Why MAGA views blatant lying as a righteous and important act

They support Trump's and Vance's spewing of falsehoods because they believe it's a means to an end. Corporate media's reporting often only validates that.

When Donald Trump spoke at the Moms for Liberty conference in Washington last month, he told an outrageous lie about “this transgender thing.”

Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child. And many of these childs 15 years later say, “What the hell happened? Who did this to me?”

This was so deranged and kooky—as if there are hospitals in schools or kids are being transferred to hospitals in the middle of the day from their classrooms—that many of us thought it was a clear example of Trump’s continued cognitive decline. He did, after all, say “many of these childs” instead of “children,” and that was more evidence of his faltering mental acuity.

But Trump repeated the claim again days later at a rally, continuing to push something that was deemed false even by his staunchest supporters.

And that is a real tell.

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CNN, in a factcheck by Daniel Dale following the claim at the Moms for Liberty conference, asked the Trump campaign if it could substantiate the claim. It could not. Then Dale contacted a few right-wing leaders to ask if children are getting gender-transition surgery during the school day:

CNN reached out to four conservative organizations that monitor how schools handle gender issues to check if they had any evidence that might corroborate Trump’s claim. None of these organizations said they had – though the two that responded in detail defended Trump’s remarks nonetheless.

One of those two, Thomas Jipping, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation—the laboratory for Project 2025—said that he’s “not aware of a specific incident yet where it has gone that far, where it has gone from social to medical transition,” but nonetheless said that Trump’s point is “valid” because if you “just change a couple words” then the claim “is 100% accurate and correct.”

This was ridiculous beyond words. But it was a roundabout way of saying what Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, told CNN:

“Are kids getting surgery in school? No they’re not.” But she continued that she was still “thankful to President Trump” for making the claim – since, she said, his remark has drawn attention to the important issue of schools facilitating children’s social transitions without parental consent.

Justice said of Trump’s claim: “It grabbed your attention, and we’re talking about it now, and that makes me very happy.”

That is in fact the goal of the lying by Trump and his running mate JD Vance: to hijack discussion and redirect it to issues they want to talk about, even if it means they are exposed as having told a lie. And if the above quotes are any indication, the MAGA masses are perfectly fine with that strategy. They don’t care about the lies being exposed because the lies are a means to an end.

Not only does media often validate that belief—as I’ll explain—but Vance actually admitted as much over the weekend. In a contentious interview on CNN with Dana Bash, Vance slipped—and actually told the truth.

The topic was the vile lie he and Donald Trump have spewed about Haitian immigrants eating dogs, cats and even geese in Springfield, Ohio. Bash was cornering Vance on promoting the claims without evidence, claims that have been debunked by local political leaders and law enforcement.

Vance, with little to grasp onto, then blurted out that “the American media ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes.”

By “this stuff,” he means their brutal and racist framing of the issue of immigration.

If that wasn’t revelatory enough, Vance then actually said that he has to “create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to” the issues he and Trump want to redirect the media toward.

It was a pretty stunning admission, as Pete Buttigieg posted.

Vance feebly tried to clean it up after Bash zeroed in on his having just said that he has to “create stories.” He said the pet-eating smear ”comes from first-hand accounts of my constituents,” adding, “I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focus on it.”

Vance then went right back into pushing his attacks on immigrants and on the current administration’s policies, depicting a country overrun by horrible people who’ve been let into the country via “open borders”—the big lie about immigration, as we don’t have open borders—as he did throughout the interview. Over and over, he said “Kamala Harris” had created “open borders.”

And, really, that was the goal—to be on CNN talking about immigration, framed in his grotesque way, using their airwaves. Vance in fact blanketed the Sunday talk shows, doing the same thing on CBS’ “Face the Nation” and on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Vance’s attempt at a clean-up with Bash only confirmed that he is “creating a story”—that Haitians are eating pets—in order to get the media to “focus” on the issue of immigration so he can push his agenda on it.

Saying that he had “first-hand accounts” from constituents calling his office is preposterous, because an attempt by his office to verify those accounts would show they’re false—and in fact, The Wall Street Journal reports today that his office did contact city officials and was told the claims were false, and yet he still went public with it.

