Big Truths Can Beat Big Lies

We can defeat Trump's Big Lies and neutralize the haters at their own game. It's time to stop countering slanderous slurs with laundry lists of logic.

“One man with conviction will overwhelm a hundred who have only opinions.”

That’s a quote wrongly attributed to Winston Churchill. It was actually said about Churchill, by journalist Alfred George Gardiner. The full quote is, “One man with a conviction will overwhelm a hundred who have only opinions, and Mr. Churchill always bursts into the fray with a conviction so clean, so decisive, so burning, that opposition is stampeded.”

The time for opinions has passed. It’s time for Burning Conviction. It’s time to counter Big Lies with Big Truths.

CNN’s Daniel Dale tracked the number of lies President Trump told in his address to Congress the other night and the preliminary total was shockingly low - 13, less than half of what we would see in a typical Trump speech. As Dale said, “By the standard of any other politician in Washington who is not Donald Trump, that was an extremely dishonest speech.” But for this night, he said Trump was “marginally more careful” than usual.

How crazy does that sound? We’ve gotten so used to the lies, repeated again and again, that we now apply a different standard, one where a speech with over a dozen whoppers is considered “relatively honest.”

Dale likely faced flak for fact checking Trump at all. Fact checking is now considered tantamount to treason in Trump’s Washington and is no longer allowed on Facebook. But news organizations still fact checked their hearts out on Tuesday night. NPR’s quick survey of lies came out at 4,662 words, which probably won’t serve them well in their battle for survival.

But I’m not here to deliver the breaking news that Donald Trump is a liar. Instead, I want to discuss what turns a simple lie into a Big Lie, and how that tactic could be useful for those who want to mount a meaningful, powerful opposition.

We need to combat Big Lies with Big Truths.

At the very least, whatever comes from the opposition needs to sound Big. We need to match Big with Big.

Tom Nichols of The Atlantic characterized Elissa Slotkin’s Democratic response to Trump’s address as “failing to capture the hallucinatory nature of our national politics.” It was, in his estimation, too meek for the moment, and too “normal.”

I’m not suggesting that she should have screamed into the camera, but a greater sense of urgency might have helped, maybe going off script or simply picking a couple of points and repeating them for emphasis.

For it’s not the lie that causes the most damage when Trum[p speaks, it’s the repetition, the constant flailing of falsehoods, often accompanied by amplifiers like, “As everyone knows.” Trump has always specialized at this, as have other purveyors of faulty conspiracy theories. It’s the repetition that turns the lie into “truth.”

The ADL monitors hate speech and showed last year that White Supremacist propaganda incidents soared to record highs in 2023 and it then climbed even higher through the summer of 2024. The 2023 increase was largely due to the white supremacist group Patriot Front reincorporating antisemitic phrases into their propaganda.

Someone who posted neo-Nazi talking points over and over again now is now deputy press secretary at the Pentagon. Kingsley Wilson. According to JTA, last year Wilson tweeted a neo-Nazi talking point about Jewish lynching victim Leo Frank. ¹ Her tweet?

The JTA report adds:

The post came amid a flood of far-right social media content by the Trump administration appointee, who previously worked at an organization founded by the architect of Project 2025, the Christian conservative blueprint for a Trump White House. Many of Wilson’s posts, which remain online, reflect antisemitic conspiracy theories.

But of course she would be working for the Trump administration. She’s one of those “very fine people,” and she’s learned from the master how to tell the Big Lie.

Pardon my French, but this blatant antisemitism is infuriating and should be disqualifying. Who vetted this woman? Goebbels himself? She should never set foot within a mile of the Pentagon.

“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, is the quote attributed to Joseph Goebbels. Psychologists call it the "illusion of truth" effect. In a BBC report several years ago, psychologist Tom Stafford stated, “Our minds are prey to the illusion of truth effect because our instinct is to use short-cuts in judging how plausible something is. Often this works. Sometimes it is misleading.”

I think it can honestly be said that Donald Trump, who loves superlatives, has now passed Goebbels in becoming the all-time best purveyor of the Big Lie. He is the Michael Jordan of dishonesty.

Laundry lists of logic

But Democrats have been trying to defeat him with laundry lists of logic. People complain that there is no Democratic leader who can challenge Trump with an authoritative voice, but I think at this point it’s not a matter of either charisma or persuasiveness. We need to outshout him. We need to find a single, simple message and hammer it home. We need to stay on message, with bombast, humor, even a little crazy-sounding obsession at times.

