A delusional U.S. president is helping thin the line between fiction and reality.
Foreign Policy
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Donald Trump seems fixated on the notion of the hoax. He has repeatedly sought to dismiss the unfolding Epstein scandal as a “Democrat hoax that never ends,” designed to distract from his triumphs. Since returning to the White House, he has dismissed green energy as a “scam,” climate change as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” and the concept of a carbon footprint as “a hoax made up by people with evil intentions”—all in one speech to the United Nations. At the same time, however, the president frequently posts fake content as if it were real, such as AI-generated images and false claims about his political opponents.
But in his conviction that anything that favors the other side is a fake, and anything that supports his worldview is real, Trump may not be that far from the average American. Hoaxes have been part of U.S. political life since the Founding Fathers, from the forgeries concocted by Benjamin Franklin to smear the British during the Revolutionary War to a series of bogus academic articles intended to undermine so-called grievance studies in 2017 and 2018. But they also have a life of their own, and tend to outrun their creators, as one particularly enduring example shows: a hoax concocted in the late 1960s by satirists intent on forcing Americans to confront the insanity of the Vietnam War.
Donald Trump seems fixated on the notion of the hoax. He has repeatedly sought to dismiss the unfolding Epstein scandal as a “Democrat hoax that never ends,” designed to distract from his triumphs. Since returning to the White House, he has dismissed green energy as a “scam,” climate change as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” and the concept of a carbon footprint as “a hoax made up by people with evil intentions”—all in one speech to the United Nations. At the same time, however, the president frequently posts fake content as if it were real, such as AI-generated images and false claims about his political opponents.
But in his conviction that anything that favors the other side is a fake, and anything that supports his worldview is real, Trump may not be that far from the average American. Hoaxes have been part of U.S. political life since the Founding Fathers, from the forgeries concocted by Benjamin Franklin to smear the British during the Revolutionary War to a series of bogus academic articles intended to undermine so-called grievance studies in 2017 and 2018. But they also have a life of their own, and tend to outrun their creators, as one particularly enduring example shows: a hoax concocted in the late 1960s by satirists intent on forcing Americans to confront the insanity of the Vietnam War.
AI-generated images shared by U.S. President Donald Trump.
AI-generated images shared by U.S. President Donald Trump.
When it was published in 1967, Report from Iron Mountain purported to be a secret government-commissioned study leaked by one of its authors. It warned that if permanent global peace broke out, the U.S. economy and society would collapse. To replace the stabilizing effects of war, young men would need to be forced into “a sophisticated form of slavery” and made to compete in “blood games.” It might be necessary to revive eugenics. To cow the population, new threats would have to be created, such as alien scares or the destruction of the environment.
The “leaked” “report” made the front page of the New York Times, and provoked internal investigations in the White House, the Defense Department, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. U.S. embassies were warned to disavow the report, for fear of adverse international reaction. Only in 1972 did Iron Mountain’s real author, a satirist named Leonard Lewin, come clean. Lewin had written an introduction to the report, claiming it had been leaked to him by one of its creators; in fact, he had written the whole thing from scratch, with help from a few others, including editors of a satire magazine named Monocle.
But then by 1990, to its creators’ horror, the hoax report was rediscovered by the far right—who were convinced it was real, and that it proved their fears of evil government plots against the U.S. people. It went on to shape the ideas of the 1990s militia movement and Oliver Stone’s blockbuster conspiracy theory movie JFK, and its influence remains visible in the discourse of the QAnon movement, the Oath Keepers, and the conspiracist influencer Alex Jones. Its critique of the centrality of war was even cited in 2022—on the basis that it might be a genuine document—in Responsible Statecraft, the online publication from the Quincy Institute.
Left: Conservative commentator Alex Jones in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 11, 2018. Right: A QAnon supporter at a Trump rally in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania on Aug. 2, 2018.
Left: Conservative commentator Alex Jones in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 11, 2018. Right: A QAnon supporter at a Trump rally in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania on Aug. 2, 2018.Saul Loeb and Rick Loomis/Getty Images
So what does this cautionary tale reveal about the power of the hoax in politics?