Vance admitted something that Trump also knows: The lies will get you attention—and the framing you want on an issue—in a sensational media environment that privileges the lie.

Jamison Foser at Finding Gravity just wrote about privileging the lie, a term he coined back in 2008 when he was executive vice president of Media Matters for America, “to describe the news media’s tendency to center lies in its coverage of politics—not to center the fact that the people telling the lies are liars, but rather to center the lie; to adopt it as the framing for their reporting.”

And he dug in further, giving examples:

When a news report treats the truthfulness of a lie as an open question, it privileges the lie. When a news report devotes more and more prominent space to recounting the lie and the liar’s defense of it than it does making clear that it’s a lie, the article privileges the lie. When a news report focuses on the target of a lie’s struggle to deal with the impact of the lie, the article privileges the lie. And when a news report focuses on the topic of the lie — even if it does a good job of making clear the lie is a lie — it privileges the lie, because it allows the liar to set the topic of conversation, and thus increases the electoral salience of a topic the liar believes is to his benefit.

While Dana Bash was given kudos by many for forcefully pushing Vance on the Springfield lies, and while CNN’s factchecker Daniel Dale is rightly lauded for his Trump factchecks, including the one on Trump’s false claim about kids getting operations at school, these approaches still privilege the lie. Trump and Vance have a platform to talk about the issue the way they want to talk about it, and the media is focused on the lie, and repeating the lie, rather than focusing on the liars and their horrendous actions.

As Foser noted in a followup after the Bash interview and Vance’s stark admission that he creates stories:

So at this point, America’s news companies know they’re giving Trump and Vance exactly what they want — because JD Vance said so on national television.

The question is whether they’ll change their approach, and cover this story the way they always should have been covering it: Not as an immigration story, but as a story about Donald Trump and JD Vance being dishonest to their core and flagrantly racist — and intentionally trying to divide Americans against each other and incite violence against immigrants.

He’s not confident the media will change. I’m not either. But the Wall Street Journal piece that I referenced from today offers some hope. The headline is, “How the Trump Campaign Ran With Rumors About Pet-Eating Migrants—After Being Told They Weren’t True.” The subhead, which explains the story, reads: “Springfield, Ohio, city officials were contacted by Vance’s team and said the claims were baseless. It didn’t matter, and now the town is in chaos.”

“[A Vance staffer] asked point-blank, ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’” recalled [city manager Bryan] Heck. “I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless.”

By then, Vance had already posted about the rumors to his 1.9 million followers on X. Yet he kept the post up and repeated an even more insistent version of the claim the next morning.

This is good because it shifts the story to the liars and their odious actions from the lie itself, although the story could be much more hard-hitting on Trump and Vance and their repeated lies. I hope it’s the start of something and not an anomaly, but I don’t have faith in a lot of the media, particularly television media.

Much of the corporate media thinks that merely exposing the lie itself—particularly in splashy on-air interviews—is journalism’s goal (while remaining “respectful” of the liars and continuing to give them the platform). Yet they don’t seem to understand that not only are Trump and Vance completely fine with being exposed if means they get the platform; the MAGA base is fine with it as well.

While a recent YouGov poll showed, for example, that about half of Trump’s supporters actually believe the pet-eating lie, the rest do not. They, like Moms for Liberty’s Tiffany Justice, just go along with it, understanding that there’s a method to the madness: redirecting the discussion, as Vance confessed.

And they believe, along with Trump and Vance, that even if other voters Trump needs to bring in don’t buy the lie, you can possibly sell them on something else regarding the topic once you redirect it. And even if you can’t ultimately sell them on something else—and I’m honestly not sure the strategy is effective—you’re changing the subject, as Buttigieg notes, from abortion rights, threats to democracy, Kamala Harris’ plans to help families and small businesses, and so much else.

So they’re creating a sideshow for the media, using the media’s platforms and taking up precious time, keeping the media from talking about the issues voters want to talk about.

Trump and Vance—and the Trump base—thus get rewarded for the lies. The way Foser describes what the media should instead be doing—focusing on the liars themselves and how Trump and Vance are “dishonest to their core and flagrantly racist”—punishes them for the lies rather than rewarding them, as the Wall Street Journal story attempts to do.

And punishing the liars for the lies would go a much longer way toward stopping the lies.