We are not the sufferers of Trump Derangement Syndrome, we are the cure.

And the cure is for the message to be repeated, with urgency and conviction, again and again.

For most of us, Trump’s rant about Biden, Obama and all the old hits in front of Zelensky in the Oval Office last week sounded like the screams of a lunatic. And they probably were. But for his followers, it was comfort food, and it reinforced his lies about Ukraine and Russia. For them, it was not the irrational outburst of a crazy person, it was one more confirmation that Trump and Putin are the real victims and Ukraine is a country filled with corrupt moochers.

When he continues to spout Big Lies, we need to rant about Big Truths.

Yes I’m talking about talking points, which politicians have been echoing from time immemorial. But mostly the purpose of talking points is to present an easily-digestible case - in other words, persuasion. But now we need to take our truths and, in the spirit of the founders, hold these truths until they are self-evident. We hold them by repeating them.

There can be no doubt of their veracity. We’re no longer in the persuasion business. We are in the business of turning facts into Self-Evident Truths.

When someone expresses doubt that Ukraine was attacked by Russia, we can’t just patiently correct that person (unless you are President Zelensky in conversation with Trump - he probably should let others do the heavey lifting on this). We should get angry. And then repeat the truth, again and again. - because it is an utter distortion of history to even suggest that Ukraine is responsible for this attack on itself, for the atrocities at Bucha, for the drones, the missiles, for Mariupol. For all of it.

Ukraine denial is the 21st century version of Holocaust deinal. It can’t be allowed to stand.

Of course one way to propagate a Big Truth is to share posts and articles that contain them. Normally, for fair-minded proponents of democracy like me, tolerance of opposing views is important, whether in water cooler conversation or on op-ed pages of newspapers that aren’t The Washington Post. I like to be challenged by opposing views. It’s the Talmudist in me. But some facts are immutable. Some things are beyond debate. And we need to gather our facts and shout them out from the highest hilltops.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Those rights are what Trump / Musk /Vance are trying to take away.

If Big Truths are self evident, like the ones the founders held, we need to defend them as fiercely as they were defended at Iwo Jima, Yorktown and Gettysburg

We need to fight every Big Lie with a volley of Truths.

Russia Russia Russia! - TYRANT, TYRANT, TYRANT

January 6 was a love fest! - TREASON, TREASON, TREASON!

We have the best economy! - EGGS, EGGS, EGGS!

Condoms for Hamas? Massive Social Security fraud? - LIES, LIES, LIES!

Everyone knows it!

As Churchill didn’t say, “One man with conviction will overwhelm a hundred who have only opinions.”

We need to bury the Big Lies, and bury them with conviction.

1. See more on the Frank case and how it has become a morality tale for the dangers of “fake news.” From the New Georgia Encyclopedia:

The Frank case not only was a miscarriage of justice but also symbolized many of the South’s fears at that time. Workers resented being exploited by northern factory owners who had come south to reorganize a declining agrarian economy. Frank’s Jewish identity compounded southern resentment toward him, as latent anti-Semitic sentiments, inflamed by Tom Watson, became more pronounced. Editorials and commentaries in newspapers all over the United States supporting a new trial for Frank and/or claiming his innocence reinforced the beliefs of many outraged Georgians, who saw in them the attempt of Jews to use their money and influence to undermine justice.

Frank’s trial had far-reaching impacts. It struck fear in Jewish southerners, causing them to monitor their behavior in the region closely for the next fifty years—until the civil rights movement led to more significant changes. But it also inspired the formation of the Anti-Defamation League, one of the nation’s foremost civil rights organizations.

In 1986 the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles pardoned Frank, stating:

Without attempting to address the question of guilt or innocence, and in recognition of the State’s failure to protect the person of Leo M. Frank and thereby preserve his opportunity for continued legal appeal of his conviction, and in recognition of the State’s failure to bring his killers to justice, and as an effort to heal old wounds, the State Board of Pardons and Paroles, in compliance with its Constitutional and statutory authority, hereby grants to Leo M. Frank a Pardon.

The pardon was motivated in part by the 1982 testimony of eighty-three-year-old Alonzo Mann, who as an office boy had seen Jim Conley carrying Mary Phagan’s body to the basement on the day of her death. Conley had threatened to kill Mann if he said anything, and the boy’s mother advised him to keep silent. For those who thought Frank innocent, this provided confirmation; for those who believed him guilty, this was insufficient evidence to change their views.