First, if they confirm people’s priors, hoaxes—however comic their intent—can have serious consequences. In the U.S., in the wake of the Russian Revolution, newspapers and right-wing politicians got wind that the Bolsheviks were making women the property of the state and declaring them sexually available to men under certain regulations. It later emerged that this myth had its origins in a Moscow newspaper’s anti-regime skit, but in the meantime, it contributed to the anti-communist hysteria of the 1920s.
The internet has, of course, made this problem worse. During the 2016 presidential election, WikiLeaks published emails hacked from the account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta. Trolls on the 4chan message board then invented the idea that the messages were written in code—“pizza” meant “girl,” and so on. As this spread online, especially to people unfamiliar with the warped 4chan sense of humor, it was taken seriously, and morphed into the ludicrous Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which alleged that senior Democrats were running a pedophilia ring from the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. A conspiracy theorist duly turned up at the restaurant and fired a gun repeatedly, demanding answers. The fact that the theory was obviously baseless—and that the restaurant was basement-less—did not stop Pizzagate feeding into the even more ludicrous QAnon movement.
A decade on, this absurdity is audible in Congress. Last month, when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was interviewed about Jeffrey Epstein by the House Oversight Committee, Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert appeared to ask whether Clinton had seen any evidence in the Epstein emails that Pizzagate was real.
Hoaxes of this kind are distinct from disinformation, which involves deliberate deception with direct political intent, such as the 1952 Chinese “documentary” Oppose Bacteriological Warfare. This went to great pains to fabricate evidence, later picked up by left-wing Westerners, that the United States had dropped germ bombs on North Korea. Similarly, a celebrated U.S. missionary to Vietnam, Thomas Dooley, wrote a 1956 memoir, Deliver Us from Evil, which was replete with confected propaganda tales of torture, supposedly inflicted by Vietnam’s communist guerrillas.
However, even hoaxes that are not intended to fool people permanently show the perils of breaking the boundary—however playfully—between fact and fiction. Today’s political “hoax” talk is more dangerous, because it breaks that boundary in the other direction. It seeks not to convince people that the fake is factual, but that the factual is fake. When Trump declares that unwelcome realities are hoaxes, it’s much more destructive of the shared trust in truth upon which democracy depends than honestly falling for a hoax.
The cover of the Report from Iron Mountain, and the report featured in an article in the New York Times in 1972.
The cover of the Report from Iron Mountain, and the report featured in an article in the New York Times in 1972.
Until recently, insisting reality is fiction was the domain of the kind of post-war, far-right U.S. writers who denounced the Federal Reserve, the United Nations, and even Anne Frank’s diary as hoaxes (while insisting Iron Mountain was real). But today, this version of the hoax weapon is wielded by some of the most powerful people in the United States. FBI Director Kash Patel built his reputation on championing the notion of the “Russia hoax.” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has alleged that former President Barack Obama and his officials “manufactured” intelligence about Russian influence in the 2016 election. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has denounced reporters as “hoaxsters” for the accepted journalistic practice of citing anonymous sources.
Worse, both thinking a hoax is real and thinking reality is a hoax create a disorientating mirror effect. Report from Iron Mountain has been cited by conspiracy theorist right-wingers as “evidence” that actual evidence of climate change is a hoax. When Patel accuses Democrats of conspiring to smear Trump by saying he conspired with Russia, he seems simply to be turning the original accusation back against the accusers—a maneuver for which the concept of the hoax is particularly useful.
Likewise, the claim that Trump only got close to Epstein to expose a cabal of abusive Democratic billionaires eventually started to look too obviously fake—and it was then that the president claimed that evidence of his past activities was a hoax. He then urged the FBI to turn its attention instead to his (fraudulent) claims of election fraud by his opponents. This dizzying effect is a means to assert autocratic authority over the whole concept of truth: things are true because the leader says so.
Today, Report from Iron Mountain seems the product of a more innocent age. Trump’s opponents need to find a new weapon to use against his fake hoax claims in a world where both evidence and satire appear to be useless.
