At a campaign event in Nevada on Saturday, Donald Trump was briefly rushed off stage by Secret Service agents after someone in the crowd yelled “gun.” Fortunately, as it turned out, there was no gun, no weapon, and no arrests. The Republican candidate returned to the stage minutes later and continued the event without incident.But then Team Trump decided the truth wasn’t quite good enough. A speaker at a Trump event in Denver, for example, said there’d been “an attempt of murder” against the GOP nominee in Nevada. Some Trump surrogates, including senior campaign adviser Dan Scavino, characterized this on social media as an “assassination attempt.”Remember, we’re talking about an incident in which Trump wasn’t threatened by anyone, at any time, in any way.This led CNN’s Jake Tapper to ask Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager, a good question yesterday: “[W]e’re happy that this was not an assassination attempt. But why is your campaign spreading that it was?” Conway’s response was unexpected:
“Jake, I want to say, are CNN [sic] going to retract all the storylines, all the headlines, all the breathless predictions of the last two weeks that turned out not to be true, the race is over, the path is closed, it’s going to be a blowout?”You guys retract that, and I will give a call to Dan Scavino about the retweet.”
The casual indifference towards demonstrable falsehoods is a sight to behold. To hear Conway tell it, Trump surrogates say things that aren’t true, but news organizations run stories the campaign doesn’t like, so in the end, it all evens out.Indeed, late last week, Conway acknowledged that Trump and the Trump campaign was pushing a bogus story about a Clinton indictment — a story the candidate and his team knew to be false — but she added that she didn’t much care. “Well, the damage is done to Hillary Clinton,” Conway said when asked if she’d walk back arguments she knew to be wrong.Now, confronted with proof that Team Trump pushed a similarly made-up story about an “assassination attempt,” Conway again suggested she doesn’t care.On the contrary, during the Tapper interview, Trump’s campaign manager seemed to have some kind of bargain in mind: her campaign will consider being more honest if news organizations cover the race in ways Conway finds satisfactory.One wonders if Americans should expect a comparable commitment to the truth from a Trump White House.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."