Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

by Al Franken

  Then the story finally loaded on my laptop. Oh. He had taken a billion-dollar write-off. That was kind of different. And as it turned out, he had used what the Times described as “a tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would most likely declare it improper if he were audited.”

  Speaking of audited, Trump had broken with four decades of tradition by refusing to release his tax returns on the grounds that they were currently under audit. He had also refused to provide any evidence that he was being audited, and the IRS was forbidden by law from confirming or denying his story. Also, you can totally release your tax returns even if you’re being audited.

  On top of that, he was the defendant in a fraud suit over his fake university (which he would later end up settling for $25 million), and it looked like his family foundation was little more than a scam, and he had left a long trail of unpaid creditors and stiffed workers in his wake everywhere he had ever gone.

  But I didn’t see anything about a missed workers’ comp payment. So, understandable that the press let most of that slide.

  Still, there was the whole “moral turpitude” thing.

  As you may recall, my history of indecorous statements and off-color jokes had created some question about my fitness for public service. How could a comedian who had once written about having sex with a robot—in Playboy magazine, no less—be trusted to honor the dignity of high office? Republicans sure seemed worried about that back when I was running. In fact, so did a number of Democrats. And, frankly, so did I. You’ll recall the existential crisis I had in Rochester the night before the DFL convention in 2008.

  Well, imagine my surprise when, in October, I heard a tape on which Donald Trump bragged about hitting on a married woman under the guise of taking her furniture shopping. I was so shocked by this that I missed the part right after that where he talked about grabbing women by the crotch.USS If I had written a sketch where a character said that, I would have been toast. But guess what happened the next day. He didn’t drop out of the race!

  “Huh,” I thought. “The world sure has changed since 2008.”

  All that aside, the thing that bothered me most about Trump’s campaign was the lying.

  I don’t know why dishonesty has always gotten under my skin. My parents taught me to tell the truth, but come on, whose parents didn’t? Well, okay, maybe Trump’s. The point is, I don’t know where exactly my particular obsession with lies and lying liars came from. And I admit, it’s a little weird.

  Part of it may be that I’ve always been an incredibly literal person. Here’s an example. When Tom Davis and I would go pitch stuff in Hollywood, and the studio executive would say, “I love it!” I would invariably assume that he said that because he loved what we had pitched.

  “He loved it!” I would exult to Tom in the parking lot. “We’re definitely gonna sell this thing!”

  Tom was always skeptical, and almost always right. Even when a studio exec would say, “Not only do I love it, I want to buy it!” that rarely, if ever, meant a sale. No matter how many times that would happen, I never failed to get excited the next time it would happen. I never, ever learned.

  The first time I ever heard of Rush Limbaugh was in the early 1990s, when I was researching something for an SNL sketch and stumbled upon a clip from the TV show Rush had back then. At the time, George H. W. Bush was under fire for questioning Bill Clinton’s patriotism because Clinton had protested the Vietnam War while on foreign soil (at Oxford). In defense of Bush, Rush showed his audience a clip from a different part of Bush’s speech. “See?” I remember him saying indignantly. “Bush didn’t question Clinton’s patriotism! What’s everyone talking about?!”

  I couldn’t believe it. Who was this guy? Why would anyone just lie like that? What made him think he could get away with it? And I could not let it go. It made my teeth itch. I’m mad about it all over again right now. I mean, it was a totally different part of the speech! And he just presented it as if it was what everyone was complaining about! Like, with no compunction whatsoever!!! NO COMPUNCTION!!!

  Anyway, it bugged me.

  Two years later, Newt Gingrich and the Republicans took over Congress for the first time in more than forty years, which was upsetting in and of itself. What made it even worse was that this same Limbaugh character was their mouthpiece and mascot—they even made him an honorary member of the freshman class. That’s when I decided that if I was going to write a book about politics, Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot would be a satisfying title. And as I dug into the research for that book, I found plenty more lies, big and small, to fixate on.

  Even after the Rush book came out, I kept noticing conservatives in the media saying things that were recklessly, provably false. And every time I noticed it, it would drive me bananas. No matter how many times it would happen, it would engender the same visceral reaction every time. “You can’t just lie!” I would yell, to no one in particular. “You can’t!” But they did.

  Even worse, not only were they lying, but there were more liars than ever before, and on more platforms. They had Fox News. They had right-wing think tanks feeding pundits to other cable networks and publishing op-eds in newspapers. They had the conservative Internet. They had this thing called Ann Coulter. They lied and lied and lied.

  And the biggest lie of all was that the mainstream media had a liberal bias, because from where I sat, the mainstream media seemed like part of the problem. They never seemed to call out the lying liars on their lies. Far from it—they would invite the lying liars to come back on the air and lie some more the next time. Not only were these people lying with total impunity, but they were getting rewarded for lying if they could do it entertainingly.

