KOLUMNI
An inside view from Washington
Washington failed.
America didn’t.
WASHINGTON FAILED. Not because of America’s polarized
politics, racial divisions or wealth inequalities.
No, it wasn’t that complicated. Washington failed
because of simple lies.
Donald Trump lost the election but then said
falsely that he’d won. He sued more than 60 times
but couldn’t show any evidence in a single case.
The courts all ruled against him, including judges
Trump had appointed. Courts decide who is telling
the truth. They decided Trump lied. But that didn’t
stop him from repeating his lies, over and over, until
many people believed him. Tens of millions of them.
Some people understood what the lack of evidence
meant, including many members of the U.S.
Congress who had a responsibility to tell the truth
to the American public. More than a hundred of
them didn’t. Trump’s alternative facts were more
convenient, so they repeated the same lies until the
same tens of millions of people believed them too.
What was the result? The U.S. Capitol was invaded
to “stop the steal” (a steal that never took place). The
insurrectionists didn’t care about courts or evidence.
They proclaimed their loyalty to Trump, QAnon, the
confederate flag and just about anything else other
than American democracy…or truth.
Many Americans were shocked. They shouldn’t
be. There was nothing surprising about attacks on
truth by using lies. It was a familiar tactic in America:
Obama wasn’t born in the USA, crime is caused
by Mexicans, white supremacists are fine people,
protesters for racial equality are thugs, the climate
hasn’t changed and a tax cut for the wealthy helps
the working class, to name just a few.
The divide between rhetoric and reality kept
getting wider. Trump said the coronavirus would
disappear like a miracle. It didn’t. In lieu of lea-
dership, official Washington undermined doctors
and scientists. America now leads the world in
the sheer stupidity of its response to covid-19 and
in the number of citizens who won’t cooperate to
fight the pandemic’s spread. Some still believe in
Washington’s downplaying of the risks while others
no longer trust Washington enough to get vaccinated
– both are results of a failure of Washington to
tell the scientifically known truth.
Not everything from Washington was a lie or a
failure. Some of it was highly accurate, and some
actions taken in Washington were very helpful. But
the lies outnumbered the truths, and far too many
Americans now believe that what’s clearly false is
true and vice-versa. Democracy can’t function without
a shared basis among voters about fact versus
fiction…or even a willingness to care. Washington
became a poster child for indifference to truth, a
mindset that’s now been accepted and imitated by
tens of millions of Americans. That’s a colossal failure,
and Washington is to blame.
Has the failure of Washington doomed America?
Perhaps not.
There’s still hope, with most of it coming from outside
Washington. America’s business community
finally took a stand against truth decay. Many big
businesses, banks and trade groups will no longer
support politicians in Washington who won’t abide
Tom A. Lippo is a Finnish-speaking American lawyer. Educated at Yale, the University of Jyväskylä and Stanford Law School,
he is the founder of FACT LAW, an international law firm established in 1985. FACT is the first law firm with offices in both
Finland and the United States. Tom has been a lawyer in Washington, D.C., on Capitol Hill for nearly 40 years.
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