, or even the observable reality that’s so obvious to the majority of Americans. Unless this machinery of lies (and the Supreme Court decision that helped create it) is confronted and dismantled, we all face a dystopian future where elections still happen but losers never concede, facts never overcome intentional fictions, and where (like in so many banana republics) democracy exists in name only.

The story of Ruby Freeman—an ordinary citizen who just wanted to do the right thing and whose life was nearly destroyed just for doing her civic duty—is both a warning and a call to action. Her experience tells us the human cost of political lies, highlights the vulnerability of individuals caught in the machinery of political lies, and the moral bankruptcy of today’s Trump-driven Republican Party that’s willing to sacrifice truth and lives on the altar of naked power.

“Do you know how it feels to have the President of the United States target you?” Freeman asked in her congressional testimony. Now we do. And the question we all now face as a result is whether we will allow such targeting to continue, or whether we will finally reject the politics of lies and reclaim democracy’s essential foundation: truth.