  So I wrote a follow-up (Lies and the Lying Liars) about how this was poisoning our discourse. I wrote about how Fox News and the right-wing echo chamber worked, but I also explored how these lies were seeping out of the conservative bubble and into the so-called “liberal media” without being challenged. Asking whether the mainstream media had a liberal bias, I argued, was asking the wrong question. Their bias was toward getting ratings. And that meant reveling in conflict and sensationalism. And if that meant putting lying liars on the air, then so be it.

  Two years after that, I wrote The Truth (with Jokes), focused on how the Bush administration had lied us into a war, and into two gigantic tax cuts, and into giving him four more years to keep lying about economic and foreign policy as our president.

  Sure, the books were about more than just the lies. And, through my radio show, I started not just exposing the bad guys but giving a platform to the good guys. And I became part of the whole progressive movement that roared into high gear after 2004. But if I’m being honest, my favorite part was always busting liars.

  Even getting elected to the Senate didn’t diminish the rush of catching someone saying something that wasn’t true. There’s a flip side to it, by the way: I get paranoid about making sure everything my office puts out is carefully fact-checked, and although we do make mistakes sometimes, I get really upset about it when we do.* And when President Obama said, “If you like your doctor, you can keep him,” and that turned out not to be accurate, that bothered me just as much as any Republican falsehood.

  All of this to say that I care a lot about people in politics telling the truth. And even considering all the horrible things Trump got away with during the campaign—mocking a disabled reporter, attacking a Gold Star family, referring to Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and “drug dealers,” calling for Muslims to be banned from our country—I still can’t believe he got away with lying so much.

  Frankly, it all made me wonder whether, sadly, the war was over and the liars had won.

  Back in the good old days, fact-checking politicians was a different ball game. Looking back now, it seems almost adorable that I made a decent living writing books about catching right-wing Republicans in their lies. What I did was effective, I reali
ze now, mainly because a lot of their lies had the veneer of plausibility, and because at least some of the liars liked to pretend that they were telling the truth—which was of course a lie, but which was also part of the fun.

  But now we seem to have entered an era where getting caught lying openly and shamelessly, lying in a manner that insults the intelligence of both your friends and foes, lying about lying, and lying for the sake of lying have all lost their power to damage a politician. In fact, the “Trump Effect” yields the opposite result: Trump supporters seem to approve of the fact that he lies constantly, including to them. Like a movie that is loosely based on a true story, Trump’s fans seem to feel that he is making the dull reality of politics more fun and interesting by augmenting it with gross exaggeration, and often utter fantasy.

  During the campaign, Trump would give speeches that would just be one lie after another, with a personal insult or two thrown in to keep things interesting. And the media would just air these speeches in their entirety.

  Here’s a thought experiment. What would Trump have had to say for a network to cut off his speech and break in, with the anchor saying, “Good Lord. I’m sorry. We’re just not going to show you any more of this crap.” Or at least run a ticker at the bottom of the screen with some underpaid intern just Googling the numbers Trump was pulling out of his ass.

  For example, when he would say that the U.S. murder rate was at a forty-five-year high (something he said constantly).

  “Nope,” the intern could say. “Not true. Says right here it’s actually at a fifty-year low.”

  “Where’s that from?” his boss could reply.

  “The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report.”

  “Okay. Jesus. Put that up on the screen. Wait, what did he just say about climate change being a Chinese hoax?”

  But of course, even when networks finally started to occasionally fact-check him in real time, it didn’t matter. Trump has deployed a variety of methods to debunk debunkings that have proven startlingly effective. The first and most common is to simply ignore the correction even when confronted with it.

  This is why he’s continually planting the seed that the media is dishonest. It renders statements of contrary fact highly suspect, because you tend to hear those via the media:

  TRUMP SUPPORTER (skeptically): Uh-huh, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. Where’d you hear that?

  YOU: CNN.

  TRUMP SUPPORTER (sarcastic): Ah, okay. CNN, right. And they always tell the truth. Come on, man! Wake up!

  Another crowd-pleaser is to cite an alternate, very anecdotal authority:

  TRUMP SUPPORTER (sarcastic): Oh, so you think the murder rate is at a fifty-year low, do you? Well, tell that to the parents of a college student who’s just been murdered!

  There’s also this variant, the sort of ear-to-the-ground evidence that only a common man with a deep understanding of other common men like Donald Trump would have:

  TRUMP SUPPORTER: A fifty-year low? That’s not what I’m hearing. People are saying it’s at an all-time high!

  As Trump prepared to take office, there was a lot of talk about the different norms he had violated, was in the process of violating, or would shortly have the opportunity to violate. Stuff like refusing to divest from his businesses and place his assets in a blind trust. Or using his office to sell hotel rooms to Kuwaiti diplomats and bother foreign regulators about construction projects he wanted to get moving.

  And that is all terrible. But I really think that if we don’t start caring about whether people tell the truth or not, it’s going to be literally impossible to restore anything approaching a reasonable political discourse. Politicians have always shaded the truth. But if you can say something that is provably false, and no one cares, then you can’t have a real debate about anything.

  I firmly believe that you can draw a straight line from Rush Limbaugh through Fox News through present-day websites like Breitbart and the explosion in “fake news”* that played such a big role in the 2016 campaign. And that’s how someone like Trump can wind up in the Oval Office.

  I know I’m sort of farting into the wind on this. But I hope you’ll fart along with me. I’ve always believed that it’s possible to discern true statements from false statements, and that it’s critically important to do so, and that we put our entire democratic experiment in peril when we don’t. It’s a lesson I fear our nation is about to learn the hard way.

  That’s why my Global Jihad on Factual Inaccuracy will continue. I cling to the hope that national gullibility is a cyclical phenomenon, and that in a few short years we may find ourselves in an era of Neo-Sticklerism. And a glorious era it shall be.

  Chapter 46

  I Attend a Presidential Inauguration

  Senators get great seats for presidential inaugurations. Well, we stand, actually, but it’s in a good spot. Standing just yards from where the new president takes the oath of office, it’s a rare opportunity to have a front-row seat to history. Except that, again, you’re standing.

  When President Obama first took the oath of office in 2009, I, of course, was still in recount limbo. They gave me a decent seat out with the crowd. It was an actual place to sit, which was nice, considering that the nearly two million other people who had flocked to the National Mall to witness this historic moment had to stand. But it was freezing cold. Plus, I had to get there really early, and by the time the new president gave his address, I couldn’t have cared less what he was saying. I just wanted to go inside somewhere and get warm.

  Anyway, my point is that I was really stoked to have that special senatorial spot to watch Hillary Clinton take the oath of office in 2017. I’d campaigned hard for Hillary, who is the smartest, toughest, hardest-working person I know, with the possible exception of Atul Gawande. She would have been a great president.

  But after election night, I started looking at the date of January 20 on the calendar with—what’s the word? Dread? No. Something worse than that. It was really, really bad. I felt like I was looking at my own execution date—and not a relaxing, fun execution by lethal injection, but a horrible, painful execution by a faulty electric chair or being slowly strangled by a piano wire.

  As that date approached, of course, things just kept getting worse and worse. President-elect Trump made it clear that he had no intention of divesting himself of his business interests. He shrugged off reports by every intelligence agency that his election had been, in part, the product of interference by the Russian government. He installed a white supremacist in the White House as his chief strategist.

  He also insisted on being a complete jerk.USS Hillary had graciously conceded the election to him despite the fact that she had earned nearly three million more votes than he had. He couldn’t even bring himself to concede the legitimacy of that popular vote.

  Mind you, no one was saying he couldn’t be president if he lost the popular vote. It didn’t matter. He could have let it go. But no. He was a sore winner. The president-elect actually insisted that three to five million votes had been fraudulently cast by illegal immigrants, every single one of them for Hillary Clinton. It was almost as if the incoming commander-in-chief had some sort of mental health problem. The kind of mental health problem that you would be disturbed to discover in your kid’s piano teacher, let alone the president of the United States of America.

  Later, when Trump demanded an investigation into those three to five million fraudulent votes, it reminded me of O. J. Simpson, who, after being acquitted of murdering his ex-wife and Ron Goldman, vowed to spend the rest of his life “finding the killer or killers.”

  Some sixty House Democrats decided to skip Trump’s inaugural. I respected their decision. But I decided to go—the peaceful transfer of power and so on.

  Standing with my colleagues on the Capitol platform, flanked by fellow senators Kirsten Gillibrand (a young, dynamic Democrat) and Mike Lee (a young, dynamic Republican), we passed the forty-five minutes before the start of the official program doing wha
t senators do—being convivial and generally enjoying ourselves. I warned Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who stood directly in front of and a step down from me, that I very well might vomit the moment Trump said, “So help me God.”

  I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but for some reason I had expected that President Trump would use his inaugural address to pivot from the awful, divisive transition—to reach out and strike a more lofty, unifying tone. Instead, he had “crafted” a speech that was just as awful and divisive and so unartful that it seemed he had written it himself in about twenty minutes. Or, given his attention span, in forty thirty-second spurts.

  His message was that all the people on the platform except for his family and the rest of his team had selfishly turned the country into a dark, perilous place, the scene of pretty much nothing but “American carnage.”

  After that things went downhill. Angered by accurate reports that the crowd for his inauguration was smaller than those at the two Obama inaugurals and the Women’s March on Washington the day following his swearing-in, President Trump ordered his spokesman to call a press conference and lie to the media with “alternative facts,” a new phrase coined by Kellyanne Conway to encourage sales of George Orwell’s 1984.

  After the public learned that President Trump spent actual time calling the National Park Service to insist they release more flattering photographs of the crowds at his inauguration, it began to dawn on many Americans, including a number of my Republican colleagues, that the new leader of our country was, indeed, unbalanced.USS

  By then, of course, it was too late. Donald J. Trump was the president of the United States. And there’s a decent chance that he still will be by the time you read this book.